Law School Online

[Alpha]

The client can make a statement indicating their opinion on the attorney's competence but it isn't that statement that alters the attorney's ability to practice.  It is the subsequent investigation by the governing body (probably the state bar association) that makes the difference.  Plenty of people complain but it rarely alters anything.  Disgruntled clients could end the career of virtually every attorney on the planet if that were the case.

To allude to the point I made earlier, I'm speaking only of legitimate cases where the complaint is deemed valid. I think it goes without saying that there is a process... but that complaint would be the catalyst since without the complaint there would be no investigation with the possibility of finding the complaint valid in the first place.

OK, I'll continue to play.  Let's stipulate that the complaint is valid.  It is still not the complaint itself that determines the competence/incompetence of the attorney.  There is the investigation by the governing body that is an ongoing process and while the investigation is ongoing the attorney is still seen as competent to practice.  It's an "innocent until proven guilty" thing.  Even with a valid complaint the attorney can be found "not guilty" of anything.  Now, you can say that the complaint caused the investigation but the concept of causality is fairly complicated and I think it would be pretty easy to say that there are multiple causes in this scenario and someone might wonder about the necessary and sufficient aspects of this causality chain
 Causality - Wikipedia
For example, the client makes a complaint but someone at the bar association has to evaluate that complaint in order to determine if it is valid and warrants further consideration.  This determination then gets kicked upstairs to an administrator for some decision on how this situation should be handled.  Maybe it will get swept under the rug or otherwise minimized.  In that case the complaint itself does not have sufficient causality to start the investigation.  We're really having fun now, aren't we?  The fact is that for the most part I agree with you and I'm just being argumentative.  That was my original point, that these definitions (licensed v. competent in this case) can be tricky and often times the disputes that arise on this board, and elsewhere in life, come from the fact that people are using different definitions for the same term.  Or they are using different terms interchangeably when they don't really mean the same thing.