The letter of the law
I have had dealings with a few solicitors in the past.
To the best of my memory I have had three different firms acting on my behalf for various reasons.
The third firm was in the village. Well, when I say “firm” I mean just a one woman show. She was grand and saw us through a load of legal shit when we moved here. As she was involved with the move, she held on to the Deeds to The Manor. We also made an updated Will seeing as we were now land owners on a grand scale.
A couple of years ago we got a very nice letter from the village solicitor to say she was retiring and shutting down the practice. She casually mentioned that all her business had been handed over to a Mob the other side of Skobieville, and that if we wanted any documents I should approach them.
Not long after, a new solicitor’s office opened in the village. It was actually a branch office for a big firm in Dublin. It seemed kind of logical to move my business there should I need any legal representation. Life in Ireland is so fucking litigious that one never knows when one might need legal advice, or indeed representation.
To start the ball rolling I banged off an email to the Far Off Mob just asking if they did indeed have my Deeds and Will. They wrote back and said they couldn’t possibly tell me whether they had or not unless I identified myself. [*sigh*] I wrote back with scans of my driving licence and a current bill. Actually It wasn’t a bill as I don’t get any of those these days so I sent off a letter addressed to me from Revenue.
I never heard any more. Maybe they had written to Revenue asking for identification?
I contacted the new solicitor in the village. Would she like my business? Of course she would! I told her about my papers being in a black hole in the other Mob’s cellar, and how I was having difficulty accessing them or even finding out if they existed. She said she would write to them and ask them to send everything back to the village where papers should be kept.
I got an email during the week. The Mob had written back to her saying they couldn’t possibly release any papers without the appropriate methods of identification. I won’t repeat what my new solicitor said about them as it would probably land both of us in court. I pointed out that the only reason for the latest demand was that the Mob didn’t trust my new friend and were either assuming she didn’t know who I was or else she was performing some scam or other on her own behalf.
I decided the only way through this little logjam was to drive all the way over to the Mob and demand my papers so I could bring them back myself. I got my new solicitor to write to them telling them I would be driving over and that they had better have the papers ready for me.
I haven’t gone yet. I have to wait until my new solicitor can confirm that provocation would be a reasonable defence if I have to resort to the use of a baseball bat.
All my similar documents are kept on-site here in a fireproof safe, plus e-copies backed-up in the normal cycle. To allow anyone else to ‘store’ them is offering them up as future hostages, especially now as all the ‘security’ nonsense just helps them stay as hostages.
My advice would be to take them home, take your own precautions and stay in control.
I’m just pondering the necessity for the safe to be fire-proof. I suppose if the place burns to the ground it would be nice to have proof of ownership of the land and ruin?
It’s useful for keeping other valuable/flammable stuff too – like your stash of panic-bought bog-rolls for the next lock-down. If the Manor catches fire and you crap yourself, you’ll be glad of them.
Here in the UK now, physical title deeds are no longer crucial, the official legal title is that recorded at the Land Registry, a government institution, the old physical documents then become more of historic than legal interest. Mine go back almost 300 years, so feature lots of historical colour.
All true. I must keep some baccy in my safe as I’d need a pipe-full after a fire. My own deeds only go back about 270 years. They make interesting reading.
All our documents of this nature are in a safe deposit box in the local bank’s vault.
I had considered a safe in the house at one point but my memory being what it is; the combination would need to be engraved somewhere on the safe itself. This takes a great deal of the ‘secure’ out of security.