Did your solicitor lie to you?

knightstyle

So are you saying it is acceptable to say something sent by email on 13th June did not arrive till 5th July?
That was the first of many delays in dealing with our sale.

Tiglet2

knightstyle said:

We bought nearly 4 years ago and found our solicitor was not being truthful on several things about dates and sellers replies.
Now we are selling again and our new solicitors are doing the same.
For example they say they have only just received an email that our sellers sent a week ago, sellers sent us screen shot of sending the email.
Who can you trust when they do things like this?

According to your opening post, the email was sent a week ago.

Your seller cannot send an email directly to your solicitor.  It has to be sent to the seller's own solicitor before it can be forwarded to your solicitor.  Your solicitor cannot compel the seller's solicitor to look at the email and action it as soon as it is received and the more people it gets forwarded to and needs action before it reaches the correct person could easily take a week. 

Is the email really important and urgent?  If it isn't really urgent and time critical to progress the transaction, it will just go into the normal flow of work....

knightstyle

Yes it was the sellers solicitor who sent the email....   It is time critical, our buyer starts a new job next week and all the short chain wanted the completion before then but because of solicitors not sending forms and searches off when they said they had this is not going to happen.

Tiglet2

knightstyle said:

Yes it was the sellers solicitor who sent the email....   It is time critical, our buyer starts a new job next week and all the short chain wanted the completion before then but because of solicitors not sending forms and searches off when they said they had this is not going to happen.

Okay...... but an email saying that you want completion by so and so date because so and so is starting a new job isn't progressing the transaction.  It may be time critical for you/your buyer, but it is not time critical as far as the legal work and the legal professionals is concerned.  That has to be done properly and be completed before they will discuss completion dates.  The way they prioritise their work on your behalf and their other clients is something you cannot control.

silvercar

BarelySentientAI said:

It's amazing how many people think they are a solicitor's only client, with every email actioned at the moment the sender presses the button, every piece of mail read and responded to at the second it leaves the postie's hand, and the file permanently sat on the front of their desk with hands poised for action over the telephone.  Anything less than that would of course be incompetence, wouldn't it?

Or in the real world, client sends email to their own solicitor, their assistant opens it and decides that it needs the solicitor to react and adds it to the bottom of the to-do pile, where it gets picked up from after every other client's equally important correspondence higher in the queue has been dealt with, and an email sent to the other relevant solicitor, and their assistant.....

If someone sent me an email last week that worked its way to the top of my inbox today, then I'd probably say that I'd received it today as a sort of shorthand too.

A solicitor saying they have sent queries to the other side, only to be found out 5 weeks later that they hadn’t done so is lying.

An assistant putting everything at the bottom of the to-do pile without checking if it is time sensitive is failing the solicitor’s client.

ss2020jd

Our buyer’s solicitor told my solicitor that the buyers had changed their mind about exchanging and although they had given their authority to exchange earlier that day, they were now not going to exchange unless certain items listed in the fittings and contents form were removed. When the buyers were contacted they were surprised to hear this as they were still ready and waiting for exchange. 

There were several unsuccessful attempts to exchange, the best reason being that the buyer’s solicitor realised they didn’t have the buyer’s deposit when going through the contract with my solicitor! Also weeks earlier paperwork the buyers had sent to their solicitor never arrived so had to be sent all over again.  

YoungBlueEyes

I think some of this is semantics and some perhaps bending the truth.  I've just got your email = I've just read your email etc.
knightstyle said:

Yes it was the sellers solicitor who sent the email....   It is time critical, our buyer starts a new job next week and all the short chain wanted the completion before then but because of solicitors not sending forms and searches off when they said they had this is not going to happen.

Was everyone aware of this, solicitors particularly? They can't work to a deadline if you've haven't expressly said it's very important. But having said that, a lot of things are not in a solicitor's control - how fast the council comes back with searches for eg can't be laid at the sol's door...

However if the BiB is true, and everyone was aware of the timeframe then that's a different story imo. That kind of thing is what the official complaint route is for. Probably after completion, you don't want more holdups. 

Debbie9009

I’ve had a solicitor lie to me in a previous house sale.  I used them because they were a family friend, something I would never do again.

I needed to complete within 6 weeks of the offer, I spoke to them before instructing to make sure this would work for them as I knew it was a tight time scale and was told it wouldn’t be a problem at all.

The issue I had was them telling me the builders hadn’t sent them information they had requested and when I checked the builders had, this happened so many times I asked the builders to copy me in on every email, which stopped that lie.  

This solicitor also acted for another family member, and made such a mess of things, that they were unable exchange on the onward purchase on time, meaning family member had to move into another family members house for a week while it was all sorted.  Yet they still continue to use the solicitor despite them still getting many things wrong.  Not all solicitors are equal.

Tiglet2

Debbie9009 said:

I needed to complete within 6 weeks of the offer, I spoke to them before instructing to make sure this would work for them as I knew it was a tight time scale and was told it wouldn’t be a problem at all.

A solicitor will never make such promises.  All they can (and do) say is that they will do their best to meet the deadline, but deadlines can never be guaranteed because they cannot control how timely third parties respond to their enquiries.

TheJP

Buyer/seller sends email to solicitor - picked up by a paralegal, they review then its sent to your actual solicitor to further review then comment back to the paralegal who then communicates that to the paralegal on the other side.

Eat - sleep - repeat each way.

Oh and remember the solicitor will have various other sales to review so you need to consider workload.

Chill out, its stressful enough already!