Today I have added another page to the Landlord Law Blog. This is the services page (which you can see on the orange navigation bar above), and it outlines some of the ‘one to one’ services which I offer to the public on residential landlord and tenant law.
However as much of my time is spent writing and running the Landlord Law web-site, I am unable to provide anything other than a limited ‘one to one’ service. The Landlord Law service is basically there to help you to do things yourself, by using the online content and a with a bit of extra help from me via the members forum when you need it.
However not everyone wants to do this. And also, with the best will in the world, there are times when, even if you enjoy doing your own legal work, you really cannot do it yourself, and need the help of an experienced solicitor. It is only right that Landlord Law should help you with this also.
For a long time I had a solicitors directory on Landlord Law, which had details of solicitors who contacted me saying that they offered a property law service. However I had to take these firms on trust, as I had no way of checking whether they really did offer a decent property service. Also I have to earn a living, and I could see that it was going to be some time before the directory built up to the level where I could make a charge for it. So this was a bit of a problem.
That problem has now been solved by a new partnership I have entered into with Contact Law. I discovered Contact Law, and Contact Law discovered me, as a result of some writing I was asked to do for a legal journal, the Internet Newsletter. (You can read the article I wrote, if you are interested, as I have also published it here). Being impressed with Landlord Law they asked if I would like to work with them.
Contact Law are a referral company. There is a lot of bad press in the legal sphere about referral companies, but this is mostly relating to personal injury referrals. (Many personal injury clients who get in touch with those companies who advertise on the telly would be shocked if they knew that their case was being sold on to solicitors, often for quite large sums of money). However Contact Law is not a part of that.
Basically they are for way for solicitors to outsource their marketing. Contact law, through their web-site, and their partners (such as me), are easily found by members of the public looking for a solicitor. When a potential client contacts them (either by completing one of the online forms or ringing them up), they talk to them and find out what kind of a problem they have. They then refer them on to a suitable solicitor from their database (of which there are over 4,000).
It is part of the solicitors contract with Contact Law that they get in touch with the client within a specific time. After that it is up to them. However if they end up acting for the client, they then pay Contact Law 15% of their fees as payment for the referral (and as a Contact Law partner, I would get a percentage of this for all clients referred via my web-sites).
All of the solicitors on the Contact Law database are carefully checked and monitored by Contact Law, not only when they apply to join, but also by getting feedback from customers, at various stages of a case. So if you use a Contact Law solicitor you can be reasonably sure that they are a quality firm (otherwise clients would give bad feedback and Contact Law would stop referring work to them).
I am delighted therefore to be able to offer this new service, both on the Landlord Law site and also on the new services page of this blog. This will allow you to find a solicitor for the work you need (not always an easy thing to do if you know nothing about solicitors) and I will hopefully get a bit more income. This will allow me to invest more in Landlord Law (which is sometimes a bit of a struggle as I have to finance all these things myself) and ultimately provide a better service for you.
If you use the new service, do let me know how you get on.