Can a solicitor act for both the buyer and seller in conveyancing?

Can a solicitor act for both the buyer and seller in conveyancing?

This is a question that arises quite regularly – and I quite understand why. From a client’s perspective, if one solicitor acts for both parties, surely there’s scope to speed up the conveyancing process by:

• removing the need for two solicitors to review and deal with the same documents and
• not losing time in communication between solicitors.

SRA code of conduct

Indeed, historically, this firm, like many others, acted on property transactions for both parties, all the while adhering strictly to the Solicitors’ Regulation Authority (SRA) code of conduct governing conflict situations, whereby acting for both parties was allowed, provided they had a substantially common interest.

In these instances, we obtained authority from both the seller and buyer to act and implemented IT and other controls to ensure that the parties’ respective conveyancers – typically located in different offices – could not access each other’s files.

The Law Society

However, the Law Society – the solicitors’ professional association – issued guidance, clarifying that the “substantially common interest” exception does not apply to property sale and purchase transactions:

“The SRA’s exception for circumstances where the two clients have a “substantially common interest” does not apply to a property purchase. Although both clients will have a common interest in completing the sale, they also have different interests, since one is buying and one is selling.”

As a result, a decision was necessarily made to immediately cease accepting instructions from buyers and sellers in property transactions, even when both parties are established clients of the firm.  Unfortunately, the potential for conflict to arise is just too great, putting us in an unnecessarily risky situation.