Star Legal Limited

I was very pleased with the service from Star Legal, Bradley Stoke. Tristan was very helpful and did his very best to help me when I enquired about a deed of assignment. He was a pleasure to deal with and I would definitely recommend him to other people.

Check your documents received from Star Legal, and with each new issue check them again! We used Star for our conveyancing, and whilst everyone we dealt with were incredibly polite and friendly, this was overshadowed by needless errors that could have been extremely costly had we not picked them up.

Star had me very close to heart attack with their biggest blunder: their request for funds after the first issue of our Closing Statement had me shocked at how my budget could be out by over £10k - until realising both the purchase price and SDLT figures detailed by them were in fact wrong.

Another costly error resulted in us being refunded a figure in the thousands. After receiving Star's "final correspondance" noting all bills were paid, I realised our previous mortgage's redemption figure had not been recalulated up to our completion date despite being advised it would.

These were the biggies, but additionally documents were sent to us for signing with an incorrect purchase price, and also being told to complete actions for a HTB bonus I knew we were not eligible for. Star had a worrying lack of attention to detail.

Ultimately I can't fault actually getting the conveyancing complete - we completed recently thanks to Star Legal, but it could have ended up costing us a lot more if we didn't check and double check what they were telling us.

We used Star Legal, Bradley Stoke for conveyancing. Sarah and the team were great from the offset. Really quick to respond and resolved issues professionally. Would definitely recommend.

We chose Star Legal as our conveyancer last September; all other local options were full.

Positives: everyone I spoke to was nice/friendly and overall they got the job done.

Negatives: they were pretty slow despite the lack of chain. We were first time buyers so probably needed a bit of handholding; I called once a fortnight for a status update and to find out what the next steps were. Despite this, I lost count of how many times a new survey or process seemed to crop up explained. Language wise, there were also a number of these surveys that we were told by SL that we 'needed' and speaking with others now we have learned they were actually optional.

Also, my father had kindly gifted me some money towards the deposit, which I declared in our initial onboarding form. Star Legal sat on this information and then announced they needed some extra security checks from my father once this was the last thing standing between us and exchange. By this point it was the end of Nov and we were back in lockdown, and my dad (who is a carer) was asked if he could drive 100 miles to Bristol to have the SL receptionist verify his identity.

However, my major grievance is that this was my first and only experience of overt sexism. They continually printed my name as Mrs 'partners surname' despite me continually crossing this out and putting my actual name (we are not married) on all paperwork. I also led on the paperwork, email correspondence and phone calls, and yet if they wanted to contact us, it was always my partner that they contacted. He reached a point where he would just say "I don't know, I'll hand the phone over to my partner" when they rang. Only when the head of the branch got involved in our case towards the end did this change and she would call me instead of him.

Plenty of other issues including a delay with our trust deed, a slew or errors interpreting the bank statements from my dad, and being sent our final invoice and then getting a call because they realised they had overcharged by £200, followed by another call after this refund because they'd also missed something worth £500 off the invoice.