As the impact of the now more than week-long IT outage at Simplify Group – affecting transactions at the conveyancing firms of Premier Property Lawyers, My Home Move, Advantage Property Lawyers, JS Law and DC Law – continues to reverberate in the industry and in the national press, a new update message has been posted  which says there is still no firm date for all the systems to be back in normal operation.

As of yesterday evening, similar messages appeared on the websites of most of the individual firms.

IMPORTANT

Our teams have been working non-stop through the weekend to restore normal business operations and enable clients to move, and good progress is being made.

Thanks to the hard work of our dedicated staff and external experts who are assisting us, last week we completed all exchanged transactions with a fixed completion date and we expect to do the same this week too.

At all times we have been acting in the best interests of our clients, understanding how challenging this situation has been for them.

We would also assure them that all client money held by us is safe and is held in an entirely separate system unaffected by the incident.

We have also substantially increased our customer relations teams to enable us to proactively contact almost all clients who are scheduled to complete.

We had several days with minimal telephone capacity, but we now have hundreds of colleagues making outbound phone calls to clients and this team are calling every client with an update.

If we have not already contacted you, please help us by completing the form here so that we can prioritise our response.

While we do not yet have a firm date for when all of our IT systems will be back in normal operation, this is our key focus and we are making progress every day.

This includes carefully bringing systems online as part of a secure phased approach and finding solutions to complete transactions safely.

This work continues and will not stop until we are fully up to speed again.

Cook Taylor Woodhouse, who are also part of Simplify, are regulated by the SRA and operate on separate IT systems which have been entirely unaffected by this issue.