I know it sounds very grand but I have just been speaking at the first Goldsmith Williams’ Inaugural International Conference. Yes, I did say it sounded grand and I was delighted to be a part of the first gathering of our panel of international lawyers. This event has come about through the development of our international conveyancing proposition and it was very pleasing to see what originally was just a concept actually come to fruition.
A recent article in the consumer press gave some startling statistics – it stated that over 250,000 holiday homes are owned by Brits and that figure has doubled over the last 10 years. The article also stated that over 75,000 of these homes are let out on a regular basis.
Add to this the fact that over 40 per cent of the rest of us are thinking about buying overseas, and you can begin to imagine the scale of the emerging market. It was for that reason that we decided to expand on our existing service proposition from acting for clients in England and Wales to being able to act for clients not only in Scotland and Northern Ireland but now across the whole world.
Speaka de English?
Of course, it’s one thing dreaming up a concept of international conveyancing and actually putting it into practice and we probably underestimated the work involved in getting our concept to a working model. The first thing to do was to find lawyers in the popular countries for Brits (France, Spain and Bulgaria) – this proved to be more difficult than we imagined – finding English-speaking lawyers across the world who firstly wanted to act for Brits buying abroad and secondly getting arrangements in place for service standards. Again, what is interesting is that while we in the UK are now completely obsessed with consumer rights and exacting service standards, this is not entirely the case throughout the rest of Europe – let alone the rest of the world.
Having spent a considerable amount of time and money in locating, checking out and visiting the firms, we then realised that communication was the absolute key to a smooth transaction and that was when we hit another obstacle – European lawyers don’t necessarily have the same degree of communication with their clients as we do and it has therefore been something of a learning curve for some of our lawyers about what our exacting service standards are.
Meet and greet
Finally we decided this was something quite special and that we should move quickly to introduce our panel firms to each other and to give them the opportunity to hear directly from us about what our plans for expansion were.
It was for these reasons that we decided we should hold an augural conference in Liverpool for our firms and that brings me back to the beginning. Having just entertained 20 foreign lawyers overnight and having had the pleasure of meeting and speaking to them, I am convinced that we have got it just about right so far.
Lawyers anywhere in the world are there to look after their client’s interests. Clients buying a property abroad seem to be ruled by their hearts not their heads (lots seem to be happy to buy their dream property abroad without taking legal advice which they would never dream of doing in this country) and one of our continuing objectives is to send out the strongest message that your clients buying overseas need to have good independent legal advice and that message can’t be repeated often enough.
That job is not yet done but all of the delegates to our Conference are happy to work with us in the future to ensure that clients do get the right level of advice. Lawyers are lawyers wherever they practice and while they may charge for their services (some more than others) their job is to look after the client’s interests – that is the same the world over.
