Can you tell me about your awful solicitor experiences to make me feel a bit better?

[waytheleaveswork]

Went into sign paperwork on a new flat today. Female solicitor who has done all the work has been fab, but was on holiday this week.

Male solicitor clearly hadn't opened my file before my 12pm appointment. He noticed some forms were missing - which he would have spotted before I came in if he had bothered to read the first page. Then proceeded to explain that because it was leasehold, I'd struggle to sell in 30 years time 'but hopefully you wouldn't still be living there'. He was just a totally arrogant, unprofessional, incompetent arse weasel.

When he told me I'd been asked to come in too soon, I just said OK and left.

I don't want to complain - there's no point. I just feel so insignificant and disappointed. I was bought out of my previous home by ex-DH. I know this flat isn't amazing, but I was excited about my next chapter. I have dealt with many solicitors over the past 4 years and, without exception, the women have been excellent and the men shite.

I'd love some solicitor horror stories to cheer me up.

Whoops @ZigZagPlant . It's been a while since I worked for a solicitors.

Reading these comments makes me glad I no longer deal with clients. It's interesting though.

As a trainee my boss got arrested for fraud and I had to explain to clients that their money had been stolen. That was fun.

The one I went to see about divorcing ex said something funny, I laughed. He said "no wonder he's divorcing you, you, you look like a horse when you laugh". I stopped laughing and never saw him again.

@Bargebill19

I’m not disputing there a number of crap conveyancing solicitors/firms/staff. Just providing some rationale. Pay peanuts get monkeys as they say.

I don’t do residential anymore. Thank god. Better pay, better clients, stress very different.

@MsTSwift

OMG what happened?

We had a fraudster once and clients sent their deposit funds to them.

He helped himself to peoples mortgage redemptions and bought himself a castle. He was always very nice to me though far pleasanter than the partners at the City firm I moved to. He got 7 years in the end. Long time ago now.

3 awful solicitors.

One in particular I was so bamboozled by, I had to come on here and the people in the know, hand held me and I got rid of her and then got what I wanted.

She was utterly nasty and Vile and was not advising me on one piece of law I should have done to protect myself when every other solicitor I spoke too said I should get this. Except t my own.

Another was Vile also.

Surely he lost his castle during proceedings? I know of someone recently they sent themselves money from clients, I’m not sure how much but I think lots of smaller amounts. He got caught but he wasn’t qualified so I think it’s more difficult to keep those people from working.

My mother was left a substantial sum of money by a friend in his will. The solicitor was executor. My mother waited patiently, until probate was granted, and still heard nothing from the solicitor. When she phoned her up, to see what was happening, the solicitor told her that she would have to wait another three months for the money as it was in a high interest account with a 90 day withdrawal period. My mother asked if she would get the interest. The solicitor laughed at her and told her not to be silly. My mother threatened the practice with the Ombudsman and finally got her inheritance, plus the interest.

I’ve never yet had a good conveyancing solicitor. Everything takes forever and they always need so much chasing up to ever get anything done. Do they just give each person far too many cases to deal with?

I used to be a solicitor and the stories on here don't surprise me. Also the stuff about your get what you pay for' is crap.

I worked for a very chichi last firm in London and was utterly appalled, in every dept during my TC, how little the solicitors seemed to know, even about the basic paperwork to file. The incompetence was staggering.

In the property dept the solicitor dealing with residential went on holiday and left his entire caseload to me - a first year trainee who wasn't even his trainee - I was in a different section of the property dept with a diff supervisor but because he didn't have his own trainee he decided to dump it on the first one he saw. I felt so sorry for his clients, I basically had to spend 2 weeks fobbing them off because I didn't have a clue what to do.

In another department there were some files left over from about 5 years prior that had been passed from trainee to trainee which apparently contained missing shares, something to do with a widow and her husband's company. No one had bothered to look through the files properly so when I finally did (and found the shares) I also found her late husband's wallet in there filled with his personal effects. It was absolutely excruciating having to email her to explain we had it and would she like it back.

Almost everyone who worked at that place was incompetent and/or evil. Horrible, horrible place. I left law not long after.

*law firm not 'last firm'

When we purchased our Shared Ownership house we used a local solicitors who had a solicitor who specialised in Shared Ownership sales and purchases.

She was useless - we had a limited amount of time to exchange and she was so slow, kept losing paperwork, didn't respond to emails or phone calls and randomly went off on holiday for two weeks and didn't tell us or pass on anything to colleagues. When the lease was sent through she had spelt my name wrong and the street road wasn't spelt correctly either so that had to be redone.

When the invoice came through it was lower than expected (by about £500) so I queried it and was told it was correct so I paid. Two weeks later I start getting threatening letters saying the invoice was incorrect and I had underpaid and owed them over £500 and they wanted payment immediately and would not send the documents to the land registry until they were paid..... also claimed I had ignored their previous emails detailing the invoice error - I never received any emails, they forwarded them to me - they had sent them to a different email address.......

When we decided to staircase to full ownership a few years later, we used the same solicitors but tried to ensured it wasn't the same solicitor as before. Turns out it bloody was, she had gotten married and changed her name and was using a longer variation of her first name, something we didn't realise until we were too far in....

This time she managed to get the lease sent detailing our additional parking areas in totally the wrong place and then argued with me that I was wrong (I wasn't). Got the street name wrong (again). Was horrendous for replying to queries (blamed the fact she has just lost her PA) and to top it off on the day of completion, we got a call saying there was a shortfall in funds!! She had calculated incorrectly - we had to pay an additional £1.5k to completed, she thought the mortgage company were sending over more than they had?!

When the bill came through, I complained about everything and pointed out she had messed up with our last transaction as well - she took 50% off her legal fees as a "gesture" and told us she was leaving the firm shortly (no idea if it was related!)

Lesson learnt, even if she isn't there now - I won't use them again!!

My mate completed on her new flat during lockdown. The conveyancing solicitor was as rubbish as they always are but completion went through eventually.

A couple of months after they moved in she contacted the managing agents of the company to ask about parking permits for her allocated space, new communal door keys, how to pay ground rent etc. They had no confirmation of her purchase going through so wouldn’t communicate with her. She rang the solicitor who was now on furlough. His boss handled the matter and told my mate that various 3 ways communications with the managing agents, the conveyancer and my mate couldn’t have happened as they didn’t show on the conveyancers logs. Luckily mate is a forensic auditor and so keeps meticulous and detailed records of every phone call/email/ meeting she ever participates in. She sent the relevant files to the boss and it transpired that the conveyancer had done very little of what mate had paid for and before going on furlough had destroyed/wiped many, many records. And if he did that for her, there is little doubt he did it to other clients too.

@MinnieMountain yeah, they actually did. When I told them, they asked me to disregard it as the information wasnt meant for me.

Would you like me to forward you the email?

I also found her late husband's wallet in there filled with his personal effects. It was absolutely excruciating having to email her to explain we had it and would she like it back.

I can’t believe you did that via email. I would have swallowed my pride and picked up the phone

My solicitor left a firm I was using.

I got a call on the Monday of this and told I had another solicitor delaing with my case, I had to file documents for my case by that Friday.

Before leaving my solicitor had sent me a copy of the document I needed to file to read through.
I sent the corrections through to new solicitor (NS) and on Friday morning I got a copy of the document as it had been when my original solicitor had sent it to me. Corrections all gone.

I sent them the correct copy and got an out of office reply from NS she was on holiday for two weeks!!!

I panicked and called and got hold of their receptionist who appeared to be the only one in the building, she had to call another solicitor and get me version of document OK'ed and at one point she apologised and said I'm just the receptionist i don't know anything about these thing (this is relevant).

I spent practically all day Friday trying to sort out the document and then had to scan it to the receptionist who DX'ed it to court.

Then the week the NS came back to work, she sent me a £3k bill for the work. I queried it she first tried to tell me it was a billing for my original solicitor, I produced the bill for him and showed I had paid it already to their firm. Then she said it was for her, I produced her own email which clearly stated she was out of office for the times I had been billed. THEN she said it was for the paralegal who helped me, I asked who that would be and she said receptionists name, I told her she had said she was a receptionist and she had only DX'ed the document and got the OK from another solicitor that they could DX my version.

I do think some solicitors are just chancers and bullies.

When we purchased our Shared Ownership house we used a local solicitors who had a solicitor who specialised in Shared Ownership sales and purchases.

Throughout my career I have met many people who claim to specialise in something, which actually they have no idea about. But it looks great on their CV and is attractive to firms to have that skill set in their face team. Because nobody else knows how to do it either their incompetence isn’t uncovered. When it is they’ve often moved on leaving a trail of crap behind them.

In part that’s an issue with unqualified staff. It’s much harder to keep tabs when they’re not regulated by a professional body.

Even knew one conveyancer (not licensed) who used a false name day to day and would vary that name as she moved around firms. You can’t do that as a solicitor. Most firms will do a DBS check (and they should to be accredited with the Quality Conveyancing Scheme) but some don’t declare all their staff as conveyancing staff to avoid this.

We were buying a house a few years ago, using a local conveyancer, who failed to point out in the deeds that there was a ransom strip between the road and our driveway that, if the owner of it had wanted to he could prevent us accessing our house and driveway or charge us anything he liked to cross it. Our conveyancer didn't point that out to us. I don't think she'd even read the paperwork.

Fortunately DH and I read through all the legal paperwork and found it. We questioned her about it and she bluffed her way through it saying she was about to call us about it. No she wasn't. We pulled out of the purchase because of that.

This happened to my best friend recently. She was buying a house and read through the documents that the solicitor wanted to deliver to the land registry. She double checked plot numbers and found that all the documents were for her neighbours house and not hers. After this,she questioned everything and she found more mistakes that would have invalidated her sale.

She escalated her complaint and had some fees waived

@ZigZagPlant

I also found her late husband's wallet in there filled with his personal effects. It was absolutely excruciating having to email her to explain we had it and would she like it back.

I can’t believe you did that via email. I would have swallowed my pride and picked up the phone

Fair comment except it would be completely inappropriate for a trainee to just ring a client, especially one I'd never met - surely it should be the (supervising) solicitor, whose case file it was, who should be swallowing his pride and calling her?

In any case I obviously asked him what we should do and he told me to email her. I told you it was a shit firm.

Name change for what will become obvious reasons.

I have been subjected to a four month period of serious bullying and intimidation by a so-called human rights solicitor.

I genuinely can’t go into any details because threatening people is what they do, and my health has been seriously affected by it.

But at the moment there are now professional bodies involved, and if they carry on there’s a very real chance the media will become involved.

All I will say is, never say anything negative about a solicitor ever.