My experience of conveyancing solicitors seems to have been long periods of silence and apparent inactivity, punctuated by the occasional sudden burst of action when they expect you to quickly review a bunch of documents and respond immediately with information or whatever. Then it's back to no updates again.
I was literally about to say. Our last purchase we had a very rude solicitor who didn't speak particularly good english and was ******* awful. Rude whenever you spoke to her, acted like you were an idiot if you asked any questions and would literally just forward anything from the other side over to us. Give us some ******* context. You are supposed to be our legal advisor in all this. Explain what this document is saying and what its for; don't just act like an email forwarding service.
We said repeatedly "tell us everything you will need and we will get it to you now so there is no delay". Cool cool cool. Nothing, OK. 3 weeks later "We need this and we can't progress any further until we have it, you need to get this to us ASAP". So why didn't you tell us we would need this? It wasn't like it was usually things that came up out of the blue either. They were standard things she would have known we would need to provide.
Seems that the entire industry around buying a house is full of people trying to do as little work as possible whilst charging you as much as possible.
Surveyor - "well, your house is absolutely fine but I'm going to suggest that every part of it
might fall down to cover myself"
Bank - "Of course we will lend you money sir, whats that? No, 5% on the loan isn't enough, we also want £1000 to do the work in order to lend you that money"
Solicitors - "We will engage with you as little as possible and only expedite things and communicate if you constantly nag us"
Estate agents - "No we have no idea if there are any schools in the local areas. Yes I think there probably is one within 5 miles of here for sure"