# If a solicitor gives wrong advice?



## Purple (9 Dec 2007)

If a solicitor from a major Dublin firm of solicitors has given advice that the Barrister they engaged had shown to be incorrect on clear points of law do you pay the bill from the solicitor?


----------



## joejoe (9 Dec 2007)

*Re: Bad Advice*



Purple said:


> If a solicitor from a major Dublin firm of solicitors has given advice that the Barrister they engaged had shown to be incorrect on clear points of law do you pay the bill from the solicitor?


 
I maybe wrong but when it comes to giving legal advice surely a solicitor should know the obvious. Rightly or wrongly I would not pay the solictor for provding such a poor standard of service and bring it further if nessary. Have you contacted the law society?

Joejoe


----------



## Brendan Burgess (9 Dec 2007)

I think it would depend on whether the client has lost out as a result of the advice. If they told a client that they had no stamp duty liability and the client got fined for not paying stamp duty on time, then the solicitor would probably be professionally negligent. 

If a barrister was being consulted, presumably the solicitor was getting a second opinion anyway? 

I got a poor advice from a solicitor on a transaction, but he did complete the transaction and I did not lose out because I knew the tax issues better than the solicitor did. I paid his fee. If he had charged me a premium fee, I would have argued. 

Brendan


----------



## Stifster (9 Dec 2007)

Purple said:


> If a solicitor from a major Dublin firm of solicitors has given advice that the Barrister they engaged had shown to be incorrect on clear points of law do you pay the bill from the solicitor?



What are you actually being billed for?

Am I right in assuming that you went to the solicitor and he said A and then he got a barristers opinion who said B.

If it was a simple as that, personally, I'd just ask the client to pay for the BL's opinion.

Were you adversely prejudiced?


----------



## MOB (10 Dec 2007)

The original question is impossible to answer without some context.

We have anything between 20 and 60 statutes passed each year.   

We have up to 750 Statutory Instruments passed each year.

We have numerous local authority bye-laws in existence, and more passed each year.

We have court decisions being handed down every week.

We have Directives and decisions out of Europe;

All of these are sources of law, and they all generate "clear points of law".  

The real question that Purple needs to ask is whether it was reasonable for his solicitor not to know the correct advice at the outset,  This depends entirely on what the specific issues under advice were.  (well, also in fairness on the calibre of solicitor:  you would expect a fairly high standard from a major Dublin firm)

It does not necessarily have to be something arcane or specialist.  for example, Cavan County Council recently adopted bye-laws which require inspection certificates to be filed for private effluent treatment plants (i.e. to ensure that they are being properly maintained).   Cavan solicitors have pretty much all agreed (rightly in my opinion) that ensuring and furnishing evidence of compliance with this law is now part of the conveyancing process in Cavan.   Solicitors from outside the County dealing with Cavan property will undoubtedly be caught on the hop with this one;  I don't think it makes them negligent - even if they are from major Dublin firms.  I hope this illustrates the point in a common sense way.


----------



## Purple (11 Dec 2007)

It was not a case that affected me directly, a family member asked for advice when they were confused about advice that they had received on an employment law issue.
After hearing the issues of contention and reading the solicitors advice and the letters that she had sent I became very concerned that she was incorrect in the assumptions that she had made about the legal position in the case. I based these views on not much more than you can read on the employment forum here. I accompanied by family member to a meeting with the solicitor and the barrister that she had engaged. The advice he gave was totally contradictory to the advice that the solicitor had given. The solicitor now agrees with that advice and has completely changed tack. 
So the question is should their client be liable for the billable hours spent leading that client down a cud-de-sac?   
Or to put it another way, if a painter painted your house and made a balls of it and had to get their mate to come along and fix the job should you pay them both?


----------



## MOB (11 Dec 2007)

Hi Purple,

It does not seem likely that 100% of the billable time accrued with the solicitor was spent giving wrong advice;  but in principle, yes, there should be a significant discount if the solicitor is charging for giving advice on a relatively straightforward employment law issue and if the solicitor had that advice totally wrong.

The 'painter and his mate' analogy is not really apposite. A solicitor will hire a barrister to advise when the matter requires more research and\or more detailed knowledge than the solicitor has - the barrister is more like a specialist; doctor calling in a consultant  (or painter calling in a guy who specialises in murals, if we must have that analogy) would be a more appropriate analogy;  

Nevertheless, the solicitor should not have given an advice letter which was totally incorrect. I am basing this to some extent on your assertion that the errors were relatively simple - i.e. based on 'not much more than you can read on the employment forum here' , but I think you need to remember that your own knowledge levels might be relatively high, and your view on what is a simple error might not be totally objective as a result.


----------



## Purple (11 Dec 2007)

Thanks MOB. My own knowledge levels may or may not be relatively high (I don't think they are) but it really was that basic. I can't go into more details on a public forum and I'm not going to PM you to get free legal advice.


----------

