Words About Things

You should seek legal advice when buying a home, but what should you look for in a lawyer?

If you are buying a home, the legal side of this transaction can be very complicated. It’s a good idea to get expert advice from a trained lawyer who specializes in real estate law. This lawyer will be able to help you with negotiations, surveyors, and much more.

Conveyancing

Conveyancing is the legal term for the process of transferring the ownership of land or property from one party to another. This process begins when an offer has been made an accepted for a home. You might want to hire a licensed conveyancing solicitor to help with the legal side of transferring ownership of the home.

It is possible to complete this process on your own, but it will be very time consuming and complicated and it can be risky if done incorrectly. If you lack the appropriate experience, it is well worth the cost to enlist the services of a professional to assist you.

Special Situations

There are some situations where the conveyancing of a property will be extra complicated, and it is very important to seek the legal advice of an experience solicitor before proceeding. An example would be if the property is being sold by a couple who are going through a divorce, as this requires very specific skills and knowledge. Also, if the property is unregistered or is not a freehold, you should also seek legal advice.

Choosing a Solicitor

When you are choosing someone to help with the legal aspects of buying a house, you will want to look for a few traits. The first trait that you will be looking for is experience, because you will want to work with someone who has handled this type of law before and knows what they are doing. You will also want to find a lawyer who has good references from satisfied clients.

Also, if you are working with an estate agent and they recommend a lawyer to you, be wary. Most of the time, estate agents and lawyers work in a sort of partnership referring clients to each other in this way. You might find that the estate agent is recommending this particular lawyer to you not because they are the best but because they get some sort of kickback in a way. If the lawyer actually works for the real estate company you can be suspicious as to whether they have your best interests in mind or those of the company. It is better to find your own independent solicitor who can give you unbiased guidance because they are not involved.

Most of all trust your instincts. When you have found the right lawyer for your needs you will feel comfortable hiring them to help you with the legal aspects of buying a house because you will trust their skills, experience and ethics.

It is an oft-repeated mantra that ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it. That said, the field is so vast, how can anyone hope to keep up?

Those who study the law do so at great length. Even then they are often forced to specialise in one particular area, and will not have comprehensive knowledge of the others.

Of course with a lot of laws there is an element of ‘common sense’ and ‘right and wrong’. Laws such as those prohibiting murder and theft are universal across cultures and times, and were codified by the ancient Egyptians as far back as 3000BC.

So yes, the more obvious laws a person should know without any training whether they are in breach of them, or have themselves been sinned against. In other circumstances the truth of the situation is not so easy to divine. In perhaps the most extreme example of this, there is currently a law suit being pressed against the United States Federal Government by the New York Times because they had declared that their interpretation of controversial ‘Patriot Act’ was a secret.

The example of the Patriot Act  in the USA is an extreme example, but there is certainly no shortage of other situations where the law is at best obscure.

One route of obscurity is the fact that the ‘letter of the law’ as it is written down is not the whole story. After legislation is passed it is then ‘tested’ in the courts in order to determine how it will be interpreted.

Having ignorance of the law means that you may not necessarily know if you have been the victim of wrong doing, or be able to properly defend yourself against allegations of wrongdoing. Organisations such as the Citizens Advice Bureaux exist to help share this knowledge, but in many situations professional legal advice is needed.

Blogs in Decline?

Data analysts at the Pew Research Center suggested that the use of blogs is in decline in a recent report.   It is thought that formerly dedicated bloggers now prefer to shrink their thoughts in a compact 140-character Twitter update thereby forgoing the effort involved in writing  long posts

..the use of blogs is in decline..

Legal Blogging – Blawggers

An article in the Times however reports that the legal profession, however, is bucking the trend an that the global network of law bloggers – blawggers – is booming, as lawyers write about their personal experiences or legal insights in a way that is illuminating, on topic, occasionally controversial and sometimes funny.

The best blogs can provide their readers with first access to reports, give valuable market insight, provoke and amuse, while their authors can become overnight stars, benefitting from a boost in public profile and peer recognition.

Russell Jones & Walker

Amongst many UK Solicitors that maintain legal blogs, Russell Jones & Walker run a network of specialist sites covering various legal topics including cycling, family law, personal injury and selected legal news  from their team of lawyers.

Winner of National Law Firm of the Year 2009 at The Lawyer magazine Awards, Russell Jones & Walker (RJW) is a leading national firm of solicitors with a network of offices across England and Wales.

History of  blogging:

The term ‘blog’, a truncation of ‘weblog’, was coined in 1997 by American computer programmer Jorn Barger, but it wasn’t until 1999 that the first legal blog, Overlawyered, written by Walter Olson appeared.

Soon to follow Overlawyered was Ernest Svenson, whose Ernie The Attorney blog remains one of the most well-respected and popular legal blogs online.

Svenson has posted regularly for the last nine years, continuing to blog even when the Hurricane Katrina disaster hit his hometown New Orleans, and his early blogging experiences still provide a valuable lesson today.

“The main mistakes [that I made] were just certain kinds of assumptions about the internet being like traditional media. The internet is not like regular media – anything you say can travel quickly to places you didn’t anticipate it would travel. So you have to assume that whatever you say will be read by the person most likely to vehemently disagree with it.”

Whilst researching this post I came across this clever reply from John Marshall of Russell Jones & Walker in a recent interview published on the Lawyer.com

If you were stranded on a desert island, what two ­luxury items would you take?

A sand wedge and a lot of golf balls.