Trustable lawyer

Don't rely on your lawyer (or the notary) doing all the work - make sure that you check EVERYTHING yourself. There's no real comeback if either (or both) of them screw up, and YOU will get the bill if something needs to corrected after the fact. It's also not unheard of for additional owners to appear out of the woodwork after a sale's gone through if the property in question was inherited. Recommendations for lawyers are like those for restaurants - you need to ask yourself if the person praising some chef can actually recognise good food when they see it; we all know what it's like the morning after a dodgy meal.....

Any translation is just for reference, only the original Bulgarian version counts and lawyers are rarely accredited translators anyway.

Utility/tax bills etc have to be settled before the sale is completed; the notary will check this.

I've bought and sold several properties in my two decades here and I have to say that I wouldn't recommend any of the "professionals" I've dealt with in that time. The best you can hope for is to light on one of the least bad ones.....

@Alex1959  I got a QC on speed dial out here, susses out the real deal for me down the shop on a pint of milk and eggs.

Alex mate you dont need a lawyer to check your bills. Daylight robbery that is. Get down to Easypay with the meter readings.  Job done.

@JimJ

It is impossible to miss any if the notary does a check with the inheritant document from the municipality is provided. Even if some somehow appear they can t claim the house, they can only sue each other, not the owner.

Our lawyers must be very poor if after studying years in university, their job is to check electricity bills for foreigners. It is true that only the crap lawyers without work get involved with foreigners buying houses. Good lawyers have lots of work in the legal system and its paid well, some are even visiting the property and measure the land and building size to confirm all is as written in the documents.

So if a lawyer is willing to do simple jobs like checking electricity bills they must be crap.

@Adriana Petrova

I think that something's been lost in translation, Adriana: no-one (or at least not I) was suggesting that the lawyer would be reading electricity meters etc.  My point was that the notary will check, by means of receipts furnished by the vendor, that all relevant bills have been paid up to the date of the notary act.

As for "Our lawyers must be very poor..", I can only say this:  I was a solicitor in London for a number of years and in the last 20 years here in Bulgaria I've had the "pleasure" of retaining probably 8 or 10 firms of lawyers for what I'd call pretty simple jobs.  I can say with my hand on my heart that they were indeed without exception "crap" - they were all inefficient and totally unprofessional, and every one of them asked to be paid either in cash or via a foreign bank account.  None was willing to give an official receipt.  Their work was unprofessional and shoddy - embarrassingly so - and not a single one would have lasted five minutes in any decent UK legal practice; indeed they would have been struck off by the Law Society for incompetence and malpractice.  The number of mistakes they made and problems they missed was staggering, even to someone unfamiliar with the Bulgarian legal system, such as it is. 

Frankly, I suspect that checking electricity bills is not so much beneath their dignity but more beyond the competence of the majority of them, despite their bombastic protestations that they know what they're doing.  I'm sure that there must be some who are good but who knows where they're hiding!

@JimJ Did you try any of the legal 500 firms in Bulgaria?.

Hello everyone,

@Alex1959, have you been able to find a professional ?

We would appreciate if you could provide an update.

All the best

Bhavna

@Zooldrool

Legal500 (and one or two other similar outfits) make their money from subscriptions and advertising by the law firms they rate - how much trust would YOU place in their entries?  They also tend to list mostly corporate law firms, hardly surprisingly since they aren't cheap - those are the most expensive firms to hire and they'll usually concentrate on their corporate clients at the expense of private ones.  There are also far too many young people becoming lawyers here - as academics, politicians and business people who need workers with skills in more useful disciplines regularly point out in the media.