Lawyers are rubbish …

… well, too many of them are, anyway.

We often wonder why we get so many irrelevant or unnecessary additional enquiries from buyers’ conveyancers (including solicitors).

In the last couple of weeks, the answer has dawned on us: not only have they not read the paperwork we already sent them – they don’t care. They want us to answer their own standard questions; they then copy them and our replies to the buyer and say, “Sign here”. They have no interest at all in investigating or advising; they are (sorry) crap: charging for acting as lawyers, but in fact only acting as a copier and mail forwarder with no input or added value – some new clients who instructed us last week confirmed this to us: the conveyancers who “acted” when they bought the property simply sent the search result, replies to enquiries, etc, to the clients, telling them to read it all through and sign the contract if they were happy. They did not even bother to check the replies to enquiries to ensure they were (a) complete and (b) not self-contradictory

This week, I received 14 pages of “additional enquiries”: all except 3 were answered by the papers we had already sent. The three extras were:
• “Does the the seller own the telephone?” (WHAT?!)
• “Is the building structurally sound?” (Ask a surveyor)
• “When was the house built?” (1920s we think, based on what the agents’ particulars said, but we cannot see why it is significant in this case).

OK, it is a relatively minor irritation, but it puts us and our clients to unnecessary work. The really galling thing is that I bet the buyer’s solicitor will hardly look at the replies: he will either simply copy them to his own client to wade through (at least then the buyer will see his solicitor is rubbish) or quietly file and forget them

Bah! Humbug!