Legal & General Home Finance Conveyancing Panel Information

When a solicitor is acting for both Legal & General Home Finance and borrower there is potential for conflicts to arise. You owe duties to both clients. All information received by you from your client is confidential and cannot be disclosed without the client’s consent. In the situation you find yourself in if the purchaser will not consent to the information being passed on to the lender the solicitor must cease to act for the Legal & General Home Finance and it may well be prudent you to cease to act for the purchaser as well. You can not tell the Legal & General Home Finance the reason for termination of the retainer over and above the fact that a conflict has arisen. The fact that you can no longer act should alert even the most somnambulistic of lenders that something is wrong with the borrower and/or purchase. The fact that you have disinstructed yourself should not affect your Legal & General Home Finance conveyancing panel status.

You will be aware of the trend in recent years for lenders such as Legal & General Home Finance to take a much more pro-active approach in relation to the management and make up of their conveyancer panels. The knock on effect of this is that it is more likely that there will be a higher number of cases where a conveyancer is not on the Legal & General Home Finance panel. The situation that you find yourself in is where your client’s purchaser has his/her own lawyer and Legal & General Home Finance have appointed a separate lawyer to act on their behalf where the new CML Part 3 requirements apply. Section 11.1 of the UK Finance Lenders’ Handbook Part 3 requires Legal & General Home Finance’s panel solicitor to ‘ ...transfer the mortgage advance directly to the Seller’s conveyancer. The Seller’s conveyancer must be required to hold the mortgage advance on the terms of the required undertaking. The example borrower’s conveyancer’s undertaking letter includes a specific example of the seller’s undertaking’. You should expect to be advised to received the mortgage advance directly from the conveyancing solicitors for Legal & General Home Finance. You will no doubt be required to undertake directly to Legal & General Home Finance’s solicitors to discharge any charges secured on the property and to send directly to them the executed transfer and any other documents required to enable us to effect registration. Please remember to carefully consider undertakings in accordance with your firm’s protocol and record them in your undertakings logg. Please remember that as well as this breach of this undertaking having regulatory and compliance implications it’s breach could also result in your firm being removed off the Legal & General Home Finance conveyancing panel.

It would be advisable to supply details of the date of removal, information on the reason for removal, date of appeal and any reason given for reinstatement. This should not negatively affect your firm’s application but gives the CQS team viability as to what has gone on.

You would be advised to get in touch with Legal & General Home Finance to obtain standard documents. The CML Handbook contains an express section for lenders to reveal who to contact to obtain standard documents. Legal & General Home Finance in their Part 2’s state: It helps to disclose the firm’s Legal & General Home Finance solicitors panel reference.