Before You Instruct a UK Lease Extension Solicitor:
I’ll be blunt. Most leaseholders spend more time choosing a new sofa than choosing the solicitor who’ll handle one of the most expensive legal transactions they’ll ever make on their home.
I get why. Lease extensions sound dry. The paperwork is dense, the jargon is worse, and when you finally work out that your lease is getting short, the instinct is to ring the first firm that pops up in a search and get it sorted. But the solicitor you pick has a direct bearing on how much you pay, how long the process drags on and whether you end up in front of a tribunal you never needed to visit.
A lease extension isn’t a standard conveyancing job. It runs on a strict statutory timetable under the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act 1993, with notices, counter-notices and deadlines that can’t be fudged. Miss one and your claim can collapse. Pick a firm that treats it as a sideline, and you’ll often pay for the privilege of them learning on your file.
So before you sign an engagement letter, I think you should put the firm through its paces. These are the seven questions I’d ask any lease extension solicitor, why each one matters, and what a good answer sounds like. None of them are trick questions. A competent specialist will answer every one without blinking. If they can’t, that tells you everything.
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1. Is lease extension work your specialism, or one of many things you do?
This is the question I’d ask first, and I’d listen carefully to how it’s answered.
Plenty of high street firms will happily take on a lease extension. Their conveyancing team does house sales, remortgages, transfers of equity and, now and then, a lease extension. There’s nothing wrong with those firms, but there’s a world of difference between a solicitor who handles a couple of statutory lease extensions a year and one who handles them every week.
Why does that matter? Because the statutory process is unforgiving. Under the 1993 Act, your claim starts with a Section 42 notice. The notice has to contain the right information, propose a premium that’s realistic, and be served correctly on the right landlord, which isn’t always as obvious as it sounds. If there’s an intermediate landlord, a head lease or a management company in the mix, the picture gets complicated quickly.
A specialist will have seen most of these traps before. A generalist might be finding them for the first time on your file.
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What I’d want to hear:
- Roughly how many lease extensions they handle each year, and what share of their work that is
- Whether they deal with both statutory and informal extensions routinely
- Whether they act for leaseholders, freeholders or both (a firm that acts for both often understands the other side’s tactics very well)
- Examples of awkward cases they’ve handled, such as missing freeholders, multiple landlords or disputed valuations
If the answer is vague, along the lines of “oh, we do all sorts of property work”, I’d treat that as a polite no. You want someone for whom a Section 42 notice is routine, not an event.
2. Is your fee fixed, and what exactly does it include?
Here’s where I get opinionated. In my view, hourly billing on a lease extension is rarely in the leaseholder’s interest.
I understand the argument for it. Every case is different, and a firm can’t know at the outset whether the freeholder will roll over or fight every point. But an hourly rate puts all of that uncertainty on you. The longer the matter runs, the more emails get sent and the more letters get drafted, the bigger your bill. There’s no built-in reason for anyone to get it done efficiently.
A fixed fee flips that. The firm takes on the risk of the work running long, so it has every reason to run a tight, well-organised process. You know what you’re paying before you start, which matters when you’re also budgeting for the premium itself.
But, and this is a big but, a fixed fee is only as good as its small print. I’ve seen quotes that look attractive until you realise they cover the notice and very little else. So ask the firm to spell out what’s in and what’s out:
- Is the Section 42 notice and its service included?
- Is reviewing the counter-notice and negotiating the premium included?
- Is drafting and agreeing the new lease or deed of variation included?
- Is completion and registration at HM Land Registry included?
- What happens if the case goes to tribunal? Is there a separate fixed fee, or does it switch to hourly?
- Is the surveyor’s valuation part of the price, or a separate bill?
- Is VAT included in the figure you’ve been quoted?
Also ask about disbursements. Land Registry fees, official copies of the title and courier costs are modest, but they should be listed up front, not tacked on at the end.
The headline number matters less than how complete it is. A slightly higher fixed fee that genuinely covers the whole job is usually far better value than a cheap quote that unravels the moment the freeholder pushes back.
3. Who does the valuation, and how closely will you work with them?
This is the question most people forget to ask, and I think it’s the one that has the biggest effect on what you end up paying.
A lease extension has two halves. There’s the legal side, which your solicitor handles: the notices, the deadlines, the new lease. And there’s the valuation side, which a surveyor handles: working out the premium you should offer, based on the value of the flat, the unexpired term, the ground rent, and the deferment and capitalisation rates. If your lease has 80 years or less left, marriage value comes into it too, and that can add thousands to the bill.
The two halves are tightly linked. The premium proposed in your Section 42 notice has to be realistic, and it needs to be grounded in a proper valuation from a RICS-qualified surveyor with leasehold experience. Pitch it too low and you risk the notice being challenged as invalid. Pitch it too high and you’ve set a ceiling you’ll never get below in negotiations.
In the traditional model, you instruct a solicitor and a surveyor separately. That can work, but it puts you in the middle. You’re passing documents between them, chasing each for updates and trying to work out who’s responsible when something stalls. When the freeholder’s surveyor comes back with a counter-proposal, your solicitor and your surveyor need to be talking to each other, quickly, not via you.
So ask:
- Do you work with a surveyor you recommend, or will I need to find my own?
- Is the surveyor RICS-qualified, and do they specialise in lease extension valuations?
- How do you and the surveyor share information and agree on strategy?
- Who negotiates the premium with the freeholder’s side: you, the surveyor, or both together?
In my experience, the smoothest lease extensions are the ones where solicitor and surveyor operate as a single team. Everyone sees the same file, and nothing falls through the gap between two separate firms.
4. Statutory or informal: which route would you recommend for me, and why?
There are two ways to extend a lease. You can use the statutory route under the 1993 Act, or you can negotiate an informal deal directly with your freeholder. A good solicitor should be able to explain the trade-offs for your situation in plain English, not just default to whichever route suits their workflow.
Under the statutory route, you currently get an extra 90 years added to your existing term, and the ground rent drops to a peppercorn, which in practice means zero. The process is protected by law. If you and the freeholder can’t agree terms, the First-tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) in England, or the Leasehold Valuation Tribunal in Wales, can decide them for you.
The informal route can be quicker and sometimes cheaper on fees. But it has no statutory protection, and the freeholder can put almost anything on the table. I’ve seen informal offers that extend the lease by 50 years and keep a ground rent that doubles every 25 years, which can leave a flat difficult to mortgage or sell. A “friendly offer” from a freeholder isn’t always as friendly as it looks.
A good lease extension solicitor will also be straight with you about leasehold reform. The Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024 is law, but most of its lease extension changes aren’t in force yet. The two-year ownership requirement was scrapped on 31 January 2025, so you can now start a statutory claim as soon as you buy. But the headline valuation reforms, including 990-year extensions and the abolition of marriage value, still haven’t been commenced, and the government has been consulting on the valuation rates during 2026.
That leaves many leaseholders asking whether to wait. My view is that waiting is a gamble, especially if your lease is approaching 80 years. Ask the solicitor how they see the timing for your specific lease, and be wary of anyone who gives you a confident prediction about when the reforms will land. Nobody knows for certain.
5. How much will the freeholder’s costs be, and how will you keep them in check?
This one catches people out every single time. When you budget for a lease extension, you’re not just paying your own solicitor and surveyor. Under the current rules, you also pay the freeholder’s reasonable legal and valuation costs.
That comes from Section 60 of the 1993 Act. It covers the freeholder’s reasonable costs of investigating your claim, valuing the flat and granting the new lease. It doesn’t usually cover costs the freeholder runs up at the tribunal, where each side generally bears its own. The 2024 Act is meant to change this picture, and the government has consulted on legal costs this year, but for now the old rule still applies.
The key word is reasonable. Some freeholders, particularly the large institutional ones, use firms that charge eye-watering hourly rates and expect the leaseholder to pick up the tab. A good lease extension solicitor will push back on inflated bills, and they’ll know what a sensible figure looks like because they see these bills all the time.
Questions worth asking:
- In your experience, what do freeholders’ costs typically come to on a case like mine?
- Do you know this freeholder, or their solicitors, and how they tend to behave?
- Will you challenge the costs if they look excessive?
- Will you ask the freeholder’s solicitors for a costs estimate early on, or try to agree a cap, so I’m not exposed to an open-ended bill?
You won’t always get a precise figure. But a solicitor who has never thought about this, or who shrugs and says “it is what it is”, isn’t one I’d trust to protect my wallet. Freeholders’ costs can add a significant chunk to the overall bill, so it deserves proper attention from the start.
6. What happens if it goes to tribunal, and how do you manage the deadlines?
Most lease extensions settle without a hearing. But you want a solicitor who prepares every case as though it might not, because that’s what keeps the freeholder honest in negotiations.
The statutory timetable is where cases are won and lost. Once your Section 42 notice is served, the freeholder has a deadline, set in your notice and at least two months away, to serve a counter-notice. If terms still aren’t agreed, your side can apply to the tribunal no earlier than two months after the counter-notice and no later than six months after it. Miss that six-month window and your notice is treated as withdrawn. You’d then usually be liable for the freeholder’s costs to that point, and barred from serving a fresh notice for 12 months.
That’s a painful and entirely avoidable outcome. Yet it happens, usually because someone was relying on an informal negotiation to wrap up and forgot the statutory clock was still ticking.
There’s a flip side too. If the freeholder fails to serve a valid counter-notice in time, you may be able to apply to the county court for the lease extension on the terms in your own notice. A sharp solicitor spots that kind of opportunity. A sloppy one misses it.
What I’d ask:
- How do you track statutory deadlines? Is there a diary system, and does more than one person monitor it?
- How many of your cases have gone to tribunal, and how did they turn out?
- Will you protect my position by applying to the tribunal while negotiations continue, if needed?
- If it goes to a hearing, who represents me, and what does that cost?
I’d be suspicious of any firm that claims it never goes to tribunal. Either it isn’t doing many lease extensions, or it’s settling cases on terms that favour the freeholder just to avoid the hassle.
7. Who will actually handle my file, and how will you keep me updated?
It’s a classic. You speak to a partner on the first call, they sound brilliant, and then your file disappears to a junior colleague you never hear from again. I’m not against junior lawyers doing the work. Supervised properly, they’re often excellent and keep costs down. But you deserve to know who’s doing what before you sign up.
Lease extensions can take anywhere from a few months to well over a year, depending on whether the freeholder engages and whether the case ends up at tribunal. That’s a long time to be left wondering what’s going on. Poor communication is, in my experience, the number one complaint leaseholders have about this process, more than fees and more than the premium itself.
Ask the firm:
- Who will be my day-to-day contact, and are they regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority?
- Who supervises them, and how do I reach that person if something goes wrong?
- How often will I get updates, and in what form?
- Can I track progress online, or will I need to chase by email?
- What’s your typical response time for a query?
A quick tip: check the firm on the SRA’s register. It takes two minutes and confirms the firm is properly regulated and insured. It’s a small step, but it gives you real protection if things go wrong.
And trust your gut. If the firm is slow to reply when it’s trying to win your business, it won’t get faster once you’ve signed the engagement letter.
How Extension.Lease answers these questions
Several of the questions above come back to the same underlying problem. Leaseholders are usually forced to coordinate two separate professionals, a solicitor and a surveyor, on two separate bills, with nobody clearly in charge of the whole job.
Extension.Lease was set up to remove that problem. It brings RICS-qualified surveyors and SRA-regulated solicitors together under one service, so the valuation and the legal work are handled as a single, joined-up process rather than two parallel ones.
For leaseholders, that has several practical benefits:
- One fixed fee. The surveyor’s valuation and the legal work sit under a single fixed price, which makes the overall cost far easier to plan for.
- One team. The surveyor and the lease extension solicitor share the same file, so the premium in the Section 42 notice is grounded in the valuation and negotiations are run with both sides of the case in view.
- Specialist focus. Lease extensions are the core of the service, not an occasional add-on to general conveyancing.
- Fewer handovers. The leaseholder isn’t left relaying documents and messages between two firms, which reduces delays and the risk of a deadline slipping through the gap.
The combined model doesn’t change the law or the freeholder’s behaviour. But it does mean the seven questions above have clear answers from day one: who’s valuing, who’s negotiating, what it costs, and who’s responsible for keeping the statutory clock in check.
The bottom line
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: don’t choose a lease extension solicitor on price alone, and don’t choose one in a hurry.
The cheapest quote isn’t the cheapest outcome if it leaves out half the work, misjudges the premium or lets a deadline slide. On a short lease, the difference between a well-run claim and a badly run one can easily run into thousands of pounds, and that’s before you count the stress.
Here are the seven questions again, so you can keep them handy when you start ringing round:
- Is lease extension work your specialism?
- Is your fee fixed, and what does it include?
- Who does the valuation, and how closely do you work together?
- Statutory or informal: which do you recommend for me, and why?
- What will the freeholder’s costs be, and how will you control them?
- What happens if it goes to tribunal, and how do you manage deadlines?
- Who handles my file, and how will you keep me updated?
A good firm will welcome these questions. Specialists like being asked things that let them show what they know. If a firm gets defensive or vague, you’ve learnt something valuable before spending a penny.
Your lease won’t get any longer while you think about it. Every year that ticks by pushes the premium up, and once you drop below 80 years, marriage value makes it climb faster still. So do your homework, ask the awkward questions, and then get on with it.