A year after the home information packs were introduced, few in the legal profession are celebrating their anniversary...
...There was never going to be much of a party to celebrate the first birthday of what has been described as the worst piece of consumer legislation in the last 30 years. However, that downbeat anniversary has been dramatically overshadowed by a dismal property market...
The Nationwide Solicitors Alliance is an initiative launched this month that aims to represent the interests of small firms and sole practitioners, as director Tracy Thompson puts it, ‘in the face of commoditisation and the Legal Services Act’. ‘Our ethos is basically about keeping trade local,’ she explains.
And do HIPs have a role to play in achieving that objective? ‘Absolutely,’ she says. 'Also, they are legal documents which have to be relied upon by the buyers’ solicitors [but] how can they be if they are being produced by ‘Joe Bloggs HIP providers’ in Sheffield, who aren’t legally trained and see it as an administration process?’ NSA has developed its own HIP and is calling on members to ‘pool their resources’ and develop local agreements to standardise documents.
Thompson, a licensed conveyancer with Liverpool firm Morecrofts, says the aim of the alliance is to give small firms ‘an alternative to panel management and our new HIP is part of our ambition to persuade estate agents, buyers and sellers to choose the faster, more reliable service offered by their local high street lawyer’.
Her firm has so far made no redundancies. Ironically, it is the old-fashioned mixed-economy high street firms with practices in family, wills and probate, and personal injury, that are better placed to weather the current storm.
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