Worst customer service I've ever experienced. No one is able to provide an update. Complete farce and someone needs to intervene, because no one else should be subject to this. The future of our living situation is fully at stake here and we're helpless.

Zero communication, the portal is decent for uploading documents but is not useful for anything else. The tired excuse of "we're dealing with high call volumes" or "we're very busy" is unacceptable, because if you're swamped, you either take on less work or go on an intensive recruitment drive to deal with your workload, as opposed to sitting on an email for over a month! All the laziness, incompetence and sheer disinterest has now led to my mortgage offer expiring. I simply do not understand how Barclays and other big lenders would use such a company as this!
Tom Trevorrow and the rest of his leadership team ought to be ashamed of the business they're running, but their greed probably won't let them see this.
My humble and genuine advice - RUN FAR AWAY FROM THIS COMPANY!!

Avoid having to interact with these charlatans at all costs who are an off-shoot of Capita. They clearly act as a volume conveyancing outfit for lenders in mortgages/remortgages and clearly take on more work than they can reasonably manage. No-one on the phone can answer a question in a meaningful way at Optima Legal and all comms are chanelled through a 'portal' where it's impossible to elicit a timely reply.

In our case, they took so long responding to correspondence they ended up costing us money. Complaining to the lender does ginger them up a bit. But I'd also recommend emailing the people who contact you via the portal direclty firstname [dot] surname [at] optimalegal [dot] co [dot] uk and copying in their 'Head of Standards' Lucy Ellacott if you need anything done in a hurry.

Optima Legal will quite accurately point out they're acting on lenders' behalf, not lenders' customers. But if they can include positive reviews from lenders' customers, they can include negative ones too.