Brown & Co Solicitors in Greenwich, London:
You'll get a lot of opinions on social boards or 'help' articles about the pros/cons of using a large law firm, a small local firm, a specialist, a general practice firm, etc. Plus dozens of review pages both monitored and unmonitored.
Obviously we have checked out Brown & Co and ended up adding them to our list of firms so we must have had a positive experience. Here are some of the resources we use that you might not have known about or things to watch for you might not have thought about.
"If your solicitor hasn't got time for you, it's unlikely that he or she has time for your opponents, their solicitors or others involved in your transaction or business deal."
Typically someone with a legal problem will scroll through several legal service sites before finally picking up the phone. However it's amazing just how similar law firm websites look these days with similar language and similar images of people smiling - all shaking hands. This snippet from the Brown & Co website is far more confrontational about the bad alternatives available and not the typical vague sales pitch.
"Brown and Co Solicitors is an experienced firm of solicitors offering legal services across a number of specialisms."
This may sound like a throw-away sentence which every legal practice states (i.e. no other firm is going to say they are 'inexperienced'). However there are two very important aspects to deal with from that sentence. The first is whether a firm is actually experienced and the other about firms which cover a range of case types rather than a single specialty.
If a firm states they have a certain number of years' experience 'within the firm' this usually means they've added up all staff's experience together to make the number bigger. To check the individual experience amongst law professionals there is a great resource on The Law Society of England & Wales' website. If you check the page for this firm you'll see contact details, case types covered, and most importantly - the number of years each qualified solicitor has been so.
"Our solicitors have the experience to go beyond simply answering your legal questions"
It currently shows that Brown & Co solicitors have staff qualified across the past three decades including David Dunitz (qualified 1988), Ian Sandy (qualified 1996), and Winston Brown (qualfied 2002). That's a lot of experience. With each focusing on different areas of law those numbers do stand out to us, and we've been working in the legal industry for over twenty years ourselves.
Does this translate into happy clients? For this we always turn to the public boards like Google, Trustpilot, Yelp, etc. Our poll from a few years back indicated that only 9% of you trusted testimonials provided by companies on their website. So what are people saying about the firm on the independent boards:
"answer phonecalls and reply emails almost immediately and even on weekends"
"never had to call him as he always kept me updated via email or text"
"license was granted on that very same day when we had the hearing"
"never had to call him as he always kept me updated via email or text"
"license was granted on that very same day when we had the hearing"
There are a lot of law firms with Brown in the title so we always advise searching for the full name and town of the company you want to see reviews on - e.g. 'brown and co solicitors london'. It's clear someone didn't do that because one of the law firm's reviews states 5 stars and:
"really upped it's game on the food recently"
The geniune reviews on the firm's legal services seem very positive. On top of that there are useful staff profiles on their website which we strongly advise every law firm to produce. They have an actual fees page which is definitely a rarity amongst legal providers as well. So hopefully from all this you'll see our decision to have Brown&Co added to the network was not without merit.
A quick note on navigation due to the number of firms out there with 'brown' in the name. The full official website is www.brownandcosolicitors.co.uk with www.brownandcosolicitors.com redirecting you there. Other variants such as www.brownandco.co.uk take you to completely different firms and you can't have ampersands in web addresses so a www.brown&co.co.uk entry in the browser bar for example will result in an error or a search results page being shown.
This is a hugely important thing to remember because the firm handles conveyancing/property matters which have been targeted worldwide by scammers due to the huge amounts of money able to be stolen in one go. People are handing tens of thousands of pounds over to fraudsters sometimes based solely on a single spam email stating the house deposit needs to be paid into a different bank account. Make sure you are on the correct website and never discuss bank details or payments by email. All that said, we'll give the firm one last pitch-y quote on this page:
"We aim to provide practical solutions to real-life problems."
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General Notes: Legal Aid availability changes constantly, so ask up front. If you are looking for a career with Brown and Co Solicitors it's best to visit the website (www.brownandcosolicitors.co.uk) and locate the correct phone/email contact details. Any quoted here will be for potential clients. Alternating or adding words such as Brown & Co Solicitors may bring up different background/reviews on the firm. Each firm's Law Society and/or SRA number should be on their site too.