Buying and Selling - draft contracts / enquiries

goodwithsaving

@Tiglet2 I really feel for solicitors at the moment. Some really can't win. I have consciously only started calling mine now that enquiries are coming through, and will only call every 10 days, unless they call me first. I am providing concise answers and providing email copies of things they already have, because me saying 'you already have it' does no-one any favours.
I am impatient, and I can be unreasonable, but I'm trying to stay calm and ensure that emails are friendly, and say 'I know you're really busy and I'm grateful for all that you're juggling'. 

Common decency. I can't stand people who are rude or lack manners. I don't care how much people are paying, you can complain and request urgency, but without being rude or demoralising.

Justonemorecupoftea

Imagine if solicitors started turning down work or having waiting lists and charging clients twice as much. That's the alternative.

At the moment they take on work with no knowledge of how complex it's going to be, how competent others in the process are and deal with people who are involved in this process 3/4 times in their life.

It's like me giving you a picture of a cake and asking you how long it would take to bake when you don't know the method or ingredients, don't know where stocks the ingredients and have to share the oven with 30 other people.

So of course it's impossible to give timeframes that are anything more than guesswork. 

Then you have people on these boards and elsewhere saying that you should call them twice a day until they do what you want. If every one of their clients is doing that and they are answering/responding - when do they find time to do their work?

30 clients x 5 minute phonecall= 2 and a half hours a day lost for no reason other than everyone thinks they are a special case.

I'm not a solicitor, but I get the sense that lots of people are unable to think beyond the ends of their nose.

Poppyka

It can be really frustrating getting the balance right between asking for updates and leaving them to get on with it all. 

We left our solicitors to it for a while as our estate agent helped to act as the go between. 

I only chased today and was told that our solicitors are in the enquiry stage so I let the estate agent know as she wanted to know how things were on our side. She then reminded the sellers solicitors who replied to say they responded to all enquiries on the 4th June and had no further contact from our solicitors to say there’s anything outstanding! It’s very frustrating that our solicitors have sat on this for a good few weeks now and not got back in touch to query further yet happy to tell us we’re still enquiring!