Solicitors conspire to drag out conveyancing

[SweetCruciferous]

AIBU to think solicitors deliberately eke out every step of the conveyancing process as a deliberate ploy to justify disproportionate fees for simple boilerplate admin tasks amounting to no more than a couple of days’ work?

This is my suspicion. Can anyone confirm this? Any heretic solicitors? AIBU?

I'm a lawyer who doesn't do conveyancing and I'm always amazed at how little is charged for conveyancing, particularly compared to the estate agent fees. The solicitors bring the skill (years of legal education, usually at considerable expense) and take the risk (and accordingly have high insurance premiums).

At my (large) firm apparently it costs the firm on average £500 just to open a file - for running conflict and AML checks, producing an engagement letter and taking the initial call. That is before anyone does any actual work that they can charge a client for. So to see conveyancers working the entire file for a fixed fee of the same amount is pretty extraordinary. There has been a real race to the bottom on fees as a result of the conveyancing factories.

But there you go, 2 weeks , nothing to say , you therefore appear to have done nothing in 2 weeks for your client. Not even a mail to say we are waiting for something. nothing, cant you see how It Looks?

I work as a solicitor in development site acquisitions and we have a plot sales team

We provide a legal handbook where we explain everything and properly drafted documents .

Some firms are utter shit. Some are great here are some pointers:-

Some firms have the files run by case handlers and then it has to be seen by someone who has some legal knowledge. That creates a bottle neck and really slows things down.

Don't go with the conveyanxer your national.chain of agents recommends they get a cut and are usually crap.

Don't go for the cheapest online quote which is based miles away. Go for a local firm where you can actually drop the documents in to the office and not have to send things in by post.

Finally before you quibble your lawyer's bill quibble the estate agents !!

@redcar2022 solidarity from me I feel like a career change but can't afford to retrain.

A (pregnant) colleague was threatened by a client yesterday, because she doesn't have his mortgage offer yet people are utterly bizarre. We don't go to work to be abused.

@redcar2022

I am going to stop now. I was roundly abused yesterday by the other side in a divorce and I am at seriously low ebb right now. Covid has been utter hell for the legal profession. But we are just meant to take the flak and the shit and the abuse. I am knackered and over it.

It's so unnecessary isn't it. I hope things get easier love, I'm aware in your area of work is depends on the backlog at the courts. But sending solidarity and support x

Yabu. They put you in a pile and forget about you unless you nag IME. If you're our vendor's online conveyancer, you're just bloody incompetent.

@SweetCruciferous

Thanks *@PersicariaBistortaSuperba* that makes sense. In my case I’m not in a chain, the mortgage was approved months ago and the solicitors have had all the documents they need for around 5 months. At the very least there hasn’t appeared to be much sense of urgency, let’s put it that way.

Obviously I don’t know the ins and outs and whilst I appreciate that clearly the tasks are specialised enough to require a trained solicitor, they still don’t seem like a half year’s endeavour. Thanks for the insight!

DS is a FTB, chain of 3. Offer accepted in June. All paperwork submitted in July. Months drift by and no update or contact from solicitor. Now approaching the expiry of his mortgage offer, they don't reply to emails, don't ring back when they promise. Frankly he'd rather have paid a lot more money and got the job done sooner.

Which firm is he using?

A firm in Newcastle.

The OP and a few others are clearly clueless about the legal process. They want rid, there is no benefit to dragging out a fixed fee.

But but but how do you know it's perfectly normal

In this case it is. Local solicitor. £1800. 5 months.

Unacceptable.

It’s not the solicitors faults but the whole house buying system is unfort for purpose. All of the checks should be visible before the house is marketed and then people can put down binding offers.

@jujuball @minecraftmother and @redcar2022 You have all (much more eloquently than me) summed up what I hate about my job. I'm going to retrain in...something just as soon as I figure out what that is. There has to be a better way.
Even 35k is a distant dream at my firm and the stress keeps me awake at night.

@MinecraftMother I'm still catching up on the thread but I've read your posts and I agree with you 100% (including PPL ). I absolutely feel your frustration.

I had one day off last week and I came back to 245 emails. If it takes me only 2 minutes to read and reply to each one, that's 490 minutes, that's about 8 hours to just answer emails. But by the time I've done that, I've got another 200 emails, plus voicemails, plus the post that's come in, plus some of the emails will take much longer than 2 minutes to deal with. So that's why I can't reply to everyone's emails on the same day. And sending 4 or 5 emails doesn't help!

And no, I don't have time to chase your lender for your mortgage offer (and be on hold for 90 minutes - Barclays and HSBC, I'm looking at you) because it hasn't been issued because you haven't provided all the paperwork they've asked for. Nor can I really make multiple calls to everyone else in the chain to see what's going on, I don't have time.

I also have an info sheet that I send out at the start of a transaction. It's a flowchart which details who does what and at what stage of each transaction so clients can see exactly what order things happen in and when they can expect to hear from me. I'd say 90% of them ignore it, cos it's easier to email me or phone me to ask.

The last few months have been absolute hell, there are some shit conveyancing firms out there, agreed, but many of us are experienced specialists, trying to do the very best we can in very difficult circumstances, many still working remotely and without proper equipment/admin support.

Is the £1800 actually their fee or does that include the searches?

Also I love the work I do, it's stressful but I genuinely want to help my clients move house, or to do whatever they are trying to do. We're working for the same goal so it makes sense to try to work together - that works best when clients don't come into the transaction already pissed off at me because the agent has told them it'll all be done and dusted in 28 days, and I say it won't.

I had an agent tell my client last week that I was being too thorough...I've acted for said client for years and she coolly let the agent know that that is what she is paying me for. She's my favourite client - rarely chases me and just lets me get on with it

In fairness, a lot of the agents I deal with are pretty good too and will chase others in the chain if I don't have time to.

I think you should name and shame the Newcastle firm if they have been as bad as you say they have been

I was a conveyancing solicitor for years. Believe me it's in their interests to have it done as quickly as possible. It's just a lot more complicated and more to it than people realise. They think nothing about paying estate agents to upload some photos to rightmove (everything else they do is pure nuisance) and baulk at paying a few hundred to the solicitors.

And I agree with everything Millie said.

Our vendor's incompetent conveyancer was PPL, BTW!

@PickAChew

Our vendor's incompetent conveyancer was PPL, BTW!

Of course they were 😉

I don't get the wink.

Our vendor's incompetent conveyancer was PPL, BTW

@PickAChew that does not surprise me in the slightest!

@PickAChew

I don't get the wink.

It's well known in the business that when goi get PPL on the other side not only will you be doing your job, but also explaining to them that we don't need to provide evidence of consent under a restrictive covenant because the fucking shed or whatever has stood for more than 20 years, so we can rely on the Doctrine of Laches. They don't understand the concept of Dom and serviant land, don't realise that indemnity policies don't get rid of the defect and allow people to go wild (only the HTT can manage that) ...then once you've schooled the foetus on the other side, with their gcse in drama, you have to wait for their "supervisor to sign off the file" sigh...

That's what you get in a race to the bottom. Those fuckers are never cheaper - they charge for verifying ID and dealing with a mortgage as if these things haven't always been part of a conveyancing process!! It's outrageous.

They were uncontactable for days on end, then, at a crucial point, announced that they'd not actually forwarded some documents that were crucial at that particular stage so we had several weeks delay before exchange. (then half of the estranged vendors went AWOL...)