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

As pp have said you can't generalise but I'm a lawyer and I've also been trying to sell and buy a house since last October. My conveyancers have been fine but those representing our buyer and our buyer's buyer have been shockingingly unprofessional to the extent that I am considering formal complaints when (please God) this transaction is over.

Slight sweeping generalisation here! Pay for a better lawyer next time. There are different standards just like everything else

OP here with an UPDATE for anyone interested.

We have not exchanged today either.

To clarify my original email - it is the seller's solicitor who has f*ed this up at the 12th hour. So regardless of what we have paid ours in fees, it is the other solicitor causing issues and as I am not their client I have no power to complain.

Today we were once again "ready to exchange" This time, their solicitor took until 4pm to return a simple email saying the seller was ready - even though we all knew they were ready and we were all chasing for this simple email all day.

So my solicitors were then on the phone to the other solicitors ready to exchange - the time is now 4.30pm. A small issue arises in that my solicitors have included a standard clause ensuring the seller pays for the indemnity they have already agreed to on exchange (about £300 quid). The seller's solicitor says she hasn't got time to deal with this clause now as she has to catch a train home!!!

My solicitors pleaded with her to stay on the line as it was a simple standard thing and they wanted to exchange day but she said NO. She said she didn't want to miss her train home and then just HUNG UP!!!!!

So we have not exchanged yet again. It has been a week of this now. What the f* is wrong with them?? There are reasons why this is really distressing and we will now be without a roof temporarily. Unbelievable!!

Also, although our solicitor said she will phone the seller's solicitor first thing tomorrow, how do we know she will even be there / respond / do her job?? What if she decides to bloody work from home or not pick up her phone again?!!!

AT MY WITS END.

P.s. any advice about whether we should complain to the seller's agent or even pull out of this sorry affair altogether?

In the grand scheme of things my solicitor didn't get much money from me when I bought my house (less than 1K) but they were absolutely faultless. The delay was with the sellers not having letters of confirmation when they put the place on the market.

CornishMaid, we were cash buyers, did not want searches and did not have a property to sell (no chain whatsoever) and yet it still took over 4 months.

She can't agree to her clients paying £300 without their instructions though. It would t matter how long she stayed on the phone. And nothing like that is standard - it's all a negotiation. I didn't pay for any of the indemnity policies last time I sold a house. Why ever did your solicitor only raise the cost of an indemnity at the point of exchange.

I suspect she isn’t even a solicitor. An awful lot of people doing the day to day work on house conveyances aren’t. If she is, you can complain about her to the regulator. (I recently had to held a friend in a similar situation and the warning that we would do so sorted it out very quickly).

When we bought our house we had an absolutely excellent person allocated to us. She was proactive, really really efficient and did an amazingly good job. The buyers' solicitors were absolutely useless.

Buyers solicitors were one of those - cheap we cna do your conveyancing for £300 jobs and it really eally showed

Our solicitors firm actually allocated someone to us that was not a full 'solicitor'. Sorry I don't know the job terms, but I think she was a legal assistant or paralegal or something. She was absolutely on the ball.

Having used other solicitors before on other moves, her efficiency really stood out. We didn't pay over the odds but it was not cheap either- worth every penny though to have such a good service.

It wouldn't particularly surprise me if lots of conveyancing were to become automated in the not too distant future sleepingdragons, especially the more straightforward stuff. Basically, you're implying that it's the fact that law firms aren't large firms that are different in structure to law firms that's preventing technological change, and this is an oversimplification and a generalisation.

AI may well make things more efficient, but law firms aren't currently being inefficient because they don't yet utilise it to the extent that it might be available in the future. And there's really no reason, unsupported generalisations from the FT journalist there notwithstanding, to assume that law firms will be less likely than ABSs to go for AI if it cuts costs. Look at for example the decline of traditional legal secretaries in the past couple of decades due to outsourcing.

I'm a solicitor who doesn't like working in traditional law firms much and doesn't do conveyancing, fwiw...

OP as frustrating as it is I guarantee it would take far longer to pull out and start fresh with someone else unfortunately.

I'd ask your solicitor to get onto them first thing in the morning (which they will likely do anyway if they are on the ball) and ask your agent to speak to the seller directly so they can complain to the solicitor. They will take a complaint from their own client more seriously than one from the other party

She can't agree to her clients paying £300 without their instructions though

The OP said they had already agreed to it though

@sleepingdragons big business has already tried to use ABS to take over law firms and beat them at their own game.

There have been lots of high profile failures and others that have struggled. Not many seem able to make conveyancing work profitably, probably because the high street type firms are already running on such tight margins and in some cases using conveyancing as a loss leader.

Following my first purchase I used to talk to lots of people about how solicitors were doing all the work for very little money comparatively and was of the view that it was the estate agents who were the dead weight in the whole thing.
Second purchase last summer changed my mind a bit though. The solicitor we used (and not a super cheap conveyancing firm) took 4-5 months for very little reason and lied to us over and over. For two months we were held up because surveys weren’t back. Eventually out of desperation we called the survey companies and lo and behold they’d been delivered months a go. I couldn’t believe that the solicitor had told us barefaced lies over and over and in fact his supervisor had picked up when he was on holiday and had again just reiterated that they were waiting for surveys and dropped our case. Exchange then took an extra few weeks and both solicitors were blaming each other for not receiving or replying to emails. I wasn’t inclined to believe our solicitor because of the survey lies we’d been told.
I’m sure some are excellent, just in any career, but I don’t think in my job I could get away with what they did which was lying in writing over and over again.

Do...do people believe that lawyers get to take home the fees they charge? Really?

Also. The people who have had nothing but bad experiences with solicitors.

There is a common denominator there.

big business has already tried to use ABS to take over law firms and beat them at their own game

This is very naive.

Lawyers will not beat AI at its own game.

I honestly don't know why anyone would want to work as a high street solicitor these days. I say that as a lawyer (in house now).

People have no idea of the amount of work involved, just to open files. Clients often have massively unrealistic expectations of what they are entitled to (especially in divorces). People expected to come out of a divorce with the same lifestyle they had when married. It doesn't happen. There is one pot of money and it has to be shared (regardless of who thinks who has been wronged).

The amount of times clients would say at the outset 'I don't care what it costs, it is the principle of it', then be utterly outraged when the bill comes through...

High street lawyers are NOT well paid.

what Buenos said

"I don't care what it costs, it's the principle of the thing!"

"OK, having listened to you talk for an hour, and seen the five lever arch files of documents and emails that you've sent on this that I'll need to review, the initial advice and strategy will be £2,000 plus VAT."

"WHAT?? That's outrageous, I thought the whole thing would cost about £1,000!"

OP, are you sure your sellers aren't stringing this out for some reason? Conveyancing is more complicated than some people think; it does pay peanuts; and clients who want it to be quick would be the first to complain/sue if something got missed - but that does sound odd. Perhaps she's ducking you because her client has asked her to? Or perhaps I'm just overly cynical!

Hope it happens soon.

indigo, non-PC though it is to say it it may be because the other side's solicitor works short time hours around small children rather than having a full time nanny, nursery place or a husband who takes turns to rush home; as she keeps having to leave early or at 4pm. As you say it is not your fault the other side have one who keeps sloping off early and making excuses (she probably also has too big a work load and I doubt she will be paid much either).

We certainly find people keep going back to the solicitor my older children have used because he replies almost instantly to emails and is very thorough. I hope you manage to exchange today (Friday, peak conveyancing day when I think for some reason most transactions go ahead).

On the AI topic the less boring grunt work lawyers do the better for them so I don't think most people have a problem with use of technology. Technology has already made legal work for lawyers and clients much better. When my son bought there was an issue in an almost unreadable very old (possibly handwritten) document though relating to his back garden which our solicitor got his trainee to read and do a note on - they did a typed transcription of it. Currently a machine could not have thought about and dealt with that point as it came down to what interpretation of the words written in 1920 or something was likely to be correct and I think as the poster above is doing he bought a cheap insurance policy to cover the issue and to cover a residual chancel repair issue (still a problem despite recent changes in law); in other words there is still a fair bit of work that is hard to let a machine do.

I am very lucky that I only advise companies and they are very nice and very happy with what I do. It is harder to be at the coal face of law when people are at their most vulnerable or upset over important things like moving your home or losing your children. I am glad we still have some solicitors prepared to do that work.

I did a project with a large insurance company looking to commoditise wills, 5 a day, over the phone, bash them out. Didn't take off. People don't like that. They want to meet a person and talk everything through. It can get emotional and all sorts comes out, estranged children, gun collections, etc etc. Which is what I have ended up doing. People must like it as can't keep up with demand and now don't need to advertise

For £600 (ish) (the rest being fees) - it won’t be much solicitor’s time you’re getting.

I always think estate agents get paid a lot for bugger all.

When you look at risk taken and skills required the disparity between what the conveyancing solicitor and the estate agent get is utterly crazy

It sounds to me as if the seller is stalling & wants to delay exchange? Otherwise very strange.

Yeah precisely Kerala

Yes I would agree estate agents get a lot of money but what is relatively unskilled work.

What I don’t get is though - online companies have come in to try to disrupt this inefficient, outdated model but it’s just not taking off as quickly as should be expected. A few years a go I would have bet a lot of money that estate agency in its current form would be dead by 2025 or so, but it seems to limp on.