As we’re past midsummer’s day, it’s time to start looking forward to Christmas and the annual pantomime visit. This year in Guildford it’s Cinderella with the usual array of characters; Cinders – the one who does all the work and never gets thanked. The evil step-mother who does everything to stop her going to the ball. Finally, the fairy godmother who makes everything alright by waving a magic wand.
You can see where I’m going with this.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen a return to the Punch and Judy show where agents criticise lawyers for being incompetent, lawyers getting upset about agents only caring about their commission and then someone pops up with their own karaoke version of “Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo”.
We didn’t have these pillow fights during the SDLT holiday because lots of deals were being done which took the pressure off individual deals. People were working harder than ever before, but if a deal fell through, another buyer could be found. With increased mortgage rates raising pressure on the fewer deals that are going through, this creates friction between parties.
We should not be surprised; saddened, but not surprised.
So what’s going on?
It’s completely understandable that everyone get frustrated with the conveyancing process. It’s not just clients, agents and brokers, but lawyers themselves who find it time-consuming and stressful. It gets even worse when we have “blue-on-blue” incidents and lawyers turn their frustration on each other that things really do spiral downwards.
Clearly, most cases go through without lawyers causing the continual mayhem some accuse them of. Yes, it’s usually slow and painful but people DO move house. It’s only when a lawyer goes on holiday on completion day, forgets to order the mortgage money or can’t find their client’s identification documents that the shortcomings of how the process is managed becomes highlighted. These few points then become extrapolated into a trend, which leads to claims that the process is not fit for purpose, but it’s a minority of cases. For context, my company runs about 1200 matters at any time and such issues as these arise only a few times a month.
Fundamentally, lawyers are struggling to manage the process effectively because they do not have the tools to deal with it. With typical caseloads of 60-80 cases each, they WILL drop the ball at some point; everyone understands this, but it’s only when it happens on their case that the downside of this sweatshop mentality becomes apparent.
In our experience, most lawyers are extremely hardworking and have their clients’ interests at heart but are simply too bogged down in the administrative side of their role, with no end in sight. The technology that has been offered to help lawyers over the last ten years has been minimal. With the exception of onboarding, SDLT and registration submission and some tentative initiatives of prepopulating reports on title, lawyers are working in exactly the same way as when I started my business in 2009.
Ask any lawyer what activity fills most of their day ( aside obviously from calls from agents and clients which can be reduced by sharing information through a portal and sending weekly updates ) and they’ll tell you it’s handling huge volumes of emails, typically 100-200 per day. However, many of these emails involve creating or responding to, pre-contract enquiries – the riskiest and most challenging part of conveyancing. Obtaining accurate information from managing agents, clients, lenders, even previous solicitors, is where the cycles are burned which creates the lack of availability, long working hours leading to oversights and mistakes. This is not a process problem, it’s a process management issue and must be fixed.
So… is anything being done about this?
Law firm owners have long-acknowledged this issue but addressing it requires co-operation and a low-impact standard way to achieve it. The understandable concerns about engaging with sometimes hostile competitors and a total lack of usable solutions always made this a challenge.
However, the realities of the market, a future with fewer experienced lawyers and ever increasing demands means firms are looking to addressing this issue, right now. It’s a matter of changing hearts and minds, but discussions are happening and we are seeing first-hand the results of this with some really exciting projects that are genuinely reducing the delays and mistakes involved in this activity.
The next time someone claims that the conveyancing process is broken, feel free to join Buttons and shout back “Oh no it isn’t! But we do need the widespread adoption of better technology”.
Peter Ambrose is the owner and managing director of The Partnership – a boutique legal provider specialising in the delivery conveyancing services.
Morning Peter,
Have you actually read your own piece here?
You literally describe a profession that isn’t competent and can’t cope.
Well done!
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Morning Matt!
It certainly has its challenges, no-one denies that. It’s about reacting to change – look at agency before the [widespread] adoption of CRM designed specifically to manage pipelines. The same revolution has not happened in conveyancing so it’s hardly surprising that lawyers struggle. But change is coming …
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Whose technology should be adopted?
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Whoever can meet the real rather than perceived needs of conveyancers and it HAS to be from within the industry itself.
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Peter thanks for the honesty, could you expand more on the solutions required?
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I’d be delighted to have a discussion – I can be reached on pambrose@thepartnershiplimited.com and happy to show what we are doing.
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Why not have the conversation out in the open so everyone can have input into your suggestions, for your solution to face scrutiny and for those who might have competing solutions to offer opinion?
To explain your solution privately to an individual agent becomes a sales pitch rather than an industry wide moving things forward.
Your industry is facing change and quite rightly you and others are trying to defend the status quo but upfront material information changes the dynamic considerably. I personally cannot see the solution can be geared to conveyancers only when there are systems in place which are successfully demonstrating an agent centred solution to conveyancing rather than traditional solicitor focused
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Obviously more than happy to have a conversation, but for the exact reasons you identify, saying “go and look at our website here” IS a sales pitch, which is what we are looking to avoid.
Not sure why you think I am defending the status quo when I have clearly illustrated that we are actually doing something about it! I’d love to be convinced by your view that an agent-centred solution is the answer when all attempts to date have demonstrably failed due primarily to a lack of inclusion of lawyers
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The point is they have not all failed, in fact the trial I was watching quite closely was taking about 8 weeks off the completion time, the level of fall-throughs was much reduced and as a result the agent was absolutely dominating their patch winning instructions ( I independently verified a peak 36% market share for them)
What that trial showed was that the requirement of material information requires agents to do most of the post memorandum of sale stuff at the point of instruction. That significantly challenges how things are done at present. Asking vendors to pay for services upfront before they’re necessarily convinced they’re going to move means either a wholesale re-education of the public or someone has got to run the risk of the expenses of preparing the TA forms and getting the searches which might contain material information that might affect the consumer’s decision to view, offer or purchase.
CPR, introduced in 2013, shifts the point of engagement of the conveyancing team and to me I can see agents either employing their own contract preparation staff or agents instructing conveyancers who might be willing to work speculatively.
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And that’s the end of the discussion on the subject, it’s not Peter’s fault but what we used to have, debate and discussion is gone.
The conveyancing industry has to figure out how it is going to handle the necessary changes brought about by legislation. Waiting until a property is sale agreed and a memorandum of sale issued before getting the conveyancers involved is effectively now against the law.
Who is going to pay for the work to be done speculatively hasn’t been figured out so while everyone has got either their own ideas how things should be done some people are cracking on, others haven’t got a clue they should be doing something different and others have stopped what was being innovated because no-one really knows how this is going to play out or pay out
By my calculations there a business opportunity turnover bigger than Rightmove and nearly as profitable for the team that get it right
The conveyancing industry is going through the change cycle some are at denial stage, some are angry but others ares already through al that and at the implementation stage
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Thanks for the article, but I feel, like others you are telling us what we already know. They system and process is not working as it should and it needs to be improved!
I would be interested to hear about these trials you mention.
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Completely fair point! I just felt it was worth clarifying where I believe the problem is. As above, please email me on pambrose@thepartnershiplimited.com and I am happy to share.
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I’ve said this before, there are good conveyancers and there are bad conveyancers and while delays can be through technical issues, I have always found the bad situations are caused because of conveyancers ‘attitude to their work process’. You can have the best, streamlined system in the world, but if they can’t be bothered to get off the golf course (figuratively speaking?), it makes no difference.
I am currently experiencing one of the worst conveyancers attitudes with a sale. A sale that for everyone was supposed to have completed a month ago but hasn’t because the conveyancer in the chain will not entertain adjusting out of the norm to solve a solution, that can be achieved and tells everyone …. you’ll just have to wait. Where there is a will, there is nearly always a way, but not in this case with a particular conveyancer. A chain with a tenant involved now having to pay an extra absorbent rent with no end in site and a fixed mortgage offer withdrawn and now costing an extra £200. Could have been prevented.
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An interesting and sound article Peter. And I fully respect your comments.
As you point out, there is a solution, in fact in the majority of cases there are a number of solutions. So the challenge is, the solution chosen is in the hands of the Conveyancer.
At present though, as has been mentioned by several people so far, the technology is available, although only if a Solicitor choose to use it.
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Hey Peter,
“The technology that has been offered to help lawyers over the last ten years has been minimal. With the exception of onboarding, SDLT and registration submission and some tentative initiatives of prepopulating reports on title, lawyers are working in exactly the same way as when I started my business in 2009.”
The comment quotes above really struck me. You mention onboarding, SDLT and reg submission as areas that have been improved with technology successfully. What other areas do you see as the most in need of an upgrade in terms of digital//technological transformation?
You mention a lot of the problems and delays are related to lawyers having to spend so much time on emails, mostly pre-contract enquiries. What do you see as a way to help mitigate this? Technology or a process change where the lawyer isn’t the one who manages the inbox until required on any given matter?
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Also, what advice would you offer to someone who works in a legal/conveyancing role and wants to make change within the business they work in to improve workflows (like adopting new tech or rethinking a process) but is struggling with management/decision-makers who would rather adhere to the status quo?
In your experience, what do you think motivates decision-makers to resist process/tech change within their businesses when it is so clearly needed?
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When a similar headline came up about one year ago I said no not broken.
Unfortunately now the system most definitely is. The last year has been the worst I have ever known in conveyancing, to the point where the profession, and therefore the operating mechanism for transactions, is utterly, and probably irreversibly kaput.
There are numerous reasons for this, but the profession (not an industry) just seems to be sleepwalking towards a doomsday scenario in the next two years. With no leadership, and too many quangos and vested interests with fingers in pies we simply have no chance of rectifying anything, since more experienced, competenet professionals are likely to leave the profession, and too many people sit working from home (or the beach) whilst newcomers and trainees get inadequate or no training.
Now the latest ideas to improve the system seem to be AI and upfront information. I keep hearing change is coming and look out conveyancers without anyone being able to tell me what “it” is that is coming? Well in the last thirty years there have been all sorts of changes to conveyancing which were supposed to be improvements, and all they have succeeded in doing is to bring us to the disastrous depths where we are now. If indeed we want to go back to HIPS, (and there are many reasons why we should not) then fine and I respectfully suggest we reverse all the other disastrous innovations over that period and go back to where everyone was professional and the job was respected and done with a modicum of competence. It seems these new suggestions are actually proposed with the lowest common denominator in mind, the tickboxer who has no knowledge or clue what they are doing. What we should be trying to do, but have left things far too late I fear, is speak tto proper professionals and learn from them how to save the system.
A massive improvement which should be the first place to start is referral fees. From the banning of them which hopefully reduces the dreaded factories input on conveyancing, we can hopefully start to reverse the decline. Maybe try and fix what is broken. But the problems are so deeprooted and require so many different solutions to be enacted in a short period of time, until we see some leadership and regulation nothing will improve. Things may even get worse.
#takebackconveyancing
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