RECOMMENDATION MASKS AN ILLEGAL PRACTICE

Ever since the coming of the EU clients several years ago I and my colleagues see the same thing. Buyers rely on real estate agents to choose a lawyer for them. Agents recommend a particular lawyer, the buyer knows none in Bulgaria and he accepts this one. Besides, a buyer expects that everything has to be taken care of by the agent.

The lawyer chosen in this way knows that he better be loyal to the agent rather than to the buyer. He is an inside-house lawyer of the agent and he has been recommended by the latter for a reason. The reason is that this lawyer will never forget that the buyers come and go, but the agent stays and that it is the agent who decides whether a particular attorney at law will have clients among the Irish buyers or not. It is like this because the agent is the first person a buyer from Ireland or from UK comes in contact with and therefore it is the agent who hands out the jobs to lawyers, movers, translators and furniture suppliers.

That's why Article 40, Paragraph 5 and Article 41 the Bar association act expressly forbids lawyers to use middlemen in order to find clients. That norm is put there precisely in order to protect lawyer's clients. If a lawyer is dependent on a third person, he might be influenced when performing his contractual obligations to his client. So whenever a Westerner buying real property in Bulgaria uses a lawyer recommended to him by an agent, this westerner unknowingly participates in an unlawful activity. However this activity is widespread in Bulgaria. It can't be otherwise as the very person who would benefit if it is discontinued actually participates in it! Because of this the lawyers are silent or else they would lose the agent's favor and therefore the buyer's favor! As the Roman sentence goes, the rights of a person are not infringed if this person agrees his rights to be infringed.

The agent-lawyer relationship resembles quasi-employment. And to be employed is another thing the Bar association act forbids lawyers to be. The reasons are the same.

Because the lawyers are not independent, but chosen by the agents, the agents can push their standards down. This is good news for the agent and bad news for the buyer. This is how it is possible for someone, who has studied fine arts or computer design to take legal decisions. Imagine you are a doctor. You examine the patient but beside you is a tailor giving you orders: don't make an injection to this patient, the x-raying is uncalled for but a new suit is definitely needed! A buyer would never imagine the fantastic situation where the competent and the responsible is a puppet in the hands of the incompetent and of the irresponsible. And yet the agent is the one person who enjoys buyer's trust.

The picture painted on the agent's website is easy and rosy. The only problem with this picture is that the flats there are virtual. Whether these will come into being depends on what the preliminary contract says, not on the quality of the website animation. But buyers surf sites, not contracts.