Tradecraft tips

Putting the past behind you

At the firm I worked for after qualifying, my room was next to one of the partners’ rooms. He had six four-drawer filing cabinets, whereas I had just one filing cabinet with only three drawers in use. I thought that the partner must be working day and night to sustain such a caseload. However, I was looking for a file one day which should have been closed about six years earlier. It was still open and it was in one of the partner’s cabinets along with one or two other files well past their “sell by” dates. It looked like he never closed a file and simply added another cabinet as required.

Closing a file is a skill which some solicitors do not seem to have. Such tasks should not be left to unqualified staff. At the next firm I moved to, I spent the first six months retrieving closed files from the basement because the searches had not yet been received or sent out. A secretary had been asked to review the files and weed out those which looked like they were completed, but she was unable to spot files which were still in effect “live”.

To my way of thinking, there is no alternative to the solicitor who has dealt with the file from day one reviewing it to see whether or not it can be closed. This might be looked upon by some solicitors as a waste of time, but it is very rare that any of my closed files have had to be reopened because I had missed something which was still outstanding.

Much obliged?

Many years ago I spotted a title where a half share in an area at the rear of a tenement had been given away by mistake when one of the flats was sold off. The solution was to get the flat owner to re-convey the share, and the selling solicitor included in his letter of obligation an undertaking to obtain such a disposition. Months went by and the corrective disposition had still not appeared. I telephoned the selling solicitor to ask when he was going to produce the deed. He replied that it was my problem as I had been stupid enough to accept his obligation. The disposition was never forthcoming and the solicitor in question has never been forgiven. I was left to sort the situation out myself.

There is no mileage whatever in treating another solicitor in this manner. If you give an obligation it should be a matter of honour to make sure that you obtemper it. It should not be used as a ploy to get you out of a tight corner. If you cannot implement the obligation, you should be liaising with the other solicitor to work out a solution to the problem, not turning your back on them. You might be dealing with the other solicitor again on another matter in six months or six years’ time and your previous encounter will not have been forgotten. This sort of behaviour is like spitting into the wind. It is just all going to come right back on to you. 

Spin

When he was doing his musical training in St Petersburg before the First World War, the Russian composer Prokofiev entered a piano competition. Instead of playing a recognised piano piece, he played something which he had composed himself. The judges could not tell whether he was playing it brilliantly or making a mess of it. They awarded him the first prize. That’s spin.

We were offering for a cottage being sold out of a country estate, and my boss knew that the estate owner gave priority to local people so, as the client was a local man, he included the client’s address in the offer, which was not our usual procedure. On reviewing the offers received at the closing date, the estate owner spotted this and instructed her solicitors to accept our offer even though it was not the highest. The value of this coup was enhanced a number of years later when the client’s parents managed to get planning permission for an additional house on part of the ground. Just three extra words in the offer allowed all of this to happen and the client was suitably grateful.

On occasion when you are trying to work out how to approach something or add value to it, rather than simply taking the “bog standard” approach, adding a little inflexion or taking an unconventional approach can be enough to tip the balance in favour of your client.