Results for The Solicitors Advocates & Barristers Inc:
TSABI Ltd - The Solicitors Advocates & Barristers Inc in Southall, London & Slough:
TSABI Ltd aka The Solicitors Advocates & Barristers Inc first caught our eye as being a larger firm that still handled Legal Aid cases. This was back when they were originally called Asghar & Co Solicitors. Whilst you may think Legal Aid is something like the NHS (i.e. available to all, just slower) over the past couple of decades the budgets and scope of Legal Aid have been drastically cut. This means that solicitors still choosing to work under Legal Aid typically get paid a lot less than for cases with regular private paying clients.
Why is that important? Because we've mostly found that only smaller, newer firms tend to work with Legal Aid clients in order to build up their client list and reputation. The number of larger firms we know that still choose to work under the scheme are few and far between. So that's noteable to us.
So whilst the majority of law firms will have a sales pitch line like this one on their website, with this law office there seemed to be some credibility and backup to the statement. They also weren't averse to listing some of the more common fees actually on their site. In fact we saw at least two pages worth of examples of case types and associated fees declared up front for people to check out before calling. Again, something you might think everyone does, but they don't.
Claims like this are across the majority of websites you'll see. Luckily though, with law firms there are sometimes independent ways to check up on such things. Many legal professionals are signed up with a local Law Society. The Solicitors Advocates & Barristers Inc are signed up with The Law Society of England & Wales which is one of the better ones. They display a wealth of user side information such as staff details, other offices, case expertise and more.
If you check out the page for this firm you'll see a list of solicitors across their two offices and their qualifying dates. This way, if a firm claims to have years of experience in its staff you can actually check up whether that's true. On this occasion, it definitely seems to be the case with a range of experience indicated including Mohammed Asghar and Fleur Ohonbamu who qualified in 1993 and 1999 respectively - going all the way up to newer staff such as Elizabeth Downing (qualified in 2011) and Ruqayah Begum (2020).
A mix of older, wiser 'mentors' along with the hungrier, younger generation is always a good idea for any firm. It avoids stagnation and (considering how stuffy law firms can be) having young blood on the team is often the only way forward.
The only way to judge whether statements such as these are true is to check through comments by previous clients. There are plenty of testimonials on the firm's website, but our poll a few years back indicated that people tend not to trust the testimonials printed on company sites.
However, on this occasion they have simply linked to the third party review site Trustpilot and are showing the public reviews from there. A bold move for sure. So what are people saying on the public forums?
"very good communication despite the language barrier, full of professionalism in dealing with cases"
"At no point in the process was I left unattended or questioning my legal position. The case was a success."
"would always answer calls nomatter how many times we needed reassuring or didn't understand something"
These snippets from the more common review boards such as Google, Yell.com, Yelp, etc. are indicative of the general feel. The majority of comments are positive and out of the few negative reviews we saw there didn't seem to be a theme to latch on to and warn about. For example, the last firm we reviewed had a lot of negative comments about how clients were constantly passed over to secretaries and junior staff rather than the solicitor that was meant to be in charge of the case. Certainly if you see the same thing repeated a few times in negative comments for other firms, then that's something to take note of.
A quick bit about navigation. The official site we link to above is www.tsabi.law but www.tsabi.co.uk is owned by someone else and their old branding at www.asgharandco.com is still currently live. So just pay attention to where you are and what you type in. The branding has the longer name but you will find most things such as regulatory bodies mentioned above and review pages use the acronym version. Their website is https secure so should be fine for entering your personal details on the contact forms.
There has been a huge rise in clients of law firms being targeted by scammers. Mostly it involves property matters as they naturally involve large amounts of money moving around. You never know what these scammers are going to think of next though so just make sure to pay attention to the email addresses you send/receive from and never discuss banking details over email. We also recommend that if someone calls you to discuss money, you politely hang up and call back the official phone number you were given.
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General Notes: Legal Aid availability changes constantly, so ask up front. If you are looking for a career with The Solicitors Advocates & Barristers Inc it's best to visit the website (www.tsabi.law) and locate the correct phone/email contact details. Any quoted here will be for potential clients. Alternating or adding words such as TSABI Ltd 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.