Solicitor woes

[MercuryMouth]

Hi everyone, not sure where to go with this. At our wits end with our solicitors, they are failing to communicate with us, not taking phone calls, not responding so emails, etc and we’re on the verge of losing a house purchase as a result. They are dealing with the sale of a business and a house and the purchase of another house. Nothing complicated, very straightforward transactions, but it has been 9 months sale agreed and we cannot close as they won’t forward contracts. They keep saying all is ok and we can sign, they will send contracts next week but they don’t. We have begged them to give us the contracts, they just won’t. I would change solicitor but then we are back to the start again and our vendors will have to incur more legal fees. Any advise, just can’t take the stress of it any more. They also did something with our deposit which I’m not sure constitutes fraud or is acceptable practice - we had agreed a deposit if 100k which we paid 6 months ago. Unknown to us they agreed a lower deposit would secure the property and they passed on 50k and retained 50k in their account - only found out by accident! Where do I go or who do we talk to? Thanks for any advice!

Don’t know if this will be of any help

www.lawsociety.org.uk/public/for-public-visitors/using-a-solicitor/complain-about-a-solicitor

Is it a large firm, or a very small one? What is the role within the organisation of your solicitor?

Thanks for the link I will have a read through it.
It is a small firm (maybe 10 solicitors) and the person dealing with us is one of the partners.

You need to complain, using the word complaint prominently, to the complaints partner. If that bears no fruit, then go to the Legal Ombudsman.

The financial issue with your deposit is more a Solicitors Regulation Authority issue though.

www.sra.org.uk/consumers/problems/

Contact the regulator who will be able to advise you on how to proceed to ensure your sale doesn't fall through and that your deposit is safe. A complaint can follow once you've dealt with all that.

No advice I'm afraid but a sympathetic reply because we are going through almost the same.
Solicitor never answers our calls or calls us, hasn't once responded to me via email and when i do get to speak to him he tells me all is in hand and he is working on it. I then speak to our buyer who tells me there is still lots outstanding that our solicitor hasn't done.

We looked at changing solicitors too but like you say, you have to start from the beginning and if they are this slow dealing with the case imagine how slow they would be sending back everything you would need for a new solicitor.

I send an email saying i wish to complain etc and he will ring me, basically tell me what i want to hear then we are back to square one again.

Supposed to be exchanging tomorrow but I bet it won't happen

Good luck i hope yours get sorted asap

Oh god @DogsNosesAreCute I think we have the same solicitor, that is our guy down to a T! He ignores us for weeks and when we threaten any sort of action via email he’s on the phone like a shot gaslighting us and acting as if we’re mad. The last time he called me was a month ago and he said well if you want to sign of course you can, I’ll send on documents this afternoon and just sign them. Haven’t heard anything since

Thanks @loveisagirlnameddaisy and @MrsBertBibby I will contact the regulator tomorrow.

@MercuryMouth his initials GN?
It's infuriating, i get that they're busy but surely they should monitor how many cases they have and only deal with a certain amount!

I send an email complaining to him last week and he called my OH to respond! Cheeky twat didn't even have the balls to speak to me

Ha no that’s not our guy! I understand they’re busy but don’t take on the work if you can’t do it and then leave 3 different parties in our case in the absolute shit if this falls apart.

What I was going to suggest tomorrow is that we call a zoom meeting with both solicitors and the seller and ourselves to sort out who’s telling lies, but DH was wincing a bit and sucking in air, thinking it wasn’t the done thing. I have spoken to the seller a few times as both sides agents are fed up of fielding calls looking for updates and asked us to talk directly (we knew each other anyway so not so weird). When we spoke I realised that our solicitor had been telling us he did stuff and asked for documents etc that were totally untrue (according to sellers solicitor).

WIBU to ask for a meeting with everyone on the basis that this is going nowhere fast? I’m hoping that if our solicitor has any professional dignity he would want to save face in front of the other solicitor and get his act together. If it goes badly I suppose we’re no worse off and can move to another solicitor.

Holding your money in their account is a breach of accounting rules so you could / should report them to the SRA. They sound shit. I think an alternative firm is probably what you should do and then report them. You can try and escalate a complaint assuming they have a procedure.

Thanks @kirinm - I wasn’t sure if they had crossed any line with the deposit - I was just picturing them saying that they were able to secure it with a lower deposit so wasn’t the money more secure in their account than in the sellers agent account. But I would have expected to be told anyway. They are absolutely shit.

I am a solicitor. 100% call the sra. The appalling customer service delaying your deals is bad enough but what they have done with your deposit is against the solicitors code of conduct and may be criminal.

You need to speak to the regulator ASAP - I don’t want to scare you but if they have kept £50k of your money in their client account which isn’t needed for the transaction they may have used it for something else (or be planning to), the more quickly the regulator gets involved the less likely they are to be able to dissipate the funds.

Thanks @Heartbreakeyes - and to everyone else - I will definitely get on to the regulator tomorrow.

@MercuryMouth I've avoided going to the regulator so far because a solicitor friend told me the solicitor could say it's best he didn't act for us any more then we would have to find a new one and start all over again. Just something to bare in mind

Hadn’t thought of that @DogsNosesAreCute of course it makes sense though! Food for thought. Aaarrrrghh!! I’ve been sweating this all night, the thoughts of getting someone in trouble is weighing heavy on me, even though I’m clearly the one being totally screwed over. Thanks everyone I’ve got more perspective anyway and I’m going to contact them this morning and flag it clearly as a complaint as a PP advised - funny I hadn’t thought to do that as I had assumed my constant and increasingly frustrated emails would convey it was a complaint, but thinking about it now I have never actually formally complained so they have some deniability or wiggle room.

Conveyancing solicitors will have a huge caseload because the fees they earn are so low. It is very unlikely the solicitor you're dealing with is being supervised a lot / at all so they've been able to ignore calls / emails without it being picked up. It will have to be referred upwards if you make a complaint.

I would ask to have the remaining £50k transferred back to you as a matter or urgency. I wouldn't get away with having £50k sat in client account. My accounts team would be chasing me and then that would get escalated upwards if nothing was done about it.

I work in conveyancing and we don’t ask for the deposit to be transferred until the clients have has a full report on the property and signed their contracts and we are ready to exchange. We would never ask for more than 10% and aren’t allowed to hold client funds too long. I am concerned you have been asked to transfer deposit funds before you are anywhere near to exchange. You need to take this further.

No reason you can't ask for a zoom call with all parties and solicitors to get things moving. It might bring some things out into the open, and new tech has made this sort of thing easier. Just be prepared for your solicitor not to turn up given previous conduct.

And just to be clear as others have mentioned conveyancing solicitors a lot - is the sale of a business just the premises or the company? If so is the same solicitor doing both?

Thanks all. Emailed to request a meeting between all parties, other solicitor had no problem - mine didn’t even bother replying
He’s not a conveyancing solicitor specifically, which may be the issue and our mistake, but has been our general solicitor for a number of years and mainly ok on other issues. Someone mentioned that conveyancing solicitors have a huge workload due to low fees etc so we mightn’t expect a great level of service. I expect the fees for this and other work in the past 12 months will be around 40 to 50k so I’d be expecting him to at least take our calls. The business I mentioned is just the sale of a premises. Anyway it’s going to the regulator now.

@MercuryMouth
Our solicitor got closed down by the SRA on Wednesday afternoon! By some miracle we completed yesterday, the SRA appointed another solicitor to take over and the new solicitor did more work in 4 hours than our awful one did in 4 months. The most stressful day of my life especially as we didn't know he had been shut down until 11am yesterday morning 2 hours prior to our planned completion time. Only upside is we now don't have to pay any fees!
Hope yours gets sorted soon