Solicitor keeping documents?????

[pinkroses]

Hi. We were selling our house up until last week as it fell through.

Anyway, the solicitor seems a bit strange. We had a big pack of deeds for our house and other documents that we gave him and we have asked for them back. This was a week ago now and they haven't even been sent. Dh spoke to him yesterday and said he would pick them up on Monday instead.....but the solicitor came up with the idea that he was away next week(we were due to complete on our house next Friday!!) So Dh said to leave them with his secretary and he would collect them.......the solicitor just snapped at him and said he would get back to him. We haven't heard from him since.

I don't understand why he's keeping our documents....can he do anything with them???? I've dealt with solicitors before and this one seems very strange!!! Any advice would be appreciated.

They should be in your solicitors' deeds room/store which should be locked and fireproof I think. Pretty sure he can't do anything with them but insist and just turn up if necessary to collect them. They should be documented in the office so should be found quite easily.

Have you paid your bill?? Solicitors are entitled to retain clients' documents until all outstanding fees have been paid.

If you've paid, it would appear he's just being a difficult prat.

yes...all sorted out. Right the way through the process, we thought he could be working for the person we were selling to (a developer and he introduced us to solicitor). If we rang and asked how thing were doing, he seemed to be talking in code and not telling us anything. Even when we instructed him to stop the process as the developer was a prat, he said about giving the developer another week to see what he wants to do!!!! The whole situation doesn't seem right, IMO.