Limitless liability

I hope that cut price conveyancers have read the report in The Times of 19 April of the judgment of Mr Justice Rimer in the case of Cottingham v Attey Bower & Jones, where they were held liable in negligence for not insisting on seeing a building regulations consent for some alterations which were carried out to a property way back in 1985, the reasoning being that it was still open to the local authority to take injunction proceedings under the Buildings Act of 1984.Is there no limit at all to the conveyancers' liability? Not only do we have to follow the 55 pages of the CML lender's handbook, including the 26 checks we have to make on a borrower's buildings insurance policy, but we now have to insist on seeing a building regulations consent for any alteration which has ever been carried out to a property.In this part of the world, the 'going rate' for dealing with a conveyance and mortgage is still considerably less than 400 and it is not a problem to find somebody who will do the job for less than 300.

When will the Law Society and/or the profession wake up to the fact that nobody can do the job properly at that sort of price and hope to make a profit.Hooray for Law Society President Robert Sayer who spells it out as it should be in his article in The Business of Law (see [2000] Gazette, 20 April).

He suggests that the cost to a client for a simple purchase should be around 800 to 1,000 - still cheap at the price, in my view, if the client wants a proper job done.Dugald Sproull, Sproulls Solicitors, Camelford, Cornwall