Optima Legal Services Limited

My experience with Optima Legal has been extremely unpleasant. Our remortgage eventually completed on 4th September (with the mortgage expiry on 7th September), but the months leading up to it were one of the most stressful experiences I’ve had. I am writing this review so that other customers do not have to suffer the same delays, stress, and lack of communication. I would not recommend this firm to anyone based on my experience.

I am remortgaging a property through HSBC, who use Optima. It’s taking months,. They do not respond to messages on their portal, they do not return calls.

Our remortgage eventually completed, but dealing with Optima was an extremely frustrating experience. To be fair, ours was a more complex transaction involving three titles and Land Registry delays. We understood this would take additional time, and that is not the reason for this review. The issue was the subsequent case management and communication. For around seven weeks we repeatedly tried to establish what was preventing progress, despite responding promptly to every request. We were asked for information Optima already held, incorrectly told documents remained outstanding, received contradictory information and experienced unanswered messages and promised callbacks that didn't happen. Eventually, after involving our broker and lender, Optima identified the document actually required. The issue was resolved the following day and we completed the day after that. We formally complained. Optima ultimately acknowledged that its service had fallen below standard, assessed the impact on us as “significant” under the Legal Ombudsman framework, and paid £250 compensation. Unfortunately, even their final complaint response reduced what we considered wider case-management failures largely to a communication issue. I would encourage anyone considering Optima to look beyond headline customer-satisfaction figures and read customer experiences across multiple independent review platforms. Many of the issues described by others were remarkably familiar to us. Based on our experience, we would not choose to use Optima again.

Optima legal are easily the worst people I've ever dealt with - they cost us over £2000 due to their incompetence. Phone lines you're on hold for up 30-odd mins, an online portal that doesn't update properly, & that they don't respond to messages in. Our completion date was finally arranged, but a small legal snag that was resolved in under an hour then took another 16 days to sort the new completion date. Was told several times during this period it would be sorted in 24/48 hours. In the meantime we had to make another mortgage payment to our old lender on a massively increased rate, while also getting charged over £35 a day in extra interest. We've already told our new mortgage lender that won't be renewing with them - having to deal with Optima once in a lifetime is already 1 too many.

I can’t even put into words how awful this experience was. Drawn out, impossible to navigate and total incompetence. Do not use if you have a choice unless you want to experience delays over a very long period of time. Would give no stars if possible.