Poole Alcock Solicitors Arvostelua 

Don’t rely on this company to do a complete local search. They use a company in Scotland and don’t check the council’s granted planning permission instead advise that you as the client could have done it ourselves! Also beware if a developer is recommending them, choose your own

Don’t use this company would be my advise. We are the vendors and still waiting on completion over 2 months later. They often won’t take phone calls from our solicitors who has tried to establish the reason for the delay, and when they do respond they contradict and back track when all we want is an open and honest explanation of what is going on. We are in the verge of losing our sale and relisting our property.

We have been left extremely frustrated by the service we've received from the James Williams team during the current sale of our property. We have experienced a lack of clarity on timelines with no progress for weeks on end. We've now surpassed our original target deadline by a month and have no idea how much longer we will be waiting

I was asking for help with an uncontested, amicable divorce. I had a short, initial phone call and was allocated a solicitor from the Folkestone branch. I was then advised that someone, not the nominated solicitor would call me. I assumed this would just be a fact-finding call and was very relaxed with the process. I was encouraged to give full details, which I did. This call cost £294.
A couple of follow-up emails to my wife's solicitor for some figures cost £42 each.
An email with a summary of my phone call and some legal information documents and some forms to fill in cost £126. In fairness to the company, they did send a list of costs associated with their contact with the client and they charge £350+VAT per hour for phone calls and £35+VAT for emails. The calls are charged in 6 minute blocks, so minimum charge is £42 for a call, £7 a minute!
I have challenged the costs, saying that had I realised the phone call would be charged, I would not have proceeded with them, but I have been met with a solid rebuttal of my claims as I did receive a free consultation call first. I suppose it's a case of buyer beware.
I have now closed my file with them and have paid a total of £546 for one call, 3 emails and a letter, phew!
Are they any worse/better than other solicitors, I'm not sure, but with my new solicitor, I am asking for any contact to be prefaced with possible charges before I proceed, and I am doing so with great caution from now on.

Were not transparent enough about costs, service (an contested divorce) too far too long. Expensive. Didn't take my complaint and the end seriously. Credit control team are vicious and unprofessional.

Dealt with the Alsager office a couple of times recently and always found the staff there extremely helpful, friendly and approachable.

Was assigned Victoria as my solicitor.
I have been waiting for over 16 weeks now since I started the process of buying a relatively newly built flat which is still under warranty. I still do not know when I will be exchanging contracts.

The receptionist always says that the team is busy whenever I call then for an update, take my number and then never call me back. Have to call over 5 times to be able to talk to anyone for the solicitors time. They blame the sellers solicitor for delaying responses, but when they respond to enquiries, poole alcock takes 2 weeks to even review the responses and don't even return phone calls during this time.

I had to extend my tenancy 3 times every month as it keeps getting delayed every single time. Would not recommend this company to anyone.

Great communication and kept fully informed.

A shambles of a company run by amateurs. From one debacle to another when using this company to purchase our new home. We went with these as they were local, but not the cheapest, big mistake. Incorrect paperwork, don't listen to instructions, send out final settlement invoice then follow with further payment requests later due to forgetting to add charges. Send out important legal documentation without prior communications, not tracked or signed for, but standard second class, in a cheap envelope that was torn completely open during transit, we were lucky they arrived complete. Constantly chasing them, their internal comms are useless. Stay clear of these circus folk, and save yourself stress and time by going else where.

Professional, honest, helpful, knowledgeable, great experience with Poole Alcock

Excellent service from the very first contact. Knowledgeable, empathetic and super efficient. I cannot recommend Jamie Riseley enough. Thank you.

Without Prejudice

They told me to accept any deal offered by the other side and then claimed they never said that. I have witness statements and medical evidence that proves i do not lie. In others words they lied to me breaking my trust.

James Williams and team did a fantastic job with our house purchase and sale. It was a challenging experience, due to external factors not related to Poole Alcock resulting in us exchanging and completing on the day of the move but James and his whole team stepped up and got it over the line, he even messaged me at 8am on the day of the move to tell me he was in, and on it.

I would recommend Poole Alcock without doubt. When something (or multiple things in our case) go wrong, you need a firm who can step up to the challenge like they did for me.

After I lodged a complaint there was a flurry of activity, documents that could have been actioned months prior (having paid Poole Alcock in March 2024) were suddenly sent to me. Unfortunately the property address was wrong, and the case was mixed up with another client. Very poor show.

DISHONEST AND NOT TRANSPARENT
I employed this firm for a post-nup and agreed a fixed fee - I checked three times that this included everything and that I wouldn't be charged extra.
We amended the post-nup four times - it was amicable so I requested very little in the way of advice, all amendments were tracked so incredibly easy to check. Every transaction was done via e-mail, if I rang I was told I had to make an appointment for a telephone call and my solicitor was unavailable for the next two weeks. Emails took an eternity to be dealt with. Eventually I stopped requesting them to make amendments and my husband instead instructed his solcitor to make the amendment and send to mine only to check - which still took an eternity. When we got to the final draft my solicitor told me she shouldn't review and sign it without further funds because we were outside of the fixed fee contract which covers only the 'original' document. There clearly is no original document until one is drafted and nobody agrees the first draft of a document of this type!! They eventually gave me a reduced figure but nonetheless I had to pay an extra £700 over and above the fixed fee. And they were not so slow in chasing the outstanding amount!

I do not recommend using this solicitor. They are so unwilling to help or answer any questions. Difficult to communicate with, I bought my flat and moved in 7 months ago and there’s still things they haven’t sorted and provide me with absolutely no updates. I constantly have to chase everything as they are not proactive and when I email with a simple question I don’t even get an answer. They are unbelievably unhelpful and don’t seem to actually care about the clients. I wish I had paid more and used a more competent solicitor. Also, I only received any sort of contact from the actual solicitor once or twice the whole process it was all done via their admin team which is fine, but when I asked legal questions I never got any answers as I wasn’t able to communicate with the actual solicitor! Just stay away if you can help it!

They never seem to "receive emails". Whenever you try to check up on them or reply to any of their inquiries via emails they will just ignore it, and they keep saying "we haven't received your email" when we call to confirm. I send emails through a work email address where I have hundreds of messages coming in and out every day and nobody has encountered scenarios where they fail to receive my emails. You have to email them at least 3 times and keep calling them every day for 3 days (often with them not picking up calls) in order to get a response. The worse is they reply in seconds when the estate agent check up on them and say "unfortunately we haven't received any reply regarding XXX from our client". I HAVE SENT YOU THE REQUIRED DOCUMENTS WEEKS AGO AND I SENT IT MUlTIPLE TIMES IN CASE IT GOT LOST. As clients we understand and even expect that you have a lot to deal with and take time to process an individual case, but can you just be honest about it? It's so stressful to work with them when one has to remember to follow up on every piece of information countless times otherwise they will never reply, and they just brush off their own responsibility easily so in the end the other parties just kept chasing you instead. We almost lost our purchase, the seller & agent were questioning our commitment, though in fact it was their fault the process is going slow! Not worth the service consider their pricing!

We made a property buying and use your company for conveyancing. The conveyancing team has made a very careless mistake for submitting wrong selling price to the HM Land Registry for registration. We requested them to fix it and revise the record for the correct property selling price in HM Land registry. They just change passing this problem to different people to handle and forward or resend the wrong document to us. The problem has still not been fixed after 11 months from our initial request to their conveyancing team for correction.