This review is for a different branch.
I was embroiled in a financial dispute with my ex ’partner and I was told the Wards would be the most suitable to assist. After an initial consultation, I was given an estimate of costs and informed that they would not conduct WiP (work in progress) before my pre-payment. I lodged £2,000 funds and received a T's & C's Contract and only a few worthless window dressing eMails from them but no invoices. I was then informed that professional work had stopped through lack of fees but they sent nothing that I could verify. I called into their Office in person to lodge more funds and was told they charged between 3% and 5% for Credit Cards use which I knew to have been outlawed some years earlier. Rather stupidly, I then accepted a quote of £3,000 for one session with their appointed Barrister only to be actually charged £7,000.00 +VAT. After a month or so of poor or no contact to my correspondence from Wards, I attended an extremely poorly conducted meeting and at the end, I called time on the whole debacle. I was especially annoyed that rather than take my instruction my Solicitor had pre-arranged a 'cosy-up' agreement with the other side. The Solicitor said to have been acting for me, wrote a deplorable letter to me accusing me of ‘walking out on them’ and offered to close my Account for a fee of £800.00 and not the £1,700.00 she claimed I actually owed. As I had by their arrangement, a ‘float’ of £2,000.00 for WiP I, evidently quite wrongly, assumed that I was to have around £1,200 refunded. How odious could they possibly get? Well, they later invoiced me saying that they had made an ‘errors’ in their Accounts Department, I actually owed them a further £2,000.00 and that they were now intending to charge the £1,700.00 too. I spoke with the Solicitor handling my case and after some ‘horse trading’ she agreed simply to close my account on that day with no fees one way or the other. A year later, Wards reopened their case and took me to Court for non-payment of their fees plus interest. My Solicitor by then had left Wards employment. Wards produced what I would claim to be ‘creative accounts’ for work that I had not ever been invoiced for, I suggest therefore that Wards are probably more criminal than some of their clients may be. I now have a CCJ against me from the very people that I instructed for support. That stinks.
