3 3 Degrees North
A legal profession regulator · complaints reporting

A case officer closes a complaint. By morning it is counted in every KPI, with nobody rebuilding a list.

A regulator with thousands of practitioners and a complaints team working enquiries, complaints and investigations in its case management system. Every year it has to show how quickly complaints are resolved, against its own targets. The same approach works for any association or college that reports on member complaints or disciplinary matters.

The case data was all there. The statistics built from it were not reliable, and trends over time were not available at all. Below is the same financial year end, before and after.

Tom, case officerThe system, overnightMargaret, director of investigationsThe board, receives the KPIs

The story · One financial year end

Margaret has to report the year's KPIs to the board

The financial year ends on 30 June, and the board wants the complaint KPIs in its first July meeting. Before, that meant asking for lists, checking totals that did not reconcile and doing the sums by hand.

What Tom sees
Case management · C-2026-0418
Complaint C-2026-0418
Tom · case officer
Mon 13 Apr 2026
Complaint
Uniform Law
Resolved informally
Tue 30 Jun 2026
Close the caseKeep open
Save
Scheduled job · daily 3:05am
Rebuild complaint statistics75%5 steps
3:05am
Read case data
Drop deleted cases
Rebuild tables
Refresh reports

Runs every night. The reports read the rebuilt tables, never the live screens.

Result
Tom's complaint counted in the 2025/26 KPIs: resolved informally in 78 days
Reports · Complaint KPIs
Complaint reporting
Margaret · Sign out
KPIs
Year end
Monthly
Age
Reports › KPIs › 2025/26
Finalised 1 Jul 2025 to 30 Jun 2026
MeasureTargetResult
Rapid and informal, within 90 days75%78%
Rapid and informal, within 6 months95%93%
Investigations, within 12 months75%71%
Investigations, within 2 years90%91%
Reports · Outstanding at year end
Complaint reporting
Margaret · Sign out
KPIs
Year end
Monthly
Age
Reports › Outstanding at year end
Open complaints at 30 June
Year endLegal Profession ActUniform LawNot recorded
2023412120
2024272360
2025152440
202692514
Case management · Open complaints
Case management
Tom · Sign out
My cases
Team
Search
Complaints › Type of law missing
Type of law missing: 3 fixed, 1 to go
CaseReceivedType of law
C-2026-0391Thu 2 AprUniform Law
C-2026-0455Tue 28 AprUniform Law
C-2026-0502Fri 15 MayUniform Law
C-2026-0517Thu 21 MayNot recorded
Inbox · board members
COMPLAINT KPIS 2025/26
From Margaret, Director of Investigations · Fri 3 Jul, 9:00am

Dear members,

The complaint KPIs for the year to 30 June are below. Two targets were met and two were narrowly missed, and I’ve set out the reasons in the attached paper.

Rapid and informal, 90 days78% (target 75%)
Investigations, 12 months71% (target 75%)
Open at 30 June264, up 5 on last year
Figures from the complaint reporting dashboards, refreshed overnight.
TomTuesday 30 June, 4:15pm

He closes a complaint on the last day of the year

Tom records the outcome and the closure date in the case management system, as he does for every case. He does nothing extra for reporting. The case record is the only place the data is entered.

The systemWednesday 1 July, 3:05am

Every reporting table is rebuilt overnight

A scheduled job reads the case data and rebuilds each reporting table from scratch: case ages, KPI results by outcome type, outstanding complaints at each year end, received against finalised each month. Cases marked for deletion are left out before anything is counted.

Why rebuild, not update

Rebuilding from the case data every night means a corrected record fixes every report the next morning. Nobody has to find which totals it touched.

MargaretWednesday 1 July, 8:30am

The KPIs are already there

Margaret opens the KPI report and filters to the year just ended. Each target sits next to the result, so she can see straight away that two are met and two are short.

Margaret8:40am

A gap in the data shows up as its own bucket

On the year end view, four open complaints sit in a separate “Not recorded” bucket because nobody entered the type of law. Before, they would have gone missing from a total. Now Margaret can ask Tom to fix the four records.

TomWednesday 1 July, 11:00am

He fixes the case records, not the report

Tom opens each of the four complaints and records the type of law. He doesn’t touch the report. Overnight the job rebuilds the tables again, and on Thursday morning the “Not recorded” bucket is empty.

The boardFriday 3 July, 9:00am

The board gets the year's figures

Margaret sends the board the KPI results, the year end position and the trend since last year. They come from the same tables, so the totals add up, and she can explain the two shortfalls instead of working out the numbers.


What the regulator had at the start

The data was there. The numbers were not.

We built the reporting in 2023, extended it through 2024 with a monthly view of outstanding complaints, and it still rebuilds every night in 2026.

7,234 cases

In the case management system when the dashboards were checked against it, 1,223 of them complaints.

3:05am

When the job rebuilds every reporting table, every night.

Since 2005

Outstanding complaints at every financial year end, by type of law.