Getting myself sued for libel

Okay, if I check the dictionary this is not actually libel since I can back it all up. I'd like to say that my experience with Laurich and Associates for the purchase of my house has gone less than ideally. I do realize that we've been living here for eight months but there are reasons I've come to this conclusion at this time.

I used the same lawyer for buying a condo in the summer of 2005 and everything went fine. Since I had a name for a lawyer who'd done a good job for an average unreasonable price, I thought I'd use the same lawyer again. Of course, that's when things stopped going smoothly.

The first problem was that the lawyer had moved his office seemly due to a split with his partner. The previous office was conveniently located downtown near my work. The new office is in a house in Bridgeland which is not convenient since it's neither near work nor home. It's also a good five to ten minutes on foot from the closest C-Train station. Have you realized that eight months prior to this post was January so walking isn't always nice. If I remember my first house sale correctly, I visited their offices once or twice for a signature. For this transaction, I visited four times and had to get Ying downtown twice. The extra visits were for typos which had to be corrected and then initialled or signed by us or to avoid being charged the lawyer-standard $10 for a 50¢ stamp. The mistakes were just the ones they caught while not in our presence. They also found a good number while in our presence. Our initial run through of the sales agreement went something like this:

lawyer: "this first page just shows the address of the property you're buying"
me: "that's not the correct address. We're buying a house in the NW and that's an address in the South. Also, that seller's name wasn't on the documents from our realtor.
lawyer: "yes, that doesn't match the address on the cover page. I'll have to get this page retyped. Just wait a moment."

The lawyer should also have a professionalism talk with his staff. The girl he has answering the phones is nice but not at all organized and doesn't conduct herself as I expect someone who works the phones for a lawyer should. On the phone, she mentioned a few times her lack of organizing her files, noticed some more of her typos and referred to me as, "hun" a number of times. She seems to be just out of college but I'm not aware of what she studied.

I'll get to talk with her some more on Monday though. Due to the crazy pace of buying and selling in the Calgary real estate market, Land Titles has been a little behind in processing everything. I didn't think they were eight month behind but I guess they were. Two weeks ago, we finally got the legal description of our property. Last week, we got a surprise of almost $200 back from the lawyer. We were surprised since we received a final tally months ago; two months or so after I had to make a trip to the lawyer's office to pick up the money from the sale of our condo. A bigger surprise came today when I noticed on my on-line banking that the $200 had been taken back out of my account. I have other issues with the Royal Bank wanting $1.50 to show me the details of a transaction on-line but that can wait for another day when they finish the job pissing me off and I switch banks. It appears that the lawyer has written a bad cheque. I'll be going through their math tomorrow after my bike race, incase there are more errors in my favour, so that I don't have to phone them more than once to complain. I've already wasted hours of my day travelling to his office so that I can verify that I'm aware of mistakes in legal documents.

When lawyers openly write on your bill that they incurred massive costs for photocopying and local telephone calls, you'd think they'd have enough money in their bank accounts to cover a $200 cheque. It's not even his money! The $200 is the amount they overcharged me on the Land Titles fee and are returning eight months after we moved in.