Ws Strategic Ltd

BE WARNED ABOUT THIS SOLICITOR. I (I am the assignor) engaged Wilford Smith Solicitors to process a straight forward shop lease assignment. The first contact was with their sales person, he did a very good pitch about how Wilford Smith provides a high level of service and cared about clients/customers etc., but do not be fooled by all his talk, does not match the service. The service they provided was terrible. I was assigned their Head of Commercial Conveyancing to do the job. At the start of the process I gave the solicitor the Heads of Terms. She completely ignored it, as a result the sale contract which should have been implemented at the start of the process was only done at the end, in the completion week; a deposit which should have been paid by the assignee at the start of the process was not collected by her, leaving me at considerable financial risk during the assignment. She ignored many of my emails and telephone calls which created an atmosphere of poor communication. As a result many mistakes were made, I found her inefficient and disrespectful. I made many complaints to the boss of the firm but nothing improved. Eventually a messy completion took place, months late. I did not get any legally executed completion documents from Wilford Smith and also no statement of account for the fees I paid. In the end, I had to engage another solicitor to make sure completion had legally taken place and to get me the relevant completion documents. I have made a formal complaint to the Legal Ombudsman which is being processed. BEWARE OF THIS SOLICITOR

Overall impressions of this firm through our experience were above average but this was variable through the process. Our initial conveyancer was very poor at communicating (he would be slow to reply to emails or ignore them completely and never once picked up the phone). This went on for a few months and we had to complain to the complaints manager (partner) Sarah Mills who was far more proactive in communicating with us. In the end, with no improvement, we were switched to Steve Williams and his assistant Wendy Straw who were excellent despite having to deal some obvious incompetence with other firms. Overall good but very variable experience.