So the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission is the gateway for complaints about all lawyers in Scotland. Some complaints we deal with directly ourselves, and we can award up to £20,000 compensation, more serious complaints, we refer to the professional bodies where they can prosecute and that deals with the conduct of individual solicitors. So our two main customer groups would be users of legal services that might need to bring an issue to us and also the lawyers who are complained about. And those customers have very different needs and very different interests in our in our complete service. But ultimately, what they're both looking for is for us to listen to them to understand what they're concerned about, and to deal with that complaint about them efficiently and effectively, so that they can get on with their life.
Case management software is fundamental to everything we do and perhaps the best example is when a complaint is sent to us over the internet, the case management system's doing work on it before any human contact. It will automatically create a case file, allocate a case number, populate basic details into the case and get that ready to allocation for a case investigator. So it's working for us before any person is working on the case.
And actually, that's mirrored at the end of the process. The final stage of the case is three or five years after it's concluded to delete various personal information off that and archive it. And again, that's an automated process that happens at the end of the complaint. So throughout the whole complaint the case management system is working for us sometimes automated, sometimes supporting our staff.
One of the key challenges that Workpro helps us to address is around consistency. We have a very strictly set out statutory process that's set out in law, and we're responsible to Parliament for delivering that. So Workpro helps us to make sure that we're delivering that process consistently, it helps us to monitor that, it helps us to be able to report on it in the way that we're required to.
Every case is different, and all of our staff are looking at each of those individual cases on their merit, but a product like Workpro helps us to make sure that the process that we're following is delivered consistently. It really underpins that work so we've used Workpro for a number of years. So all our insight and intelligence comes through its reporting modules and the way that system is built.
I think one of the most valuable lessons it's flagged up to us, which we're tackling at the moment is a delay by certain groups of solicitors in responding to complaints, we started to see a pattern through our case management system. And that's now letting us look at ways to tackle that.
For my team what Workpro helps us to do is to look at what is now more than a decade's worth of complaints data within 15,000 complaints and understand the story that it tells us. Ultimately, we're interested in how that data has changed over time. For improvements, we've seen where the new risks have emerged, and what that can tell us that we can helpfully share with the sector to improve the service that they're providing. That's a huge wealth of information.
Workpro's been a good choice for us on lots of levels. The first one would be adaptability and the ability to implant our own templates. That lets us take an off the shelf product, which we're confident is being supported for a number of clients, but tailor it to our specific needs. So that's been really important.
I think our values are also aligned with the company that provide Workpro for us. It is useful, they're a local business, they're an employee owned business, that they understand the type and size of organisation we are. And I think with a lot of bigger providers, we would be a much more anonymous customer whereas we feel we have a personal relationship with this key supplier.
I think it's adapted with us over time and that's really important as organisations change. And it's, providing credible reliability. It's a system we've always been able to access.
