Solicitor - am I being too demanding or are they just rubbish?

[5amisnotmorning]

My personal opinion is that our solicitor is rubbish and I am now getting lots of calls from the estate agents on either side getting frustrated with the time taken for our responses and the quality.

His turnaround time for responses to queries is 1-2 weeks which he believes is acceptable.

We have now had a complaint from our buyer and his solicitors that there are too many queries outstanding with no attempt to resolve them ie. no building control sign off for some older work which was done before we bought the property. They were requesting FENSA certificates previously which we had no knowledge of and only through mumsnet did I know that I could get replacements through the website.

So the complaint with a list of outstanding queries (none of them new) came in yesterday morning. I have pretty much demanded a call today to go through them and see what our options may be to try and get them resolved. He is refusing to call today saying he needs more time to go through them. But they are not new??? Surely he should know as standard what the implications are and whether indemnity insurance would be appropriate etc?

Could someone reassure me if I am expecting too much? We are going to lose our buyer if this carries on.

Sounds like your opinion is correct !! Hope this is a wake up call to them, and it resolves it's self for you soon !

They are rubbish.
On occasions our solicitors were slow but usually a quick call and they would bring you up to speed and sort stuff out

They are awful. That is not an acceptable response time and if your estate agents are getting frustrated (and they work with solicitors every day) then that's not a good sign. Hopefully they will improve.
Are they part of of a chain?

You need to sack him and get a new solicitor. He seems particularly crap. He's going to loose u this sale!

Thanks for your responses!

I work with top lawyers every day so was wondering if my expectations were just too high but his latest e-mail explaining why he couldn't call me today just said that he would be in touch in due course... That has REALLY got my back up..

I would love to sack him but we need to move before Christmas! Wondering if there is something I can do like threaten a complaint or ask for a different partner at the firm?

Your engagement letter will set out a complaints mechanism. You should have the name of a partner at the firm to complain to. Start there.

get complaining. My solicitor turned things round in a day or two, was responsive by email, answered the phone etc etc. And they weren't the most expensive firm.

the high street firms were pricier and slower, but still not this bad.

Thankyou.

We used a local firm that we used when purchasing our house (but new solicitor) in the hope that things would be easier and it is one of the most expensive!

I now have read the law society Protocol (which they keep referring to in their emails as to when they will respond which actually states it should be in a timely manner) and the engagement letter and terms. If they don't phone today and start turning things around in 2-3 days, I have a lovely e-mail drafted in my head to the lead partner who it says to refer complaints to in the first instance.

It won't really be a solicitor dealing with it. It'll be some office worker with an in-tray stacked to the ceiling. That's why the solicitor him/herself has no idea what's going on.

We are I'm same position. Sold our house and had offer accepted on new one in aug and still no where near moving. He is just awful!

We bought a few months back and our conveyancer returned calls within hours, emailed responses and generally dealt with things pragmatically and with a no nonsense attitude. My friend had an offer accepted on her flat last December and only finally completed the sale in October, all due to her incompetent solicitor. They can make or break a sale in my opinion. Ours wasn't as cheap as an online conveyancer but she wasn't too expensive and she dealt with it all herself so no clueless juniors to contend with.

Email him now, copying in their complaints partner (who will be listed in the engagement letter) and say you are extremely dissatisfied with his response times and failure to respond to queries. Say expressly that you believe the buyer will withdraw if he does not progress this on an urgent basis. Wait and see - but at most firms that would put you right at the top of his inbox!

Well he responded yesterday to the queries without consulting us first which I made clear in my e-mail I wanted to discuss..but with an unprofessional rant to the other solicitors firm (who had said they were disappointed with the lack of progress with responses) for personal attacks and that he is entitled to respond as he see fits. He also called at 5pm after I left 2 messages which happened to be the only time I was unavailable.

DH thinks if we can have a conversation next week to see what solutions to the outstanding queries we can offer to the buyer then we should just be polite but persistently annoying so he just wants us out of his hair. He thinks this is our only chance of completing prior to Christmas.

I am willing to give this a go but will be also contacting our estate agents to ask them to apologise on our behalf to the other solicitor and to reassure our buyer that this isn't coming from us and to bear with us while we try and offer some solutions as quickly as possible.

If it looks next week like it's not working then my lovely e-mail will be going to the senior partner - it will be going anyway but hopefully after completion in December!

Personally I would like to complain now and kick up a fuss but it's a smallish local firm with not a lot of other solicitors to pick things up and I am heavily pregnant and we NEED to move prior to Christmas.

Oh by the way this is a partner at the firm and he is doing most of the work - previous conversations with his trainee solicitor indicates that he is too junior to be doing much apart from the filing and ordering searches.

He has also blamed his PA for not typing his responses for a week when he promised us a next day turnaround on previous queries and said he couldn't flog her any harder when I explained that it wasn't my problem how busy his PA was..

5am, he sounds just awful. I would be furious too. If you're in the south east, PM me if you want my solicitor's details. We had a time constraint too and managed to exchange within 5 weeks of having our offer accepted so there could still be time to swap to someone else.

He's appalling. And if he is blaming his staff, that is not your problem. You are paying for a service nd if he doesn't hire enought people/competent peple, that is for him to sort out. Please do send you complaint letter and also report him to the Solicitors Regulation Authority.

Please also go over any bill he sends you with a fine tooth comb and refuse to pay anything that appears excessive or duplicative (you can contest a solicitors bill and he will have to justify everything he tries to charge for).

Oh yes, I agree with HellsBells about checking the bill. My MIL's aunt died a little while ago and the probate took so long and was so badly handled that the solicitor agreed to take £100 off the final bill. When they received it, not only had he not reduced his charges, but he had charged them twice for the BACs transfer. Especially annoying as he was sending them a cheque! She had some sharp words with him.

Actually, maybe if you speak to/email the senior partner, you could also ask for a reduction in their fees. I would tell him that if you lose the house due to their incompetence you will not be paying anything at all, that should focus them on the task in hand!