Client care at GoodyBurrett

Client care at GoodyBurrett

Client care at GoodyBurrett

Client care is so important to us here at GoodyBurrett. Not only is it the right thing to do and we want to keep our clients happy, but there are also Statutory Requirements in relation to client care.

Delivery – We want to ensure that at the end of your matter, we arrive at the final outcome having kept our promises to you, our client.

Timeliness – We strive to do everything in a timely manner. If we are going to face delays due to outside influences beyond our control, you will be kept informed.

Keeping you informed – We will always provide you with comprehensive and accurate information in relation to your matter as and when we receive it.

Professionalism – Your matter will be dealt with by staff that are competent, knowledgeable, professional and client focused, who have a thorough understanding of your matter.

Staff attitude – All of our staff are approachable, friendly, and understanding of your needs. We will assist you in an open and transparent way.

At GoodyBurrett we have our Golden Principles:

# PUT YOURSELF IN THE CUSTOMER’S SITUATION – Have compassion and try to understand what the client is going through whilst remaining objective.

# FIND THE REAL ISSUE AND WHAT THE CLIENT NEEDS – Good communication skills are paramount along with the ability to listen to your client and really understand what the real issue is for them.

# INVOLVE THE CLIENT IN THE ANSWER – Talk to your client and understand their goals and outcomes.

# ACCEPT ACCOUNTABILITY – If there is a problem or an issue, personally deal with the problem as soon as you are aware of it.

# FOLLOW UP – if there has been a problem or an issue arise, once resolved, always make sure you check that the client is now satisfied.

In the words of Bill Gates,“ Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”. If we do not know what is wrong, we can’t fix it and learn from it. However, if we do not know what is right, we can’t do more of it. If there is something you are unhappy about, we need to hear from you to enable us to solve the issue. BUT … if there is something we are doing great, please do shout out to us and let us know, we’d love to hear from you too.

We are always here to help.  You can contact us via email [email protected] or call us on 01206 577676.

We are always here to help

Contact GoodyBurrett on 01206 577676 or email [email protected]

Bryan Johnston  – Former senior and managing partner

Bryan Johnston – Former senior and managing partner

Bryan Johnston

Our former senior and managing partner has moved further along track to become a Consultant to the firm. 

Bryan was appointed a partner in 1998 and has over the last two decades made his mark in Colchetser and North Essex. He has been  President of the Colchester Committee of the Essex  Chamber of Commerce. He has sat on the employers committee of NEST the Government Pension organisation. He has been Chairman of the Essex Committee of ABF the Soldier’s Charity. Bryan also  sat on the board that successfuly brought the BID to Colchester. Bryan  had a play performed at the Brentwood Theatre and whilst he  will remain involved as a Colchester Ambassador and be on the Board of the Mercury Theatre during their multi-millian pound redevelopment  he wants more time with Wendy to write, trek, sail and travel-covid permitting.

If you would like any advice from our Family department

Contact GoodyBurrett on 01206 577676 or email [email protected]

Coronavirus: An update on evictions and re-possessions

Coronavirus: An update on evictions and re-possessions

Coronavirus: An update on evictions and re-possessions

During the pandemic, the Government put certain restrictions in place to prevent evictions and possessions of properties.  Hence, protecting tenants who may struggle to pay bills during lockdown.  The Court, however, are now starting to handle these cases and new procedures have been in place for when a landlord choses to evict a tenant.  If you are a landlord, there are numerous rules and regulations you should have in mind.

The Coronavirus Act 2020 has more recently been amended by The Coronavirus Act 2020 (Tenancies: Protection from Eviction) (Amendment) Regulations 2020 and means the eviction ban ended on the 20th September 2020.  However, the rules have significantly changed:

  • Prior to 26th March 2020, a Landlord was only required to give 2 months’ notice when serving a S21 Notice;
  • Any notices served on tenants between 26th March 2020 and 29th August 2020 required at least 3 months’ notice to given;
  • Now, since 29th August 2020, landlords must give 6 months’ notice under S21 to terminate an Assured Shorthold Tenancy – a restriction which is now in place until 31st March 2021.

 

Help for Tenants

In light of the above, there are numerous ways that landlords can or will act illegally when seeking to evict tenants or when seeking to implement a rent increase.  If you are a tenant and want to understand your rights in more detail, do not hesitate to contact someone in our litigation team.  If you feel you have been treated illegally by your landlord, we would recommend the following:-

  1. Speak to your landlord as soon as possible. They may arrange a rent repayment plan if you are struggling or in arrears.  Your landlord may be willing to not evict you and allow you to pay less rent.
  2. Gather all evidence, including rent paid and when – communications with your landlord. If you or your income has been affected by Covid-19 make sure to flag it up as soon as possible.
  3. Double check that any notice given by your landlord is valid and the correct notice period has been given depending on the date you received. (See above).

 

Landlord

It is important that if you are a landlord, you are acting cautiously in terms of a notice period and providing a tenant with all the information required under a S21 notice.   With the law changing rapidly, if you are ever unsure of what notice period you should be giving when evicting a tenant, you should seek independent legal advice.

If you are a landlord who requires advice on what to do next in relation to eviction proceedings, or a tenant who is facing eviction, please contact the GoodyBurrett Civil Litigation team on 01206 577676 or email [email protected]

If you would like any advice from our Family department

Contact GoodyBurrett on 01206 577676 or email [email protected]

“A Plan for the Employment Sector”

“A Plan for the Employment Sector”

Government Announcements- “A Plan for the Employment Sector”

The Chancellor has set out a plan for jobs that will see to it that the employment sector recovers from the Corona Virus outbreak thereby aiding the UK economy.

The government has broken these down into four (4) main areas of focus being: –

  • A plan for jobs
  • Supporting jobs
  • Creating jobs
  • Protecting jobs

We will examine each of these in turn: –

A plan for Jobs

This is the second part of the three-phase plan to secure the economy of the country. It must be borne in mind that the first stage was a £160 billion support package which also included £49 billion of more funding for the country’s vital public services, paying the wages of approximately 12 million people and also supporting viable businesses through grant schemes, various types of loans and rates cuts.

Seeing as the country is now entering into the second phase in its recovery, governments new plans are designed to focus more on skills and young people, investing into shovel ready projects in order to boost the employment sector immediately, a VAT cut for the hospitality sector, amongst other things.

Looking on- the third phase will focus on rebuilding and there will be a budget and spending review in the autumn.

Supporting Jobs

This is a huge one for the government. They have made it abundantly clear that a job retention bonus will be introduced to help firms keep furloughed workers. As part of this commitment- UK Employers will receive £1000 for every furloughed worker that is kept on as of 31st January 2021.

Also, there will be a £2billion kickstart scheme which will be used to create fully subsidised jobs for young people across the country. If you are aged 16-24, claiming universal credit and at risk of been unemployed for a long period of time- then you will be eligible for this type of scheme. Furthermore, the funding available for each six-month job placement will cover 100% of the National Minimum Wage and Employers are free to top this up if the business is in a position to.

Besides this- a total of £1.6 billion will be invested in growing and harnessing employment support schemes to assist people who are looking for jobs. For example- businesses will be given £2000 for each new apprentice that they hire under the age of 25. This is in addition to various other schemes that are aimed at supporting young people who are entering the job market at such a tumultuous time.

Creating jobs

The plan will also create tens of thousands of jobs through bringing forward work on £8.8 billion of new infrastructure, decarbonisation and maintenance projects.

Protecting jobs

The government is aware that the tourism and hospitality sectors are massive employers in the UK and this pandemic has severely affected their sector. It is estimated that about 80% of hospitality firms stopped trading in April 2020 and over a million workers in this sector have been furloughed.

Once these sectors open- the government has made it a priority to ensure that there is enough demand for these businesses to safely reopen and to also recover thereby keeping employment afloat. Therefore, to encourage people to safely return to eating out at restaurants the Government’s new Eat Out to Help Out discount scheme will provide a 50% reduction for sit-down meals in cafes, restaurants and pubs across the UK from Monday to Wednesday every week throughout August 2020.

We will aim to keep you posted as the government’s plans continue to develop as far as the Employment Sector is concerned.

If you have any employment concerns, click here to contact our Litigation Department.

Mumba Chakulya

Solicitor- Litigation Department

 

If you have any questions on the above points

Contact GoodyBurrett on 01206 577676 or email [email protected]

Being a Trainee during Lockdown – We’re all in this together!

Being a Trainee during Lockdown – We’re all in this together!

Being a Trainee during Lockdown – We’re all in this together!

I’m a paralegal here at GoodyBurrett, soon to be completing my LPC and moving onto the next steps of becoming a trainee.  There are thousands of trainees in the UK starting or in the midst of completing their training contract in a very rare situation – during a global pandemic!  So, what’s different about being a trainee solicitor during coronavirus?

The main change for starters is working from home! GoodyBurrett are now fully operating from the comforts of their sofa and sometimes even their dressing gowns… We have gone from a busy office space to working independently without the luxury of being able to pop your head into a colleague’s office.  Interactions between my colleagues and I are now held through telephone calls, zoom calls and emails rather than arranging a face to face meeting or enjoying a coffee morning.  This change has meant that this period of my career, where I am learning the most, has been extremely different to other solicitors that have trained in previous years.

As a paralegal, completing my LPC whilst at a firm, this means I have the opportunity to learn brand new areas of law and get a feel for what it will be like when I become a trainee.  Our mission is to learn as much as we can in each area of a new law in a few months, and the world of coronavirus has presented this experience on a whole new level.

I have found this period to be challenging.  I am not just able to pop my head into a partner’s office and quickly ask a question.  I am not able to have a quick chat with a solicitor about their opinion on something as I walk past their door.  Instead I have had to be flexible and patient, and sometimes wait a few hours for a response to a question if someone is busy or on a call.  I have come to appreciate more than ever how important the flexibility within my role has been to my teams.  Not only do I need to be available for everyday research or drafting for solicitors, but I also need to have an understanding on administrative tasks such as bundling or costs retrieval.  The benefits are that I am learning a lot faster than I would have done in an office space and have become more independent, instead of relying on asking too many questions!  In the long term, I know my training will be better for it.

So, if you are a fellow paralegal, currently studying, or a fellow trainee, nervous and struggling whilst working during a pandemic, we’re all in this together!  In the long term, it will make you a more flexible, forward-thinking and mindful solicitor.

The rapid global spread of coronavirus presents unprecedented legal and commercial challenges for all businesses.  GoodyBurrett is committed to supporting clients and keeping our normal working hours through the challenges the pandemic presents.  Please feel free to still call our main line on 01206 577 676 to contact us here.

If you have any questions about the GoodyBurrett trainee application process, or managing working from home, you can email us at [email protected] or take a look at our other blog posts here.

Sydney Window

 

If we can help you in anyway please

Contact GoodyBurrett on 01206 577676 or email [email protected]

I am not going mad in lock down..

I am not going mad in lock down..

I have the brain of a genius-I keep it in a jar on my desk.

The Tabula rasa or blank state hypothesis is that people are born with no genetic, innate or evolutionary content. Rather they are an empty disc onto which their life is written by experience, learning, example and their environment.

In 1950 the famous code breaker and mathematician Alan Turing came up with the “Turing test” for Artificial intelligence: “a computer could be called intelligent if it could deceive a human into believing it was human”. BIG BLUE the IBM Computer beat Grand Masters to be a chess champion but it was PARRY that was the most successful. PARRY pretended to be paranoid and was questioned by a group of psychiatrists. The results were revealing: none of the group would believe that they were dealing with a computer even when they were introduced to it. The transcripts were later mixed with genuine paranoid patients’ records and sent to psychiatrists, none of whom could distinguish between the two.

In the 1970’s eight “normal” healthy researchers gained access to American mental hospitals by reporting only one symptom; that “they were hearing voices”. Once in the institutions they behaved entirely normally. Seven were diagnosed as schizophrenic. When they “came clean” and admitted their guise it took almost three weeks to get them released. Sometime later the same researchers told the same institutions that there were other “fake” patients trying to gain access. The result was that 19 genuine patients were suspected of fraud. The conclusion being that it is difficult to distinguish between the sane and insane.

In 2011 in converted car park in Moscow six” astronauts” lived in a small isolation pod finding out what a nine-month journey to Mars would be like. They arrived home in the November having spent more than a year and a half “in space”. All contact with the outside world was by radio and there was a significant delay as the signal moves from the earth to the “car park.” The results will go some way to determining the likely psychological and physical demands of such a journey

So here’s the rub, in 2020 in lock down , when my computer crashes, when my iphone freezes or when I lose the signal between my home desk top and the GoodyBurrett server it could simply be the technology but then again it could be a schizophrenic, a paranoid or even a psychiatrist any of whom could be living in my garage!   I am not going crazy!

Bryan C Johnston

If we can help you during lockdown with any legal questions

Contact GoodyBurrett on 01206 577676 or email [email protected]