Lyons Bowe Solicitors - Shepton Mallet Reviews 246

I've given it 6 months after the end of the matter to write this review, but I still feel it is important to share my experience. I have already taken this through Lyons Bowe's complaints process, and got nothing but a condescending and useless response, under the guise of a "reasoned approach", which as far as I can tell is what Lyons Bowe call blaming it on me, refusing to accept responsibility and taking a condescending tone throughout.

My experience with Lyons Bowe was a comedy of errors from start to finish. I wish I'd changed to a different solicitor after their first mistake.

Lyons Bowe were the cheapest quote through for the purchase of my first property. As soon as I'd accepted the quote, it immediately increased by £480, as they'd "forgotten" to add the Leasehold Supplement. They immediately said this was my fault as I hadn't told them it was a leasehold property, yet in both the email I sent them and the quote they'd returned, it said it was a Leasehold. While I realise quotes are always subject to change, it changing immediately after I'd instructed them seemed dishonest. When I raised this with my point of contact, I was told "Well if you don't want to pay it, you're welcome to find another firm".

Hoping that was a one off, I let paid the additional supplement they'd missed and carried on with the process. My next point of contact was Robert Hann, who was responsible for the conveyancing process. In the email, he sent me documents with hundreds of pages and very little explanation, just that he was happy with them. I'd made sure to do my own due diligence and had a few questions of my own. When I replied to Robert with these questions, I chased for 2 weeks (phone and email) before finally managing to get a reply out of him, that he was going to look into my questions. Having to spend so much time and effort to get even as much as an acknowledgement within 2 weeks left a severely sour taste in my mouth. In fairness to them, this was the only part of my complaint that they upheld and apologised for.

Moving to the Exchange and Completion team, I had made it clear from early in the purchase that I was going to be using an ISA to fund a significant portion of the purchase. When I mentioned this, it took them by surprise and further delayed the completion process as they then had to go and do the paperwork. They told me I needed to go and get the balance on a cheque (I didn't know how the process worked so I was entirely under their guidance at this point), but no information about how the cheque should be made out. I was then told that the cheque was wrong and accused that I'd "rushed off and got the cheque before we'd asked for it". I'm not exactly sure how I'd have done that, considering I thought it was all handled by bank transfer between them and my bank so had no idea that a cheque was required until it was asked for!

Finally, the day before completion, I had a phone call at work saying that "you still owe £1000 (approx. figure) or you won't complete tomorrow." In the week leading up to completion, they had sent me a Mortgage Statement confirming the final value owed, which I duly paid, and they then sent me a further Mortgage Statement saying the value owed was now £0, only to then call me the day before and ask for another £1000 with the threat of not completing if I don't pay it. They offered no explanation why this value had changed, and seemed unwilling to find out when I pressed them for it. I had since found out they'd confused the Gross and Net Mortgage Advance figures (another mistake on their end!) and entered the wrong value into their system, which was found the day before completion.

The complaints process with Edward Romaine involved him trying to offload any blame onto me and making it very clear that, despite me sending him the relevant evidence, "I cannot agree with you that it is a poor process that Lyons Bowe run", mixed in with his final punch that he can't be held responsible for buying a house being a stressful experience, somehow managing to completely ignore all of the points I'd raised through the process, claiming that buying a house is stressful.

Our experience from the very first contact has been excellent. Each allocated officer has been highly professional and efficient. This has continued with Ally Hardy- she has kept us informed and responded very quickly to any query in a friendly and respectful manner. We are very impressed with each member if the team- they have helped ease what might otherwise be a stressful process. We highly recommend Lyons Bowe- their team is excellent.

We could not have asked or dreamed of a better service from beginning to end who managed the purchase of our house.

Quick to respond and thorough throughout.

Thank you!

I am writing to express my sincere appreciation for the exceptional service provided from our initial inquiry through to the closing of our deal.

The communication throughout the process was outstanding, and the ability to track progress and updates online was incredibly helpful. Although our first deal did not proceed, your team’s efficiency in helping us secure another property in such a short timeframe was remarkable.

Thanks to your dedication, we are now enjoying the holidays in the comfort of our new home.

The team at Lyons Bowe were excellent in achieving our sale and onward purchase in a four part chain. Ayisha and Ella were stars and helped us go from offer to completion within 6 weeks. Thank you!

From start to finish there was great communication from the team at Lyons Bowe. We rarely had to chase as they were always on top of providing us with updates, and were fast at moving everything along our side.

The completion statement did have a couple of errors which is why we have not given 5-star, but this was rectified quickly by the team after we had raised them.

We would 100% recommend Lyons Bowe to anyone looking for a responsive solicitors to assist with their purchase.

The team worked quickly and efficiently and completed this phase of the conveyancing very quickly. Thank you

Really polite, extremely helpful, quick and efficient. I reccomend this legal team to anyone.

Excellent communication and very professional. Kept all parties up to date with proceedings. Very thorough with various checks. would highly recommend their services.

There was good communication from the start. We were informed at each stage of the sale and purchase. Very good

Hi I would like to say thank you to you all especially Alisha ngoor she has bin very friendly and afficient and a pleasure to deal with thank you alisha

This is the best solicitors firm I have used for purchasing and selling a property. Very helpful and quick to respond and the process ran really smoothly and on timescale.
If your looking for a solicitor, then I can Highly recommend Lyons Bowe!
Fantastic firm.

clear, precise help & support that made the whole process so easy to understand and complete.

the two members of staff that we dealt with were super helpful and friendly.

we held our meeting over teams - and the process was so smooth, and the member of the team made us feel very relaxed and comfortable, and was able to answer every question or concern we had.

Excellent service for me. I sold my flat and there were Land Registry issues that we not sorted by my solicitor when I bought the property 5 years ago. That firm no longer exists and Lyons Bowe took it upon themselves to fix these issues in addition to the usual work for a flat sale with great efficiency which meant the agreed completion date with the buyer could be met.
They explain requirements clearly in plain English and guide you through what steps are required as a seller. Would recommend and would use again if the need arose.

Was recommended by Hollis & Morgan, as they're more expensive and had good ratings I hoped it would translate into better service so I agreed to go with them.

For the £'000s I paid I had hoped to get swift responses & good customer care.

Instead, I got Rob H as my conveyancer. The issues I experienced were:
- NEVER picked up phone - permanently set to answer machine. I tried and fail to call him ~15x over a period of 6 months and never got through
- AVERAGE email response time of 1-2 weeks; leaving me frequently frustrated and in the dark
- AUTOMATED emails and in some cases, emails with multiple different fonts and font sizes from copy-pasting, showing an utter lack of care.
- VERY LITTLE pro-activeness - I spent much of the time chasing parties myself for answers and coordinate responses / missing information etc

My property took 8 months to complete, I would say 80% of that delay was waiting for Lyons Bowe (Rob H) to decide to attend to my file.

I never give 1 star reviews but on this occasion I think it's entirely warranted. Not everyone at Lyons Bowe I dealt with was this unprofessional, so perhaps I got unlucky - but you're totally at their mercy throughout the process and they're fully aware of this and so are not under any pressure to provide good customer service. I thought perhaps this was how all experiences with conveyancing goes, but I used a different firm to buy my new property who were much more responsive.

We cannot fault the service we received from Lyons Bowe solicitors, in particular Ally and Faine. From start to finish of a complicated 6 month house purchase, they were available at the end of the phone or via email. We had many questions that were answered promptly and professionally. The service was exceptional.

I have used Lyons Bowe a few times over the past year for property sales, purchases, and declaration of trusts. Whilst their services are competitively priced, cheap certainly does not mean cheerful and the level of service has gone downhill.

During our latest case, there have been simple failures including:
1. misspelling of names in communications
2. requesting a release of funds from my mortgage provider before we had exchanged and without notifying me first
3. poor telephone manner reflecting the lack of competence and experience of staff
4. The inability to pick up the phone or communicate in general. We had several complaints from our estate agents that their messages were not responded to and we often had to try and make contact for the estate agent as well as contacting my mortgage provider to confirm they were happy to release funds so that we could exchange contracts because staff members were claiming they didn’t know despite making the request.
5. Having to repeat our requests several times with examples which were not read and documented

Should Lyons Bowe wish to be competitive from a service perspective, they need to enforce greater training schemes for junior members of staff to build a better client relationship where an element of trust is built. Having members of staff not able to answer conveyancing questions when an estate agent can is disconcerting and often left us concerned throughout our property purchases and sales.

Lyons Bowe helped us put together our wills and the service was excellent. Tazmin was responsive and very clear in her guidance, suggesting things we had not considered but could be important.

Thank you to Tazmin and her team for updating our Will,
Making it easy to understand and guiding us through the whole process, we could phone or Email to ask any questions we were not sure about,
Lyons Bowe stored and registered our Will free of charge which was an added bonus.
I would highly recommend them.

Friendly and listened to. Expedited my mother’s estate.