Recently, someone felt there wasn’t enough negativity in our lives; the economy, world instability and unpredictability caused by artificial intelligence, and decided to commission a report into the most common complaints about lawyers made to the Ombudsman.

Obviously, as we’re growing tired of the pantomime villain that is “the broken conveyancing process” it made sense to try and find another accusation to lay at the doors of conveyancers.

Putting aside the question as to why someone would think such an exercise would be a life-affirming activity, and maybe taking up line dancing might be more fulfilling, it was not hard to see what the response was going to be.

Given the Ombudsman’s role as an outlet for clients to complain about service as they didn’t get the outcome they wanted, or that it was frankly a bit of a miserable experience, the answer was pretty much determined from the outset.

The results showed the main area of complaint was about communication and it’s hard to believe there were many agents, brokers or indeed lawyers themselves, who would have been shocked.  No doubt the most common response would have been “Well Mr Sherlock, I am not surprised at all” – albeit using rather more colourful language.

Why don’t lawyers tell their clients when nothing has happened

The key message of this cheery little survey was that if lawyers wanted to stop clients complaining, all they needed to do was give them updates, even when there was nothing to update them about.  The argument was that if clients were actually told that nothing had happened for weeks on their case, they would be less likely to jump onto ChatGPT and generate a 5000 word missive outlining their “total and utter disgust with this appallingly old-fashioned process.”

It’s safe to say that this level of boundless optimism is right up there with the confidence that this year, football is indeed “coming home”.  Suggesting to a lawyer that they should voluntarily tell a client that they’ve not done any work on a file would garner a similar response as to when an agent says, “let us know if you’re too busy to take on any more work”.  Which would be, “I’ll come back to you on that”.

If a lawyer has a client who’s read on a consumer website that calling them every day for a month will help get the deal through, sending them an email to say they’re still waiting for the management pack, is not going to be at the top of their to-do list, as it’s probably going to generate a telephone call.  After all, these people have watched Suits and will ask the lawyer to use their superpowers to make that pack arrive immediately, expressing their bitter disappointment that they’ve not been chasing them harder.

We see the same issue where lawyers do their utmost to avoid telling their clients that they are going away on holiday.  Whilst in theory, it makes sense to let a client know that their taking a break should not affect progression of the case, in reality, we know that this causes panic, and increased pressure to try and move things more quickly.   Which is why lawyers don’t say anything, resulting in the inevitable client complaint.

Theory versus reality

The problem is that while clients might tick a box in a survey that receiving unchanging updates is better than not hearing anything at all, that’s not what happens in real life.  Our experience of sending out hundreds of thousands of weekly updates to our clients, is mixed at best.  Despite this unusually helpful and proactive service, the feedback we increasingly receive is, “Yes it was good to hear from you, but”  followed by a amuse bouche of “we’re disappointed it was the same as last week”, “we’d rather it was more detailed” through to “Why haven’t you chased that buyer more frequently?”  Whilst we have seen a noticeable change in recent years that people are now calling us more following receiving these updates, we have seen that on balance, it’s still a good thing to do.

It’s also important to recognise that technology to give automatic updates to clients when anything substantive occurs is also not necessarily a good idea.  Information changes throughout a transaction, and this can result in misleading or inaccurate updates being given, resulting in even more frustration.

Managing the expectations of clients during long and often intricate transactions is not solved by such simplistic thinking, but instead comes from agents, brokers and lawyers working together to share information that has real value to the client, at the right time. Which is a whole different and more complicated quest than just sending an email on Monday to explain that we’re still waiting for the other side to complete their source of wealth check on their client.

Peter Ambrose is the owner of The Partnership and Legalito.