Mixed review but overall use another solicitor
This may have been the worst service I have ever had. Period!
I felt there was zero communication or help with this company through 90% of my journey buying my first property. I was told to send my deposit and told the completion was done when in fact it wasn’t due to incompetence and lack of communication from BL&J. I was ignored several times on emails, I received no further help when I needed to ask questions as I have never done this before. I spoke to one of employees on the phone regarding the miscommunication with BL&J and the vendors solicitors for completion and she proceeded to talk down to me and blaming other people.
I could not believe she would talk to a client like this and how ridiculous she sounded.
The process in all took nearly 5 months and I got ingored several times whilst emailing them.
However, two senior employees realised how I have been treated whilst they where not dealing with my case and proceeded to help me in the kindest manner and apologised for there colleagues actions.
Once again thank you to them people.
Overall I will never use this firm again and I advise anybody else to do the same!
A representative from Bell Lamb & Joynson responded to this review on 31 July, 2019
Thankyou for taking the time to leave a review. We welcome all feedback we receive, good and bad, as we are always looking at ways to improve the service that we offer. We have investigated the matters you raise, and we apologise if you feel that our service did not meet the high standards that we set and we of course take your feedback seriously and will use it to improve the service that we offer. We don’t always get it right, but you will see that ordinarily we have very high levels of client satisfaction which has been recognised nationally with this firm winning an award for client care just last week. We appreciate that buying a home is incredibly frustrating and the process is very slow and is often outside of our control. We as a firm have invested heavily in IT to help speed the process up, however much of the industry is yet to adopt a more modern approach in this regard. The average time that it takes to complete a residential property transaction in England and Wales is now 18 weeks. Only a few years ago it was 12 weeks. This demonstrate that in an age when generally a lot of what we do in life is quicker and easier, this Is not the case with residential conveyancing. We are pioneering firm in this regard and are actively engaging to help improve the process. We appreciate that does little to alleviate your frustration but those are the simple facts. We note that your transaction was completed in just over 16 weeks which is inside the national average. We are normally able to complete matters well inside the national average but that was not the case with your matter. Several factors played a part in this which included poor communication from the seller’s solicitor, documents having to be signed and returned from abroad (and then being incorrectly executed) and confusion about the mortgage deed. At the outset of the matter we provide a full detail of the process and indicate what is required at each step together with our service standards, which includes that all emails are responded to within 2 working days and all telephone calls if we are not able to deal with in the first instance within 1 working day. Every single email and telephone call from you were responded to within our agreed and published service levels and furthermore, the majority on the same day. In addition, you were communicated key stage updates as the matter progressed and were able to track the process online or via our mobile phone app which would have advised you as to where your transaction was up to and what the next step in the process were. Unfortunately, in an effort to complete to your desired time frame and a communication issue between this firm and the seller’s solicitor the initial completion was aborted resulting in a week’s delay. This was unfortunate and can happen in conveyancing. We note that you comment yourself that this was rectified quickly and clearly to your satisfaction which demonstrates our high standards of customer care that we aim to deliver. We are sorry to hear that you feel that our service levels did not meet your expectations and we will feed that back to the team.
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