Fee claimed by a solicitor

harrys_dad

OP, you may find it easier to cross post on the Debt Free Wannabe board as the people on there know much more about these sort of things. It is really a "debt" issue and not a housing issue.

cattie

DELETED USER wrote:

You don't have to pay the fees and interest. Write back to them stating that you need to see documentation proving that you owe them money, and if they can't provide it you will be charging them for every additional letter you have to write.

If the Housing Association jumped the gun that is their problem. They can only claim reasonable costs that you are responsible for, which would only be the case if due to you not paying they incurred extra costs themselves. They have to show that things had broken down to the point where there was no realistic prospect of resolving the matter and a lawyer was the only course of action, which since you were trying to work out payment terms it was clearly not.

I think you misunderstand the OP's situation, this has nothing to do with a Housing Association, this guy is an owner, a leaseholder & by not paying his maintenance fees on time as determined in his lease, then he is in breach of his lease & is liable for all costs that the RA have to take to recover the monies owed.

OP, you are not only in serious danger of incurring more costs due to legal action, but could end up with freeholder taking steps to revoke your lease.

Nobody likes paying service or maintenance charges, but when you live in a flat, you know you have to & you know exactly when such monies are due and it is your responsibility to ensure that fees are paid on time.

Lotus1954

Hi I am new to this forum. It is regarding solicitor's excessive amount of fee of my divorce case. What can I do?
freezing injunction – I wanted to freeze all properties those were in my wife’s sole name, so that she cannot sell these properties. But my solicitor advised that we have to freeze all joint bank accounts and other accounts that belongs to her.
I raised the following objections:
1. All the direct debit for mortgage repayment are set in joint accounts, there will be problem for not honouring repayments.
2. It will be difficult for her to live if all the accounts are frozen.
My solicitor dismissed both the objection by saying that in the freezing injunction we ask not to freeze direct debit payments. We will unfreeze the essential accounts that she need to run her life later.
There was unnecessary work done for freezing injunction:
1. There was no need to freeze accounts –all the direct debit were also stopped and that lead to bad credit rating.
2. Some accounts were unnecessary to freeze for example Amazon, M&S and I was billed for freezing these account without any kind of benefit to me.
Freezing order was discharge by court on 29/01/2010. Because it was ill formed freezing order. Preparing this order, no attention was given for the wellbeing of me or the respondent.
I had to pay the cost of defendant solicitors.
Also other case cost has been enormous, so far I have paid £35,000 and my solictor wants another £5000. There was no trial. i got scared of the cost and negotiated with my wife to finish the case. Lot of unnecessary work has been done by my solicitor just to make his bills.
Any idea what can I do???? Thanks for reading it, much appreciated.

Thrugelmir

Solicitors follow their clients instructions. Compromise is always the best solution as it's the parties themselves that lose out in the end. As its the parties that pay the solicitors. As you've found the costs soon run away with no benefit.