Solicitors, is the stereotype real?

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As we go through our first purchase we're having some issues with our solicitors....we think !

She's a nightmare to get hold of, doesn't answer our emails and we're left wondering if anything is happening. Is this just the stereotypical behavior everyone talks about? I don't expect her to be at our beck and call and I imagine she's dealing with other things but we've not heard anything in two weeks.

I'm normally happy to leave people to do their job and let me know when they're done but I've had two phone calls from the estate agent handling the sale and they're saying they're just waiting for a date from my end.

Out last email from her, she sent us the results of the searches, our mortgage report which I completed and returned and an answer to a question. She mentioned she was waiting for a few more responses before reporting to me.

Is this normal?, am I fretting over nothing?. I was quite happy until the estate agent called.

100% normal. Try not to fret, it’ll fall into place. But I appreciate it’s a stressful time x

That's not my experience. Mine was super efficient. If I emailed her, she replied within the hour. She had came highly recommended on our local Facebook page and I'm very glad I used her!

My last solicitor was on the ball, excellent communication and very fast.

Yours sounds awful, and doesn’t bode well because this will very likely take months to get to the finish line.

Personally I would sack her off if it’s early in the process.

How these useless ones get away with it is beyond me.

This is normal in my experience too but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.

Solicitors like everyone else are just normal people.

Some people would have you believe they are somehow superhuman. More punctual, more capable of accommodating huge workload levels, unaffected by personal/change in life circumstances, not driven by money and scrupulously honest.

This view is somewhat unrealistic.

Generally you get what you pay for, and if you have specific requirements such as processing speed, it's best to make those very clear up front before you engage them in business.

If you are paying a small sum (granted it may seem big to you, but if you think of the many hours of work they put in, plus paying for admin staff, plus overheads - rent, PI insurance, software licences etc. etc.), conveyancers often have to absolutely stack up the work to be economically viable. A lot of High Street solicitors are earning peanuts. Consider what you are paying your Estate Agent for the sale compared with your solicitor ...

Yes, some solicitors doing conveyancing are more efficient than others, as with any job. And yes, if you have a need to push the sale through rapidly, you are going to have to make this clear and be on the ball with your solicitor.

The last time we sold a house we needed it to be done fast, DH was away a lot for work, so I just took it on, and was very active in chasing up everything, making sure all questions were answered, that nothing was left hanging etc. From the day we accepted the offer to completion was ten weeks and two days. (Chose a cash buyer and we weren't buying at the time ourselves, which obviously helped.)

Mine was unfortunately like that. Though I will never know for sure, I feel that, if I hadn't kept pestering & prompting her, we wouldn't have made it before our deadline (Stamp Duty deadline earlier this year).

I would not harass them every day, nor have faith that if kept to themselves they will keep the ball rolling. I would do something in between - making sure with regular prompts that all is moving forward.

Annoying, I know, but worth the hassle for such an important moment!

That's the one thing, I'm in no particular rush, I'm renting and we don't plan to give our notice untill we have the keys in hand so to avoid any worry of timing things. If I had my way we wouldn't move until January and Christmas is out of the way so I'm happy for things to go as they do.

It's the sellers solicitor that's making me think something is wrong. I was quite happy until they rang! That being said, I would appreciate a response to an email asking if things were progressing ok, it's not like I'm asking for a fixed date.

It sounds very normal ime. I was also in a situation where it was to my advantage not to rush the sale, so I never chased up and just responded and replied when there was action to be taken but didn't send pointless emails when there was nothing to be said. It all worked out fine and I knew that things were going on even when I wasn't getting updates.

That wasn't our experience. We were assigned 2 solicitors to contact right from the start so I could always a reply if one of them were out of office. Always responded within an hour or so and happy to answer any of the little questions I had not being familiar as first time buyers.

Honestly even good ones only help the stress so much - there are too many people involved and everyone covers their own back. I know right now my vendors are furious with me because they think I’ve screwed the over but it’s because their solicitors have lied to them about contacting mine on dates (they say they’ve been chasing and we’ve not responded) and their agent lied to me about their willingness to negotiate on the survey so they think I’ve waited till near exchange to screw them! And my buyers are mad as my estate agent didn’t tell them when they offered (as explicitly instructed) that I couldn’t move quickly!

Same with all service providers really. Some are quick and good, others are slow and shoddy. Some are good but slow. The worst are slow and shoddy! Trouble is that you don't know what kind you're getting until you're using them!

I agree, especially the way they blame the other party. We had exactly the same when I bought my little office off the guy I was renting it from. He lived above in the flat. We spoke every day! His solicitor was writing to him telling him they were waiting on me. My solicitor was writing to me telling me they were waiting on him! Both lying through their teeth! We both challenged them and lodged formal complaints and suddenly they started being quick and efficient and concluded the sale really quickly. Like most people, they try to get away with things if they can to excuse their own inefficiency!

My experience is that they take on too much work and then everything gets back logged. It is very frustrating.

For me this is one of the areas to be addressed as part of the overhaul of the whole process recently discussed. Solicitors and EAs should be held accountable and be able to compile transparent reports for their clients. This would be made mandatory as part of the proposed regulation of the buying/selling process. Often solicitors will provide a staging process of what is involved with the buying/selling of a house, but regular communication with the client should inform them where they are in that process and how long each stage is taking. There should also be SLAs in place for requesting information (local searches, for example) and the provision of this information to their clients. There are some very good solicitors out there (as commented on in previous posts), but the lack of accountability is frustrating, especially around the lack of contact and the appearance of doing nothing. Any regulatory process agreed needs to take into account the stresses involved for the clients for (let's face it) the most expensive purchase one will ever make, and put the client front and centre. Financial services has this. It's called Consumer Duty, and it should 100% apply to the house buying/selling process.

“It's the sellers solicitor that's making me think something is wrong. I was quite happy until they rang!“

Are you saying the seller’s solicitor phoned you? If so, that is totally wrong and unprofessional.

Your Solicitor should be keeping you updated either by phone or email regardless of what is or isn’t happening.

You need to understand that your conveyancer will have lots of different matters not just your own. Completions obviously take priority usually on Fridays and more often than not they are usually waiting for responses from the other side before responding to you.

Don't forget the estate agents usually have no idea where the Legal process is at. They are also pushing for it to complete because they want their money.

I'm sorry that's my bad, it's the estate agent that's been calling me not the sellers solicitor.

Just ask your solicitor (conveyancer?) for an estimated date for exchange. Not everything that’s needed is going to come in on time but just phone the solicitor.

We’ve had a nightmare with our solicitors, I had to put a formal complaint in towards the end, funnily enough I never got a reply off that complaint to her line manager but she did start to move really fast, we completed Thursday just gone

My most recent experience with conveyancing solicitors has been mostly positive. However, I'm not in a chain, amd the property was sold at auction. Previously when I was attempting to sell on the open market, my then solicitor was very difficult to get hold of. But I remembered that she wasn't just trying to deal with my sale, hut others too. So I tried to be kind.