A ‘Guardian’ of your legal needs? Hardly...
Mrs M.G. writes: Mike Carter, the director of Guardian Legal Limited, came to our house in July 2017 to discuss mirror wills, children’s trusts and lasting powers of attorney. As his office was closed, he insisted we pay £3,619 by cheque, rather than by card the next day. Subsequently, after some research, we changed our minds and cancelled within the allowed 14-day cooling-off period. Guardian Legal said we would be repaid on September 7, 2017, but no repayment arrived on that day or on any day since.
YOU have had an extraordinary battle to try to get your money back. You and your husband travelled to Guardian Legal’s head office in Huntingdon, only to find that it was not really there. The address was a maildrop.
You contacted the company’s registered office at Chatteris in Cambridgeshire, but that turned out to be just the address of accountants who acted for Guardian. You sued Guardian and won a court order instructing the company to pay you a total of £4,084. Yet you have still not received a penny.
What can anyone think, when a firm that holds itself out as being part of the legal profession ignores a court order? On Facebook, Guardian is described as an ‘estate planning solicitor in Huntingdon’. But it is neither a firm of solicitors nor is it in Huntingdon.
The fact is that Guardian is yet another example of the unregulated legal sector inhabited by firms that carry out work that needs no qualifications. Anyone can draft a will, a trust deed, or a power of attorney. They can charge what they like – often far more than someone who is legally qualified.
I contacted Mike Carter last month. His company currently says on its website that its offices are in Peterborough, but in fact they are 90 miles away in Scunthorpe. On his own page on the LinkedIn business website, Carter says that he lives in Spain, where he runs a property firm.
Carter told me: ‘We have never portrayed ourselves as being solicitors.’
He cannot change his company’s Facebook page that claims this, because the staff member who had the login details has left. As for living in Spain, he explained: ‘I am surprised you think I live there.’ He has been back in Britain since 2013, he added.
Yet on LinkedIn, he says he ‘now owns and runs Benimar Villas’, and that he lives ‘about 30 minutes south of Alicante’. Perhaps the staff member who wrote this for him has also quit, taking the login details too. No matter. Carter assured me that he acknowledges the debt. Guardian suffered a huge downturn in its finances, he told me, but he has turned things around. ‘I expect the refund to be in place by the end of January,’ he said confidently.
Well, you and I waited, and the end of January came but the refund did not. Carter now says: ‘The past debts of the company, including the payment to Mr and Mrs G, are part of a Company Voluntary Arrangement currently being arranged. I had thought this repayment system would have started by the end of January, sadly it has been delayed a few weeks.’
Of course, this is nothing like his pledge to repay you by the end of January. A CVA is an attempt to keep a company trading when it is insolvent. It needs creditors owed at least 75 per cent of the company’s debts to agree to be paid in instalments.
Guardian has failed to file accounts that were legally due months ago, so I have no idea how bad its financial situation might be. But even if creditors do accept a CVA, there is a risk that Guardian will then take on more clients and use their up-front fees to pay off older creditors.
Carter is no stranger to this situation. He worked for a very similar company called Indeed Law Limited, which went bust two years ago. Indeed Law itself took over from an earlier company, Direct Law 4U.
In 2015, I reported the collapse of Direct Law 4U and warned that Indeed Law was its successor. Nothing has changed since then. The legal merry-goround continues and the victims continue to fall into the clutches of the overpriced and underqualified.
Four years ago I wrote: ‘Sooner or later, some official, somewhere, must surely clamp down on this.’ Along with every other consumer in the country, I am still waiting.