Changing solicitors part way through a house sale?

[ErlingHaalandsManBun]

Anyone done this?

We are 10 weeks into selling our house and our solicitor has been awful. He has been rude, slow, blunt, not communicating, and has put everyone's backs up. He doesn't reply to important emails and won't take our calls and has been a total nightmare.

As we have had a very difficult sale so far, with lots of issues that have needed sorting, and have now lost our onward purchase due to him not communicating with our sellers solicitor, we are now at a point where we would just like to let him go and hire someone else.

I have no idea if we can even do this, at this stage in the process. He has done some work for us/for our buyers and still has some to do.

Can we just pay him for what he has done and ask him to send everything/all the details from our sale so far to a new solicitor? Will he even do this or will he just refuse?

We have no idea what to do for the best at the moment but we are struggling to see how this sale will go through with this guy at the helm!!

My DH is going to try again today to speak with him but as its traditionally exchange/completion day he will no doubt be busy and once again won't want to talk to us.

We don't live near to where he is based, another error on our part I admit. We are relocating and decided to give the work to a business local to where we are moving to. He came highly recommended by several people when I put the feelers out too and did my research on solicitors in the area.

Its all very frustrating but we don't know what are options are at this stage?

Stick or twist?

You definitely can ask him to invoice you for all work and costs to date and request that he forward the file to "X" firm.
Is it a good idea ? That's questionable. I would be very careful how you word your request. In fact if I was going to do this I wouldn't approach it directly myself at all. I would explain the situation to my new solicitor and ask them to deal with it directly. They will know exactly how to word and proceed with it - and it's important they know the full story and agree to take it on from the start anyway.

We partly did this. We had a conveyancer recommended by the EA. Big mistake! After 12 weeks, the sale fell through because the prospective purchasers couldn’t raise the money to buy the house, which is, of course, a whole other story about due diligence and financial checks. He was also doing the work on our purchase, a new build and it was mostly done, so we sacked him from the sale and instructed a local solicitor. The purchase completed with him, not without difficulty and we had compensation because he’d been so poor.

The new local solicitor dealt with the handover and completed our sale.

I'd be tempted to talk to their manager before switching. Usually, on your contract letter, there's details of the person who has overall responsibility above your conveyancer. Explain you're not happy, are disappointed due to x2 recommendations, what can Manager do to stop you jumping ship? Have a list of actual examples of why you are not happy.

Manager may just dump it on someone better within the organisation. Which is infinitely better (assuming next person is competent) than the whole file moving firms.

Weve just learnt through our solicitor that 3rd in chain is a leasehold
this is 10 TEN weeks in
theyre suggestion can anyone go into rented for a period of time .........
I have no words