To ask....do solicitors f***ing realise how there shit work Impacts on real peoples lives

[Mightbemiddleaged]

....because I have been sobbing my heart out all day as the house we have been desperately waiting to move into for five months has now fallen through due to the complete ineptitude of all the solicitors involved.

There was a small legal issue to resolve wrt our sale and it can and should have taken no longer than a month.

Four months later and now no-one wil even respond to our requests for updates or try to hurry the fuck along on our behalf. The vendors of the house we should be buying have lost patience and pulled out, wo can blame them.

It's taken 15 months to get this far from putting house on the market and I literally cannot face the thought of going through this again. I actually feel desperate today and like I'm on the edge of some sort of breakdown.

I actually hate and despise these people the lazy heartless bastards

[florencedombey]

Peppermint, on the subject of conveyancing fees, I've just recently been involved in a house sale where the estate agent's fee was about £4,000. The conveyancer got £200. Crazy.

[YouAreMyFavouriteWasteOfTime]

pindora it sounds like you have had a tough (and expensive) time.

[PeppermintPasty]

florence, we regularly roll our eyes when the agents' account comes in and say we're all in the wrong job

[PeppermintPasty]

oops, stray apostrophe.

[LightSky]

Be careful who you hand control of your life over to. Those in positions of power are attracted to the position for a reason

What DeepFriedSage said. Wow!

[Jux]

I did work for a solicitor once - admin stuff only. If a client contacted us by any means - phone, email, letter, another solicitor - then I pulled the file out of the cabinet and put it on his desk, and he dealt with it that day. Clients who didn't contact us, well, their files just stayed in the cabinet.

TBF, he always worked late, sometimes until 10ish, and took lunch at his desk.

[mrsmalcolmreynolds]

Are the two posts above meant to imply that solicitors are in the profession because they are power crazed and see it as an opportunity to do people over?

If so that's a breathtakingly ignorant and ill-informed generalisation. The days of solicitors being viewed as the word of God are IME over. I've been in practice for 10 years and am completely clear that my job and professional responsibility are to provide a service to, and act in the best interests of, my clients.

And with regard to the OP, I practice in a particular area of the law precisely because it has an impact on individuals' lives and I wanted to be involved in helping to get that done right.

Be angry about bad service by all means, but don't call my personal integrity into question by making lazy generalisations.

[PeppermintPasty]

deepfriedsage-there I was thinking naively that I would become a solicitor to help people it certainly wasn't to earn a lot of money when in fact it's because I am power crazed!!

A nice soundbite, but woefully inaccurate imo.

[PeppermintPasty]

x post -hurrah mrsmalcolm, hurrah.

[ILoveTomHardy]

Jux - exactly. I have five four drawer filing cabinets in my room. These are all full with files. If a client rings, emails or writes or if we receive any correspondence from a solicitor or another party then that is a reason for getting that file out of the cabinet. There is just no other system for looking at current files. You write to someone, the file goes back in the cabinet. They write back, or ring, the file comes out of the cabinet. Not a perfect system but it works most of the time. You are reliant on other people responding to correspondence though.

[mrsmalcolmreynolds]

Peppermint

[bunnybing]

OP - We had a v similar problem selling a house - our solicitor remedied it quite quickly.

What I was going to say was that we had used the same solicitor in the buying of that house and, because he had failed to spot the error the first time around, he didn't charge us for his work. We didn't push for this at the time (no idea that we could)- he just pointed out that it had been his error and he'd been negligent - in other words we could have sued him for failing to do his job properly (although it was a 30 yr old house at the time so other solicitors had also missed the issue).

Could this apply to you??

[ohnoherewego]

ILoveTomHardy; you are kidding right? Do you not have a case management system? Even back in the day when I did my training we used a paper diary to carry forward reminders and to do lists so no file got overlooked and we were proactive rather that reactive. Please tell me it's a wind up!

[Alibabaandthe40nappies]

Jux - exactly. I have five four drawer filing cabinets in my room. These are all full with files. If a client rings, emails or writes or if we receive any correspondence from a solicitor or another party then that is a reason for getting that file out of the cabinet. There is just no other system for looking at current files. You write to someone, the file goes back in the cabinet. They write back, or ring, the file comes out of the cabinet. Not a perfect system but it works most of the time. You are reliant on other people responding to correspondence though.

This, right here, is what we are all talking about. No duty of care, no system for ensuring that you are doing a good job - rather you are relying on clients to drive their own case forward. Pretty disgraceful.

[Alisvolatpropiis]

Alibaba

How do you propose it is done then? As you clearly know better.

You understand solicitors have more than one client and need all of those clients explicit instructions and authority before taking action at every step of the way surely? That some clients matters may become more pressing and urgent than yours?

At the end of the day it is your case, why shouldn't you be the driving force for action?

The amount of clients who are desperate to bring action but are, for example, incapable of signing and returning forms is ridiculous.

[Alisvolatpropiis]

TomHardy

Surely you chase up letters you've sent? You can't seriously just send letters/documents and hope for the best?

[Alibabaandthe40nappies]

Alis

refer yourself to your second post for an answer to your question to me.

[PeppermintPasty]

I feel moved to point out that whatever your case management system, whether paper driven or computerised, it's success depends entirely on the person or persons inputting the information.
We don't have a computerised cms, but we do have incredibly able staff, legally qualified or otherwise, who well know how to push on and process cases.
Plus of course, our professional rules oblige us to be properly supervised. I am supervised by a partner, who is supervised in turn by someone else.

[Alisvolatpropiis]

Alibaba

That'll teach me not to RTFT

[Alibabaandthe40nappies]

[Alisvolatpropiis]

Ffs. To not comment without. I think my brain just stopped functioning.

[motherinferior]

To return to the charming generalisation of your thread title, yes they do. My sister got out of the law after one too many legal aid cases defending women who'd lost custody of their children or had cigarettes stubbed out on their faces. She and her fellow partners were paid a pittance, too.

If you mean 'solicitors dealing with conveyancing' perhaps you should spell that out? There are quite a few different types of solicitor, you know.

[grovel]

My experiences with Probate and Conveyancing solicitors have been universally ghastly.