Bust legal firm's clients in home ownership battle

Judi Brown and her husband paid more than £3,000 to McClure solicitors

Clients of a law firm that collapsed have spoken about their years-long battle to regain ownership of their homes.

The collapse in 2021 of McClure saw some owners with homes in trusts struggling to sell them while others faced thousands of pounds in legal costs.

They include Judi Brown, who paid the Scotland-based solicitors more than £3,000 to set up a trust to take ownership of her house in Ludlow, Shropshire, to avoid possible future inheritance issues.

Mrs Brown said she was able to dissolve her trust and recover the additional costs, but worried others may not be as fortunate. Police Scotland have said however that no criminality had been established.

McClure had specialised in work such as wills and trusts and it is believed around 18,000 family protection trusts were taken out by people in England and Wales.

Trusts are used by thousands of people as a way of managing assets like property or money and some people set them up in the hope it will protect their home from being sold to pay for care home fees.

Mrs Brown said she and her husband set theirs up to avoid the possibility of something called "sideways disinheritance".

She said that is a situation in which a family can lose the right to their inheritance if one partner dies and another partner subsequently re-marries and then passes away.

At the time, she said they had "no reason to think there was any problem at all with that".

'We thought we want rid of it'

After putting a home into a trust, it is the trustees who own it but they have to follow the purpose for which it was set up.

In cases where McClure solicitors are still named as trustees on a client's home, they legally do not own the property and cannot sell it.

When the company went bust another firm called Jones Whyte took on its files.

Mrs Brown said they paid Jones Whyte to dissolve their trust agreement, using money they received from a complaint to the Legal Ombudsman.

Their house is now back in their own names and she said of the trust arrangement: "In the end we just thought we want rid of [it]."

But she added: "I'm lucky that I'm young enough, I've got enough time available, I've got the digital wherewithal to go online and research, to do these things for myself."

She said she believed older clients, including her parents generation, may be unable to do the same as her and would be left "very, very vulnerable".

Tom Sterling said he had "quite a traumatic time" trying to sell his home in order to move to Market Drayton

Tom Sterling, of Newcastle, Shropshire, also had his house placed in a trust by McClure and said he had "quite a traumatic time" when he tried to move house after the firm went bust.

He said he and his wife only realised there was a problem when they tried to sell the house and realised they couldn't, because the two trustees appointed by firm were registered as the owners.

Mr Sterling said his solicitors were unable to locate them, but he was able to track them down online.

His son contacted the pair, and persuaded them to sign paperwork to give Mr and Mrs Sterling control of their property again.

Mr Sterling said at one point he was "so stressed" he almost called the move to Market Drayton in Shropshire off, but his son convinced him to go ahead.

He encouraged others in similar positions to use the internet to contact their trustees.

McClure Solicitors was based in Greenock

The Solicitors' Regulation Authority (SRA), which is based in Birmingham, said it was monitoring Jones Whyte (JW), to "make sure that they are improving and meeting their commitments to clients".

It said it was concerned about the time it said JW had been taking to contact clients and address their queries and had placed the company on formal compliance plan.

'Changing regulatory environment'

JW said it had been working closely with the SRA on "agreed timescales to support previous clients of McClure", but disagreed it had taken too long.

"The situation is more complex than it would appear at first glance as a result of difficult circumstances following the McClure administration and a changing regulatory environment," a spokesperson said.

JW also said it was not a successor firm and McClure's former clients were free to instruct a solicitor of their choosing.

The former managing director of McClure previously denied any clients were misled to pay for a trust, and blamed the firm's demise on the Covid pandemic.

The Legal Ombudsman is dealing with complaints from McClure clients in England and Wales and the Scottish Legal Complaints Commission deals with complaints in Scotland.