My rights with a negligent solicitor

LondonChris15

Hi all,

I think this is the right section for this.

On January 14th I completed a freehold house sale moving from an owned leasehold flat.

The process for moving was fraught with difficulties and stress due to the buyers having multiple solicitors and subsequently introducing many delays, which in the worst instance resulted having to cancel one completion date (I had to move my belongings into storage) and incur additional costs for removal, storage, my failure-to-complete fees to my Buyer, loss of earnings due to more days required for the move which were never reimbursed (Outside of the interest for late completion, there's no legal guarantee of re-imbursing these costs due to failure to complete so I was left thousands out of pocket).

In May of this year, our old service charge/ground rent company (Firstport Property Services) confirmed that they hadn't received a Notice of Transfer for ownership so in their eyes, we still owe them for the half-yearly service charge fees. Our solicitor promptly forwarded this to our flat-buyers solicitor to action with no response.

We're now in November and the buyers solictior has yet to issue a notice so we also have a service charge fee for the second half of the year. Again, we've shared with our solicitor and also direct with the flat-buyers solicitor and will chase via phone.

We don't want to be in the position where we have missed payments/debt-recovery agencies due to negligence from our flat-buyers solicitors.

Any advice how to overcome this problem other than to constantly harass the solicitors?

Of course, we shouldn't need to do any chasing and are surprised that a legal profession such as this could be so lax in handling something which must occur frequently on property-moves.

theartfullodger

You have the right to sue, but they may be better at the law than you.

Suggest make formal complaint and/or approach Solicitors regulator

silvercar

It is your buer's solicitor's who are at fault. You are not their client so I don't see how you can sue them. I would also wonder if they have correctly registered the new ownership of the property (you could see if zoopla records a new ownership price around the date of your move). I would write to the new owners and ask them to sort.