There was a post a month and a bit ago on Signal to Noise, recommending a lawyer from personal experience, and it prompted me at the time to make a mental note to do the same. My wife and I have recently managed to buy our first house, and the solicitors were probably the best part of the experience, aside from actually moving in and falling in love with the place. Talking to them was certainly better than having to decorate, and so much better than our dreadful experience with BT that it doesn't even bear thinking about.
Loosemores Solicitors are based in Cardiff, but if you live elsewhere in England and Wales then don't let that put you off. As far as I can tell property law is the same throughout (Scotland's a special case) and although in theory local knowledge can speed up and narrow down the search procedure, in practice it seems that every solicitors' firm eventually has to perform the same searches. Welsh firms will probably tend to stress mining searches and deprioritize flooding searches in conversation and initial planning, but a good firm shouldn't undertake a search unless other searches prompt it, and should never neglect to perform a search that's necessary. Loosemores certainly followed up every issue, clarified where searches differed in their results and why, and kept us fully informed on progress and the specific status of all necessary aspects of our purchase.
John May at Loosemores was polite, knowledgeable and friendly, and was happy to let me occasionally bend his ear so that I might understand the vagaries of the conveyancing process, a task which of course we'd never undertaken before and so approached with some trepidation. The firm was accurate and diligent, and kept in communication with us at all times. And not only were the fees very competitive, but when Loosemores closed our file they calculated that they owed us money in unspent disbursments and an initial deposit, and refunded it all unprompted. The first we knew of it was the cheques arriving. How often does that happen.
I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really rate Loosemores' legal capability. But I am a satisfied customer of their conveyancing process, and as such I can heartily recommend them.
