We bought a flat in London and hired Lockings to act as our solicitor. Frustration and despair soon resulted. Some of the problems are described below.
1. Very slow processing
We hired Lockings in April 2015 and completed four months later, at the end of August 2015. Our title was registered with Land Registry in February 2016. In total, the transaction took more than 9 months from beginning to end.
As far as we could see, there was nothing special about this simple, standard purchase of a flat that could have explained the lengthy processing time. Indeed we found that our case frequently sat in a drawer at Lockings with nothing being done for long periods of time.
2. Complete lack of customer service
We called the Lockings office a great many times to get updates. We were never able to speak to our paralegal. He was always busy or away from his desk. We would therefore leave a message with the receptionist in order that our paralegal might call us back. He never, not even once, did.
The first time we spoke to our paralegal was just before completion when he called us. On completion day, there was not even a phone call to let us know we had completed. We learned this from our estate agent.
On top of this, there was a general lack of initiative shown by several members of the Lockings team. We were not proactively informed of the progress of the case, instead we always had to contact Lockings. An illustrative example is that when in the week of completion we got a final property report, nobody then told us what to do next. The document was just sent over and nobody called or emailed us to tell us what the next step is. We had to try to find this out ourselves.
3. Too many errors
The first error occurred in communicating to us about two months into the case. Due to erroneous word usage by one of Lockings team members, we were led to believe that our purchase was closer to completion than it was.
Shortly afterwards Lockings sent us a Land Registry TR-1 form which contained an error, as one of the sellers had been omitted. We signed and returned the form without knowing about the error. Lockings then had to send us a revised TR-1 form, which we had to sign and return to them again.
At completion, Lockings sent us an erroneous bill for their services, trying to charge a Land Registry fee twice. We noticed this and complained. The complaint was readily accepted but we then had to chase them again to get a refund. It took more than a week for the money to be returned.
A couple of months later, we discovered that the bill at completion had been incorrectly calculated with respect to an outstanding service charge and we had to send more money over.
In summary, Lockings could hardly have performed worse on our case. Even worse, we felt our complaints fell on deaf ears. Their communication hardly improved during the case, despite frequent complaints. We went up from the paralegal, to the head of the property department, to the managing partner, and nobody really seemed to care. We could not have been more surprised and disappointed in the quality of service received.
Avoid this company. read more
