This review is for a different branch.
My overall impression of Wards is that they are fine, but no better than that. I was really hoping for them to be great and frankly they weren't. We bought a house using Wards, and to be entirely fair to them all of the legal aspects for handled properly and on time. Enquiries made were responded to quickly and phone calls were generally returned and often quite quickly, but sometimes not returned at all. This brings me to the thing that disappointed me about Wards - customer contact. Having worked in service roles for law firms including a previous and recent law firm of the year, I can safely say I know what good service and good customer contact looks like. There were plenty of opportunities during all parts of the process to contact me either by email or by phone to keep me updated on the latest. Wards took none of them. I'm not asking for much, a 30 second one line email is all. But sadly I was kept up-to-date on what was happening by my sellers solicitors rather than my own. Having informed the conveyancer that post was extremely slow Wards still insisted on sending a large amount of items by post rather than by email, none of which needed to be by physical post. I found this practice inexplicable and archaic. The cherry on top is that we completed our purchase yesterday and I didn't even have any contact from my conveyancer whatsoever on the day of completion. One of the most important transactions of my life and my own conveyancer didn't even give me a phone call. I was hoping that in 2021 solicitors with this kind of reputation for being out of contact and leaving customers guessing was something relegated largely to the past and perhaps the occasional comedy routine. I was wrong.