About
Why this site exists.
The Office of the Legal Services Commissioner (OLSC) has a simple job. When someone complains about a lawyer, it’s meant to look into the complaint and act on what it finds. Chapter 5 of the Legal Profession Uniform Law gives it the powers to do that: it can demand documents and answers, investigate, and take a lawyer to the tribunal.
Look at what it does with those powers and the numbers are hard to believe. In ten years it classed about 14,000 complaints as misconduct complaints. Only 44 ended in disciplinary action anyone can see, and most of those were a reprimand with no fine.
Dig deeper and there’s only one body watching: the Legal Services Council, which oversees the Uniform Law. Every year it publishes the OLSC’s figures, and every year it lets them pass without comment.
Something is very wrong here.
Start with its own website
Open the OLSC’s “Making a Complaint” page. Step 1 isn’t how to complain. It’s an instruction to read a page called “Complaints We May Not Deal With”. The first thing the OLSC wants you to know is what it won’t do.
The “Before Making a Complaint” page then sets out what the OLSC expects from you, including a warning that if you’re rude it may end the call or only deal with you in writing. Its promises to you (courtesy, fairness, integrity, honesty) come after that.
That’s the attitude, and it doesn’t change once you’ve lodged. The person who complains is handled as a nuisance, not as a witness with information about a lawyer. You’re expected to prove your own complaint, you wait months, and then a letter arrives closing it.
How it reports itself
The annual reports dress this up. Complaints are “finalised”, time frames are met, and a complaint closed without any investigation counts as a result.
Then there’s what the OLSC chooses to report. Annual Report 2022-23 gives Adobe Pro its own heading. The OLSC had three licences, bought nine more, then after “a review of the heavy usage” bought another seven. Annual Report 2020-21 lists a second monitor for staff working from home, and staff using MS Teams, as technological advances. Annual Report 2024-25 tells Parliament that a test rollout of Windows 11 caused minimal disruption.
The PDF software gets a paragraph. How many complaints the OLSC actually investigated, how often it used its powers, and what happened to the lawyers don’t get one.
Thousands of complaints come in every year. Very few lawyers are ever taken to the tribunal over them. Those two facts don’t sit together, and the reports don’t explain the gap.
What this site is for
It’s a warning. If a lawyer has done the wrong thing by you, the OLSC won’t help. What to do instead is on the Need help? page.
The figures justify a parliamentary inquiry into the Office of the NSW Legal Services Commissioner.
I wrote this site because it needed writing. If you have something to discuss, get in touch through the Contact page. Sean