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Shittest firm you ever had anything to do with

when I was in house there was a firm on my panel which was a relic of a set of firms selected for debt recovery and repo work.  The full set was four, two of which had merged, one of which had become a larger international organisation and the fourth was this scabby bunch.   One of the partners used to write letters which always, without fail, read "I write to provide an update on this above-mentioned matter" and then would have a single paragraph which stated that nothing had happened and then a third which always stated "I therefore have no option but to mark the file for further consideration at a later date."

I wrote to them saying I wasn't interested in paying for that and that we were in the process of reviewing panel providers for such work.

The senior partner wrote a shitty email back saying "what do you expect? Nothing has happened!" I said if nothing has happened then I am not paying to be informed on a monthly basis that nothing has happened. I then pointed out that we had 22 months of the same letter and that his partner was raising bills to tell me he hadn't done anything. He wrote back saying I was being difficult and I asked "what bit of the client care manual does that come from then?" and he wrote saying he'd been looking after our organisation for a decade and thought my attitude was inappropriate and that I ought to show some respect for people who knew more about the business of law than I did because I was just some shabby in-house dilletant (his actual words).

Then, remarkably, he enclosed a CD case with no CD in it, saying "in the meantime can I draw your attention to the fact that my band has released a Christmas songs album and you can buy this online for £6.99". 

 

If there’s one thing I fooking hate it’s when clients moan about being given updates, on the basis that they “don’t want to pay for them”. F@ck off fgs.

The firm who expressed bemusement at my reference to jurisdictional gateways and no doubt the judge too would be enlightened by my explanations. 
 

I photocopied part 6 and sent to them. 

Laz you degenerate pornchugging beer swilling swaggering japer, 22 months of "nothingburger" (your term? trying to make you understand) is not "updates".

 

The CD thing did make me laugh.  Bloody good cheek that. I quite admired him. 

Kick them off the panel Mutters, get hold of the CD (don't pay for it), then send it back saying this is about as competent as your approach to dealing with clients.

Try harder.

A firm once issued a pre-action application with no jurisdictional grounds (none here and they were timed out in the right jurisdiction), despite our warnings, then withdrew it but insisted we pay their costs (we didn’t), then served an RFI pre-action (you can’t), which we didn’t answer, then a letter before action which we ignored, all the while bemoaning our lack of compliance with the spirit of the CPR (which didn’t apply).

Spent north of £100k, achieved absolutely zero.  How their (very respectable) client tolerated it I have no idea.

Upshot was I realised there was no money in litigation, and moved to Dubai on a sweet M&A gig so I could boss it from my luxury apartment.  My rug is a dead tiger.

I’m dealing with one now; a firm which is utterly terrible in how it provides advice. I keep getting emails which start “and another thing to consider” 48 hours later, or changing their original advice, and unbelievably poor in communication generally. I thought it was being lost in translation as English is not their language so I asked one of my team to step in on the basis that they both speak the same language, and she couldn’t understand them either. 

It is likely you are joking, but as you typed that didn’t it sound attractive to you? Didn’t you think, oh sh1t...he is actually bloody right...

There is no point to litigation. It is just angry letter writing wasting with more money than sense. Mostly mad inbred Arabs and Russians who have made their money off oil, rather than intelligence or competence.

There is no money in it; it is a niche game of the foregoing persons. No serious firm wants to have anything to do with it, exceptions aside. 

You have a few well known partners people go to, the partners need some associates underneath, but the associates themselves can never get made up. And if they do, it’s a Wiggin or Hankins, they non firms which pay paralegal wage at a decent firm to partners.

meanwhile bossing it in Dubai, is just anyone’s dream. The amount of money is just unreal. And all transactional work in Dubai is pretty much advisory anyway. No one works that hard compared to London. Quite common to have lower targets or people not quite meeting hours and still getting bonus which would never happen in London. Strategically important to be in the UAE.

Yeah I don't litigate any more Georg, unless needed.  But I didn't need to move to Dubai to not litigate.  Sounds great though.  M&A, targets, working not that hard compared to London - fantastiche!

Nabarros. Constantly sending four page letters of nothing but tedious petulant whinging which they insisted on sending by email, hard-copy and fax - almost always at 6 pm on a Friday. All complimented by ocean-going levels of stupidity.  

On a cost per cock up basis easily Linklaters. We weren’t a huge client so we’re fobbed off with foreign first seat trainees sending error riddled docs through at two in the morning, then billing us fvcking thousands for the pleasure knowing their relationship with our investors would see them home. Which it did, until it didn’t and they got booted for a yank firm who were a million times better. 

Heh. Also we had to instruct Knights for political reasons, so copied the person telling us to do so into each and every cock up until he told them to fvck off. 

Sorrydidyousaysomething05 Aug 21 19:50

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Yeah I don't litigate any more Georg, unless needed. 

 

Seriously - you should be a spokesperson for the cause. It is good to hear a litigator confirm everything I say verbatim.

shittest - tough call

shittiest - individuals in the hothouse of aholes that bought themselves a formerly decent brand wrapper to cloak their own brand of unpleasant spivvy shystering : Ince. 

This one ends with a humblebrag (or outright brag), but it's relevant to showing how godawful the firm was.

I was working on a matter where our client was joining the party after the first wave of contract documents had already been done by the godawful firm in question.  We were therefore told we had to use godawful firm's godawful documents wherever possible.

It basically wasn't possible.

I know that any lawyer picking up a "rival" lawyer's drafting will probably find fault with it, but it's hard to describe how awful this drafting was.  Sentences / clauses which stopped part-way through, omission of "not" or using "excludes" instead of "includes" in really crucial places, x-refs which didn't exist, outright incomprehensible Martian - that sort of thing.

Our client got godawful firm's clients to contribute to our fees for fixing everything.

Godawful firm kept making absolute mountains out of less-than-molehills, leaving the big issues untouched.  At one stage in a conference with counsel on a point which godawful firm insisted was crucial, and for which we'd already given the answer, counsel finally lost patience and literally told them to "stop [expletive] fiddling while Rome burns".

Godawful firm was meant to be coordinating completion.  Three days before the completion deadline we'd heard nothing from them on that front despite numerous chasers, so we took it over for them - no sleep for my team for more than 72 hours.

On the day of completion they faxed us to ask if we could locate the final version of a crucial document for their clients (nothing to do with ours) because they'd somehow lost all copies of it.  Luckily someone saw the fax and was able to track down a copy of the doc as an attachment to an email we'd been (wrongly) Cc'd on.

Then all their printers supposedly broke so we were asked to print off all their clients' documents as well.

There's probably loads more that I can't remember, and this post is already way too long, but it's hard to describe just how completely dysfunctional this shower of strutting incompetents really was.

Anyway, a couple of weeks after the (no-thanks-to-godawful-firm) successful completion I was contacted by a recruitment bod who said they'd been instructed by a firm to approach me about a partnership role - not bad for a barely-5PQE associate.  Of course it turned out to be godawful firm and of course I turned it down.

(Not as good as an empty Christmas CD, I grant you.)

Had a partner at a yank shop yesterday try to gaslight me and claim on a call he had with me the day before I’d agreed to something 180 degrees opposed to what the conversation was about on behalf not just of my shop but another shop entirely.

That was fun.

If they were so shit, why did you allow them to organise completion?

Client instructions innit?  Not a question of "allowing" them to do anything.  When it became clear that absolutely nothing was happening we got the clients (including theirs) to agree to switch completion responsibility to us.

Should we have done that earlier?  Quite possibly - but at the time we were: (a) focused on sorting out all the other mess they'd left in their wake; and (b) still genuinely trying to help them help themselves and not show them up.

Any conveyancing firm which is a Quality Solicitors franchise.  

Fixed it for you.

(Sorry - probably grossly unfair, I know, but I've only ever used conveyancing firms as a client and only on one occasion did any of them rise to what, in any other legal discipline, would be considered barely adequate.)

Are Aston Carter still a thing? Anyone ever deal with them?

Nope, but I've had recent dealings with a guy (at a different firm) whose name is very similar - the epitome of a jumped-up, pompous local lawyer whose firm dabbles in commercial stuff so he thinks he's the absolute shit (though I also sorta love that type - they never see it coming when someone who actually knows their stuff crosses their path).

Ambulance chasing firm paralegal rings me up on a GDPR claim and makes an outrageously high offer plus costs while refusing to tell me what his costs actually are.  I laugh at him and unpolitely decline, restating our offer.  He threatens to report me to the SRA and the costs judge for not making reasonable efforts to settle.  I laugh at him again.  He says he's going to get an injunction to compel us not to misuse his client's data again (it was a one off human error issue).  I laugh etc.

Two years have passed and they have sent us 3 different letter of claim, made about 5 Part 36 offers and apparently run up about £20k costs on a £1k claim, all without actually filing a claim form.        

Client doing a bolt on of a business to expand into a region of the UK they didn't already cover.  A business and asset deal. Client agreed that seller's solictors ,a right provincial small market town outfit, who certainly all wore tweed and chanced the back roads home regularly, would do the first draft sale and purchase agreement.  What eventually came over for review after several chasing emails was what was the standard conditions of sale for a resi freehold with the space for the title number crossed out and the name of the business inserted where the address of the property would normally go.

What eventually came over for review after several chasing emails was what was the standard conditions of sale for a resi freehold with the space for the title number crossed out and the name of the business inserted where the address of the property would normally go.

Heh, this reminds me of the ferry company the government did that deal with, where their website's standard terms were c&pd from a pizza shop.

Seen this a few times. Once from the seller's accountants (2 man band bucket shop). Just bizarre behaviour really. Why risk the PI (not to mention rep damage) doing something so far out your sphere of competence. 

@Buzz

 

Seen this a few times. Once from the seller's accountants (2 man band bucket shop). Just bizarre behaviour really. Why risk the PI (not to mention rep damage) doing something so far out your sphere of competence. 

Hmmmm, similar: Personal injury claim about two years ago, Cl Sols sent me their medical report. Pages 1 - 7 were paginated by the expert, whose signature was on page 7.

Page 8 was not numbered, and stated in capitals at the to "NOT FOR DISCLOSURE TO DEFENDANT SOLICITORS" followed by about 4 lines stating, from memory, "you will see that I have made the report as favourable as I can, but in reality there is nothing wrong with this chancer, and he is really swinging the lead".

Sent this back to them with a letter saying "Here, I don't think we were meant to have this". It discontinued pretty sharpish after that.

The one who just sent me a signed contract with a covering email saying “I have told my client x, y, z. Is that your understanding of the situation?” and described a totally different deal than the one she’s just had her client sign, & had herself negotiated over the preceding month. Reader, I am holding those signatures to order.
 

(Baileys Shaw & Gillett anyone?)

The one who just sent me a signed contract with a covering email saying “I have told my client x, y, z. Is that your understanding of the situation?” and described a totally different deal than the one she’s just had her client sign, & had herself negotiated over the preceding month. Reader, I am holding those signatures to order.
 

(Baileys Shaw & Gillett anyone?)

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