J B Leitch Reviews 166

Theives.

Time these bullies were behind bars.

I find the people who work at this company, who call themselves solicitors, are lacking interpersonal skills.
Personally I do not think they ere truly solicitors or professionals. I think they’re bully’s debt collectors and con men and women.
First port( another bad company) referred my case to them in December 2020.
I found the 2 people I spoke to are very rude and very unprofessional. I had to tell them not to call me or speak to me again. They are not good listeners and lack work ethic.
I shall be reporting them to the ombudsman .
I informed them about their poor reviews but one of the staff bang the phone on me.

JB Leitch has been employed by my building management company to sort out fee arrears that occurred when I bought my flat last year. The Seller's Solicitor messed up and have refused to correct the error creating an arrears dispute. The management company themselves are unprofessional, unresponsive and lazy - which is also how I'd describe JB Leitch. Had the management company deigned to communicate with myself and my solicitor the situation would have been sorted out last year, but it's been going on for a year and 7 months now. JB Leitch has been of no assistance and left my Solicitor to do all the work but has decided that I owe them disbursements for their thumb-twiddling. After months of requesting a Statement of Account it finally arrived missing pages, in particular the one that breaks down their fee.
A simple mistake, however it's one that they refuse to correct!
Avoid at all costs.

JB Leitch were involved in the sale of my father's retirement flat, acting on behalf of the property's management company. They were without doubt the worst solicitor's I've ever dealt with, and I recommend you never use them. They failed to respond to emails and phone calls, and refused to negotiate with me or my solicitor. Truly awful.

As my previous post got taken down for defamatory I am just rewriting it.

During lockdown the lady I was dealing with refused to let me speak to a manager. What I meant by unethical staff is the lady I was dealing with refused to hear me out. She also refused to let me speak to a manager and said 'there was no manager' which I refuse to believe. I was in contact with my estate management company and showed proof I was in contact with them and it was wrong of them to refer me to the solicitors as the estate manager from trinity took over three months to respond to me. Even after showing proof of this the case handler at J B leitch was rude and wouldn't listen to why I shouldn't pay the fees or be referred to the solicitors. Apparently there is 'no manager' that can help or can deal with things. Please listen to the recorded phone conversation.

never seen such an unprofessional staff from this company, not just one.
Just want collect money and don't give explanation. very very very bad company

No compassion and expensive charges to get money at all costs. I advised the property management company we could not afford charges until the property was sold, they appointed J B Leitch regardless and when I informed them the same, it was a case of "not our problem, pay in 5 days or we will take legal action" . Once again advised them we did not have funds to pay and they withheld the purchases information pack so the sale could not proceed until we coughed up the money (by clearing all our savings) and almost £400 of charges on top. This on top of the covid-19 lock down in the uk that was announced and our savings going to this terrible firm instead of helping our family to survive in this extraordinary time. Avoid

This legal company teams up with predominantly poor property management companies such as Firstport Property Management, and Homeground Property Management.

Their raison d'etre is to charge disproportionately large legal fees to leaseholders as a result of late service charge payment.

This was my experience:

- Myself along with other leaseholders in my block of apartments received the annual accounts from our property management company Firstport.

- The accounts incurred more costs than we expected under major works for the building, and we endeavoured to find out why.

- It materialized that 1 leaseholder in the block had sold their apartment, and moved out the previous year. They had moved out without fully settling their service charge bill, and there was a small amount outstanding on their service charge account.

- Firstport then passed this outstanding service charge item to JB Leitch, who then proceeded to charge to the block leaseholders £8-9000 in legal fees in order to chase down the small amount outstanding on the departed leaseholders account. All that JB Leitch did for this £8-9000 was to send out a few automated reminder letters to the old departed leaseholder, the majority of which (perhaps all) had been sent to their old address at our apartment block, which was inevitably likely to be a pointless exercise.

- Firstport then allocated these huge and unnecessary JB Leitch legal charges of £8-9000 to a major works levy in the building accounts. We do not know if this was deliberate or in error.

- Other leaseholders also reported receiving unpleasant letters and extra fees on their personal leaseholder accounts due to being only 1-2 days late in payment, and never having received any service charge invoice or reminder.

In summary, JB Leitch will take advantage of any opportunity to charge disproportionately large legal fees for even the most trivial of items.

Very poor experience from a defendant's perspective. Shoddy 'solicitors' who really are nothing more than glorified debt collectors. Despite all payments being up to date, attempted to claim over £1200 in respect of a £950 debt (which didn't even exist), even went as far as to issue a claim form which was promptly discontinued when they realised it would (obviously) be defended. I definitely would not recommend from a client perspective, as they think nothing of racking up enormous legal fees for their clients which - as in our case - are unrecoverable and thus it's left for the client to pay. Solicitors are also not even aware of very basic law that 90 seconds on Google reveals (in relation to forfeiture, small claims track, discontinuance and costs). A complaint to the SRA is pending.

This is a true review for J.B.Leitch.It follows Trustpilot guidelines so not expected it to be taken down.
J.B.Leitch have taken my daughter three times to Leicester County Court acting on behalf for Firstport. I have on all three times acted for her. They provided me with wrong information regarding vat on electricity and refused to send me trail audits and invoices. After the third court case was over i eventually received this information.Im now having to compile all my proof against them to report them to the relevant authorities. They truly are the worst debt collectors around and any leaseholder being chased by them should immediately google them. J.B.Leitch you have successfully taken down so many reviews on this site but you can not take down the google reviews. In the process of reporting them to the FCA. Will post their report.

Be careful this company is part of the Ground Rent Trap.
Basically they make it impossible for you to contact them in order to pay for it and then charge you over £1000.

I feel trap to this and am astonished at how this is still legal and allowed in a modern society like the United Kingdom... I just hope someone eventually shuts them down.

I encountered JB Leitch when they represented the other side in a First-tier Tribunal (Residential Property) case.

Whilst dealing with lawyers is rarely pleasant, I found it was actually a relief in some ways to finally interact with some bright individuals rather than the dullards the property sector seems to attract. The "legal tone" can be perceived as mildly offensive at times but I'm used to that.

It's difficult to rate the opposition but I would note that they left a load of hand-written scrawl over some documents. Perhaps that's a crude attempt at misdirection but it seems sloppy and rather unprofessional. They submitted the requested, replicated packs to the Tribunal which were found to be inconsistent due to missing sections.

It's possible and probable that they know a fair bit about property law but they know little about construction and actual property. In our case they'd clearly not spent the five minutes it would take to read the manufacturer's guide and hence made some obviously inaccurate comments on building materials.

It wasn't relevant to the case, but I was a bit disturbed by their lack of knowledge on (gas) boiler exhaust gases. That's well-known for several risks including fatal ones. It doesn't surprise me for someone sat behind a desk with an education in the arts but I would hope they would make more effort to learn about their chosen sector.

They also had the cheek to try and apply rule 13 to seek costs from the applicant which annoyed the Judge. The Judge ultimately and unusually applied rule 13 to them for the respondent's unreasonable conduct in the case relating to omitting a document.

This firm are just rude bullies who offer ground rent and management companies a way to charge more and more money to get their money.
They do not care that their clients send the bills to the wrong addresses. Instead of trying to fix the issue with incorrect figures, they send a note to the ground rent company to add a charge as well.
So for one lost invoice we have been charged not only by the management company but by the ground rent company as well because of this bad firm of solicitors.
Their review speaks for themselves and working for the likes of first port or om peveral whoever they are called now.
Sooner they remove First port from all block management the better the world will be.

Truly amazing that J.B.Leitch have not appeared on this website before. I shall be editing this post to explain exactly why.