Matter Type:
Residential Conveyancing
Chris
Collected on:
Slow to respond and somehow slower when things go south
Was blindly recommended these guys by our mortgage broker - in retrospect I didn't look them up or read a single review, just trusted the mortgage broker (he obviously gets a kick back, v naive of me)
Seemed to start ok and pretty smooth, the app is fairly easy to use and you have a fairly long tick list of forms and letters to sign and fill out. All fine with that to be fair.
We had a chain sale/purchase with a few moving parts, we signed on with CL in May 2024 and over that time I think had 4 or 5 case handlers. At one stage I needed an urgent update on something and had to email our handler 4 times and leave 2 voicemails. The response I got was actually from a new person to say that our handler was now off the case. They simply do not return phone calls and answer complex emails with short one liners.
I received zero actual advice on what was happening or should happen at any stage of the sale/purchase. Towards the end of the sale they noticed that we'd signed a form incorrectly, i think i'd posted it a month before this, so caused stress and delays. On the day of completion we were called at 11.30 as they had miss-priced our property and we had to pay an additional £2,000 before we could collect our keys. After 4 months of stress and uncertainty this was the last thing we needed.
To be fair to them Neil Doherty - the final case handler - did pick up the phone and responded to emails promptly at times towards the end. He certainly knows what he's talking about but he was the ONLY one out of a full team of people.
Maybe it's just the way solicitors are, but they will not respond to anything if there isn't an update. I think they could do well to send even holding emails to say they've not heard anything yet but will do x, y and z rather than waiting for clients to email and call multiple times.
Did they get my house sale and purchase done, yes. Was it mind bendingly frustrating and stressful, yes. Would I use them again? no - I'd rather study law myself.
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