Tort

Solicitor acting in connection with purchase of foreign property - instruction of foreign lawyer - duty of care not discharged therebyGregory v Shepherds (a firm): CA (Simon Brown, Morritt L JJ and Bell J): 16 June 2000

The claimant instructed the defendant firm of solicitors to act in connection with a contract for the purchase of property in Spain.

The firm instructed a Spanish lawyer to act on the claimant's behalf in the transaction and wrote to him asking whether he had carried out searches against the title and whether the purchase money should be paid.No answer had been received when they paid the money to the vendor.

It was subsequently discovered that the property was subject to a charge having priority over the claimant's interest.

Judge Behrens, sitting as a judge of the Chancery Division, dismissed the claimant's action against the defendants for damages for negligence.

He appealed.Michael Driscoll QC and Katharine Holland (instructed by Pickering & Butters, Stafford) for the claimant.

Michael Briggs QC and Richard Walford (instructed by Beachcroft Wansboroughs, Birmingham) for the defendants.Held, allowing the appeal, that it did not follow that, because the Spanish lawyer was instructed to act in connection with Spanish end of the transaction, the defendants had no responsibility for that end at all; that a reasonably careful solicitor in England would not, in the circumstances, pay over his client's money to the vendor without first obtaining specific confirmation that the searches against title had been satisfactorily completed; that, further, such a solicitor would not pay over his client's money, not to the client's foreign lawyer, but to the foreign vendor, if the specific question whether it was in order to make the payment had not been unequivocally answered by the foreign lawyer; and that, accordingly, the defendants were liable in negligence.