Tradecraft tips

Client sensitivities

Clients owned a holiday flat in Spain outright, so it was available throughout the year. They were about to sell their house near Aberdeen in a sticky market. I was looking for some sort of “attention getter” in promoting the house and I suggested that it should be advertised with holiday entitlements, bearing in mind that many people are starry eyed about holidays.

The idea was to make the flat in Spain available to the purchasers of the house for a fortnight each year for three years, with my clients paying their air fares to Spain for the first year, giving the purchasers one free holiday followed by two cheap holidays. The total cost to my clients would be the first year’s air fares, but the value to the purchasers would be much more.

My bright idea found no favour at all with the clients. I would not have made the suggestion in the first place had the clients themselves not mentioned previously that they were thinking of renting out the flat to generate some income. Clients can have sensitivities about certain things, and if you are suggesting an unorthodox way of dealing with something and the clients are unhappy about it for whatever reason, you cannot take the suggestion any further.

Keep it simple

In the middle of the 19th century, the Government introduced legislation so that everyone could get the benefit of railway travel. They obliged every railway company to run at least one train per day over all parts of their systems at the statutory fare of a penny a mile. Everyone knew what a penny was and everyone knew what a mile was. Gilbert & Sullivan lampooned such “parliamentary” trains in The Mikado, but for sheer simplicity the scheme could not be bettered.

When sending out deeds to clients for signature, the firm I used to work for enclosed their style of particulars of signing form, which ran to two full pages with a total of 627 words. I used my own style of form which was just over half a page long with only 75 words. I just felt that a client faced with the full two page version might lose the will to live before they reached the foot of the first page.

In our line of work, complication is unavoidable but anything you can do to simplify matters for the client should be done.

Biting your tongue

Solicitors act as agents for clients and we take instructions from our clients and act upon them. I attended a closing date many years ago where the selling solicitor appeared to be bending over backwards to reject the top offer and accept my client’s offer which was about £1,200 less. The logic behind this was that the parties who were offering the most were former clients of his who had taken their business elsewhere when he had given them an estimate of the value of their house which they were unhappy with. He just wanted to pay them back for their apparent disloyalty. The fact that he was costing his current clients £1,200 in the process did not appear to enter into consideration.

In email exchanges with other solicitors I sometimes get the impression that a slightly belligerent tone is being used by the other party, but I suppress my instinct to blast back at them in like manner because I am acting on behalf of a client and not dealing on my own account. You cannot let your own feelings colour the way you deal with a matter for fear of prejudicing your client, and in the last analysis it is the clients who pay our wages and they have to be the sole priority in carrying out legal work.

Beam me up, Scotty

Many years ago, before the advent of home reports, a client was selling a flat but because he worked offshore his partner was attending to the viewings. A prospective purchaser had the flat surveyed and a problem with a beam apparently came to light. The client’s partner contacted him on his oil rig and between them they appeared to be up to high doh about this beam. I telephoned the surveyor and asked “What is the problem with this beam?” He replied “What beam? I never mentioned anything about a beam.” 

I never did find out if it was a sunbeam or a moonbeam which had triggered off the furore.

Buying and selling property can be an anxious time for clients, and misunderstandings can arise and then grow arms and legs. Part of your job is to keep the clients on the straight and narrow, and if you see them starting to go off at a tangent you may have to cut through all the waffle to get to the core of the problem and sort it out for them.