Hassling solicitor - am I being impatient?!

sparky130a

newbieFTB wrote: »

I never said I expected them to reply the same working day or within the hour (as I would) - I was asking whether me chasing them after three clear working days was being impatient!

Well unless you tell us what the question was.....

leahkicker99

In my experience, you need to constantly chase! Sped up the process alot.

TBagpuss

ThePants999 wrote: »

Sadly, this is normal. Like you, I have a job where this would be unacceptable. I think it's utter crap, but most others here are happy to cut them some slack because they take on a bajillion cases.

It's about cost. People want cheap conveyancing, which is only possible if conveyancers have high volumes of cases.

If you want faster turn arounds you can have them, at a price.

TBagpuss

newbieFTB wrote: »

Yikes, Instead of leaving it three full working days I may leave it a week before poking her - that's an insane amount of work!

I was just about to post to say that sounds like quite a conservative estimate to me! I just asked a conveyancing friend of mine and he said he would normally expect to have between 110-130 files open, but can't recall ever having fewer than about 75, and in busy periods may have 170 or so.

I think that leaving it 2-3 days is reasonable.

Also, bear in mind that Fridays are always particularly busy as that is when most completions take place, and as those are hard deadlines they will take priority.

DumbMuscle

110 files may not be too bad - depending on the work involved. The average house sale takes 12 weeks (so 60 business days). That means about 4 hours average for a case, for a standard 9-5 week - and most legal professionals work longer than 9-5. That doesn't sound like much, but most cases will be fairly standard (e.g. once you've gone through search reports from a search provider a few dozen times, I would assume you know what to look out for and can do it much more quickly), and a lot of the work will be done by assistants (either admin or trainees).

Of course, that means that 2 minutes to answer a chasing email, multiplied by 100+ cases can add up to a lot! But that just makes it more important to give reassuring enough noises in response to the first chase that the client won't chase again for a little while.

(Source for educated guesses: I am a trainee in an unrelated field of law. My "active cases" is about 200, my "cases which need work now" is less than half a dozen)

Marvel1

If the solicitor has to answer every minor query from their clients like yourself, no work will get done.

They have many clients, you are only replying to one.