To think solicitors are f***** unprofessional and no other professions would get away with it

[Indigo93]

A chance to rant. Please tell me I am not being unreasonable to feel utterly pissed off and beyond exhausted over this???

After 5 months of attempting to buying home with no chain at either end, we have been "apparently" ready to change contracts since last Thursday but surprise surprise it hasn't happened. So far I have been the one to chase the seller, the agent, the lender and other parties to send stuff back as our solicitor prefers to sit on their bum and wait for days for snail mail. We needed to exchange today in order to not be homeless for a few days due to complications with renting. Today was finally to be the day but guess what?? The vendor's solicitor is "working from home" and has not responded to emails or phone calls all day!!!!! Her team have apparently said they can't do any more. The e. agent can't reach her either.

WT ACTUAL F??!!

How is this professional?!?!?!

How do they continually get away with slow and non-responsive practice!!!

Rant over

I think builders are worse.

Fafoutis - that goes without saying.

I fixed this.

Very true. I need an extension and I can't face it.
My last solicitor was shit and nearly made a house purchase fall through but at least he turned up in the end.

Builders, then solicitors.

The number of clients who would ask me to “summarise” it hmm as they couldn’t be bothered to read it!

*Why wouldn't you summarise it though?

Business reports have exec summaries. Scientific studies have abstracts. What make this report so special that this courtesy is not afforded to the people reading it?

It's this attitude that keeps law firms stuck in the past IMO.

The legal industry is ripe for disruption. With ABS / the relaxing of the rules about who can be a law firm, I don't think the industry will last long without major overhaul, once it faces serious competition.*

This is the summary - from title documents, searches, replies to enquiries, protocol forms - probably more than 500 pages.

It is probably the biggest financial transaction of your life. Read it.

Bold fail! Sorry

And it is that long because of all the arse covering that we have to do.

Re not summarising a report, ten pages IS a summary! The sheer volume of paperwork (not produced by us but in existence-such as large numbers of deeds, the mortgage offer, the searches) are included in the report on title, and we do summarise the findings.

What is amazing to me and may be what the pp is getting at-people will pay many thousands to buy a house but cant be arsed to read ten pages of a report summarising all the paperwork it entails! Sheesh.

And as for a solicitor being perpetually on holiday, well, patently that's nonsense, but I see that you are determined to think badly of all of us as a homogeneous group of villains, cheats, and ne'er-do-wells!

X post! Agreed.

I've never understood why people think I want to have a file with moaning clients and agents on my desk for months on end unnecessarily. Trust me I want to get rid of them just as fast as you 😂

It annoys me as well when agents say 'but we've had to chase you!!' yes... And I've had to actually DO the work you're chasing me for which believe it or not doesn't magically appear within the hour all in between fielding hourly calls from every Tom Dick and Harry asking me why it's not done yet.

The problem I find it people don't want to take the advice of the people they are paying to advise them. People think they know the process and how long it should take and what should cause an issue and what shouldn't but forget that the people they are paying are experts for a reason! Not to mention all the compliance we have to follow in the background that no one sees.

You want us to summarise an already massively summarised report and then would in the same breath sue us for negligence if we didn't include enough information on something that was important.

As for volume firms, they charge cheap fees for a reason. It's like buying a pair of shoes from primark and expecting Louis Vuitton quality.

And don't even get me started on the fees that estate agents charge. They should be made to wear masks. Absolute day light robbery and no one bats an eyelid as they all seem to be doing a fantastic job... Yes because they don't actually do any of the work 😂

Yes - what do estate agents do apart from take photos and marketing. Genuine question.

Chase us!

I'm a conveyancer and our standard fee is around £500 - £700 plus VAT. Perhaps you have counted in disbursements like searches and land registry fees as well?

You get a great personal efficient service from me and I think the problem is that people don't want to pay. They will happily pay Estate Agents up to 1% of the sale price. If they paid solicitors the same they might get a decent job.

Trouble is lot of people go for the cheap overloaded conveyancing firms who are like factories. You only need one such firm in a chain to hold the whole thing up for everyone.

You get what you pay for I'm afraid.

And don't even get me started on the fees that estate agents charge. They should be made to wear masks. Absolute day light robbery and no one bats an eyelid as they all seem to be doing a fantastic job... Yes because they don't actually do any of the work

I remember a very funny comment by Bill Bryson in one of his books asking if UK estate agents are actually capable of getting out of their chairs.

Not read everything but this makes me so sad. If somebody came on here and said ‘ all nurses are crap and I substantiate this by saying my nurse was crap’, people would be up in arms. Because it’s so unreasonable a stance.

There are some lawyers, as in any profession, who aren’t good. Like nurses I guess? Or any job. There are also ones who are great, and some (I imagine the majority) in between. So a spectrum then.

We don’t earn bad money for sure, but most of us work hard for it and do an awful lot of hours, weekends etc, taking calls on holiday from worried or needy or demanding clients. Many of us do pro bono work - free work for those who can’t afford it. Some of us do really worthwhile jobs which challenge the system, inequalities in pay, poor police or prison practice, discrimination in myriad fields, the three month old baby who was catastrophically injured in an accident that clearly wasn’t his fault. And about the lawyers currently working on Grendfell - are they useless snakes too? WhAt about those who work in human rights abuses in our country and abroad? Are they money grabbing greedy bastards?

Ask yourself this - is your lawyer negligent? And then take action if you are entitled to.

Also ask yourself - am I making a sweeping generalisation just because I’m cross? That’s also fine, and ranting is allowed, but recognise it for what it is. A vast generalisation based on very little or no fact.

@feelboring1
The company that I worked for did really seem to fairly charge the sellers. We did an awful lot of work to sell some houses which included:

Initial listing of the house - market appraisal, comparables with other houses in the area, going and taking measurements etc and pics. Keeping on top of the vendor to make sure the house was in a saleable state and the literature was up to date.

Writing up the brochures and newspaper articles, rightmove adverts for the property.

Each of the staff in the branch had a list of contacts that they would match new property to and then call to see if they wanted to view the property.

Booking viewings and going to attend the viewings if that's what the vendor wanted.

If an offer came through, we would relay that offer to the vendor and back and forth until hopefully a price is agreed and do letters for each offer.

Arrange open house days and attend those.

Sales chasing - checking on the survey, EPC, making sure all parties in the chain were all ticking a long nicely. I once had a chain of 5 purchases almost fall through because the survey on the bottom of the chain was too low and they then couldn't get the mortgage for their onward purchase, so had to call all parties involved to try and get them to reduce in price so the whole thing didn't collapse.
Chasing solicitors and mortgage advisers.

Vendor contacts - we each had a list of vendors that we would regularly call and give updates and feedback from latest viewings and stats off rightmove (admins of the site can see full stats for things like how much traffic your listing has generated etc and its a good indicator of if your house is on for the right price or if people are just dismissing it for some reason that the estate agent needs to look at)

Other marketing things... advertising for the company, delivering leaflets to people to increase brand awareness.

Making sure the For Sale and Sold boards are up to date.

Thats all on top of general enquiries, people walking into the branch off the street, and your usual time waster neighbours who have no intention of buying the house next door but have booked a viewing for a nosey. Phones were always going.

I'm sure there's things I've missed but there was never a dull moment!!!

I've bought houses myself since working there and been shocked at how little some EA's will do. I've had viewings on property where the EA has never asked me for my feedback on the property afterwards, or even asked if there's anything else I'd like to see or try to match me with anything else. How they stay in business is beyond me..

We exchanged in about 7 days on our house - I said I would pay whatever that price was. It was very high but worth every penny for the certainty (personal searches, no chain and we had a mortgage offer; I am not sure if that can be done today although my child paid a fair bit last summer and exchanged and completed quickly on a purchase and remortgage. Again she paid more than the fees mentioned on this thread though. I think it's worth paying 3x the cost of the cheapest lawyers even just to get very personal responsive service. Even then things can go wrong which hold things up - my son's solicitor found something complex regarding the garden no one had picked up on. He was very thorough and that was important.

What is amazing to me and may be what the pp is getting at-people will pay many thousands to buy a house but cant be arsed to read ten pages of a report summarising all the paperwork it entails! Sheesh.

Again - it's this attitude that means traditional law firms are dead in the water. There's obviously an issue here with how the information is communicated to the clients. You can choose to keep berating them, find out what it is they need and deliver it, or let someone else get there first and steal your business.

ABS has made it possible for competition to come from companies who understand customer care and have decent IT systems and understand the opportunities in embracing technology. Soon enough, they come along and take your business.

At the moment, it's cheapo conveyancing companies doing it, they haven't got a great reputation. But once a large company comes along, that can trade on a good reputation and can offer a better, more efficient service at a lower cost (though efficiencies) - how will law firms compete?

That should say,

Soon enough, they will come along and take your business.

The solicitor we used for our last house purchase was utter rubbish. Three weeks before completion she suddenly left overnight, so we were suspicious of the reasons for that.

They got so many things wrong that we are still sorting it out nearly four years later.

Good lord, I do deliver what they need. I can give them all the written advice under the sun, and that is a requirement of my profession, and then a client can choose not to read it.

That's up to them of course, but they cannot then complain that I haven't advised them properly!

As for methods of communication, do you think we still use a quill pen and parchment? My boss is from a specialist IT background, a whizz kid genius who had a top flight IT career and then decided to become a lawyer (in his family firm). He has a planet sized brain and is about as shit hot on IT as you can get.

Our clients get a fantastic service from us, but, and it's a big but, they also have to take responsibility for what they are doing i.e. parting with a large chunk of cash. We can lead them to water but we cannot make them drink. They should read the damn reports!!!

Oh, and the large cut price conveyancing firms can never offer what a local lawyer can, it's just not in the business model.

I want to say something else too-buying a house is not just about getting you in and getting the keys. You guys instruct us to ensure that the house you buy is of good and marketable title for when you come to sell on. Otherwise you are just storing up trouble and costs for the future.

At the moment, it's cheapo conveyancing companies doing it, they haven't got a great reputation. But once a large company comes along, that can trade on a good reputation and can offer a better, more efficient service at a lower cost (though efficiencies) - how will law firms compete?

I do rather wonder how exactly you envisage this happening though. Bear in mind it would likely need to be at prices similar to those charged by the conveyancing factories now. Thus they'd need to stack em high and pay peanuts for the sums to add up, and that is actually where the problem lies. The 'efficiencies' already being practiced.

There is certainly plenty of dinosauring within the sector and from solicitors firms. There are definitely individuals and firms that could improve this. But the idea that there are all these efficiencies waiting to be discovered in a sector that's already pared down to the bone is not realistic. I do think as a whole it will get more efficient as more land becomes registered, because unregistered on a whole can be more time consuming, but that's just something that will happen over time.

"But once a large company comes along, that can trade on a good reputation and can offer a better, more efficient service at a lower cost (though efficiencies) - how will law firms compete?"

I think large parts of conveyancing will be done by computers in the near future. It's surely one area of law that is very vulnerable to the middle class mechanization that is coming.

PrincessCuntsuelaVaginaHammock I'm not making this stuff up!

For example, AI is on the horizon. Tasks that until recently required human brains to think about will soon be automated.

"Middle class mechanisation", exactly, as poster critiqueofeveryday says.

From the FT:

Its traditional aversion to risk has meant the legal profession has not been in the vanguard of new technology. But it is seen as ripe for disruption — a view that is based not least on pressure from tech-savvy corporate clients questioning the size of their legal bills and wanting to reduce risk.

As more law firms become familiar with terms such as machine learning and data mining, they are creating tech-focused jobs like “head of research and development” or hiring coders or artificial intelligence (AI) experts.

Change is being driven not only by demand from clients but also by competition from accounting firms, which have begun to offer legal services and to use technology to do routine work. “Lawtech” start-ups, often set up by ex-lawyers and so-called because they use technology to streamline or automate routine aspects of legal work, are a threat too. Lawtech has been compared to fintech, where small, nimble tech companies are trying to disrupt the business models of established banks.

A study by Deloitte has suggested that technology is already leading to job losses in the UK legal sector, and some 114,000 jobs could be automated within 20 years.

Article here: www.ft.com/content/5d96dd72-83eb-11e6-8897-2359a58ac7a5