An interesting piece of research by Today’s Conveyancer suggests that there is something of a recruitment crisis in the conveyancing industry.
The surge in property sales since the end of lockdown would appear to have caught conveyancers on the hop and a flurry of job ads show that they may be struggling to bring staffing levels up quickly enough to cope with present demand.
Today’s Conveyancer says there has been a steady daily increase in the number of conveyancing-related roles being advertised on the jobs website ‘Indeed’.
On the 23rd July there were 391 roles listed, which included legal secretaries, paralegals and trained conveyancers. This has risen to 526 on the 10 August, an increase of over 34% within 2 weeks.
The trend is in contrast to what is happening in other areas of the legal profession where redundancies are rife and there is considerable concern that large swathes of the high street law firms will go under.
The salary scales of the conveyancing jobs on Indeed are interesting.
Residential conveyancers are generally being offered between about £25,000 and £45,000 but there some jobs advertised at as little as £17,000.
A case-handler is likely to receive between about £19,000 and £25,000
A head of conveyancing is advertised at up to £50,000
In a sign of the times there are number of home-based conveyancing positions on offer.
1. never ever disrespect the public and call your conveyancers ‘case handlers’
2. don’t just take any CV if you need new conveyancers, as you will preserve the mediocre conveyancers out there, who need to be squeezed out of the profession
3. pay conveyancers properly – find me another area of the law where the lawyer works as hard. And who brings in £200+ per year ( and currently £45k a month of new work)
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It should be pointed out that, following a brief check on Indeed, that a number of these vacancies are advertised by recruitment agencies. Some agencies are known to keep old adverts open in order to gather CVs so this may not reflect the number of actual vacancies. In fact, it may not even be anywhere near that figure.
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I think it is likely a considerable number of those vacancies are ‘ghost jobs’. Over the last few months the number or roles available has been in the hundreds anyway and nobody has commented on that volume before? A lot of others are consultant positions or ‘work from home’ roles that may or may not be realistic.
What I have noticed recently is that it is the factories and bucketshops taking on high numbers of untrained staff to fill vacancies caused by an upturn. Which is hardly reassuring for future standards in the conveyancing profession. More likely they are taking on low paid staff knowing there is likely to be a downturn from April next year when the stamp duty holiday ends, and they are cheap to make redundant again. No point in investing in good experienced staff is there?
But I think there is a story here. After the last recession a considerable number of experienced conveyancers from my generation took the opportunity to leave the profession. Frustrated at the compliance issues and lowering of standards they decided there was no point in continuing. It is one of the major reasons there are only a tiny minority of able, competent conveyancers left in the profession, and we are where we are. Like myself these were people who had been thoroughly trained and had a lifetime of experience to devote to their clients. Since that recession standards have nosedived, and it is no coincidence that it is due to proper training not being given to case handlers, or indeed Solicitors. It is another reason why staff from those organisations will unlikely never go on to work at proper Solicitors as conveyancing fee earners, because they lack the ability to work unsupervised.
So with this recession the older experienced conveyancers may take this as their time to retire. I dread to think where that will leave conveyancing. I am lucky being a Locum in that I can work when and where I want to without money being an issue to me. After a few weeks of dealing with the awful conveyancing that passes for the profession these days I can take a few weeks to recharge my batteries again. I love the job and helping clients but conveyancing was never meant to be the battle it is today and increasingly I lack the will to carry on.
So it is the lack of the experienced older generation of competent people that is the major crisis in conveyancing. Case handlers can be pulled off the street to carry out administrative journeys without any thought, but where is the next generation of conveyancers who know what they are doing and more importantly why they are doing it? Giving yourself fancy titles on social media or writing clever clever articles might look impressive, but also means you have lost sight of what is the most important role of a conveyancer.
Prospective house buyers should be very afraid of the future.
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