A major cybersecurity issue affecting the property legal sector is creating mayhem in property chains across the UK this morning.
Exchanges and completions are at risk of being severely delayed as conveyancing firms struggle to access necessary systems to progress transactions.
It is understood that a major outage from a legal sector specialist infrastructure service provider is having a major knock-on impact, with up to 200 law firms affected.
Companies adversely affected by the incident is believed to include Taylor Rose, Gateley, Talbots, Setfords, and O’Neill Patient, among others.
O’Neil Patient told EYE this morning that they are working hard to rectify the issue, but would not go into further details.
Requests for comments from these firms have been made.
Rob Hailstone, CEO and founder of Bold Legal Group, told EYE this morning that it is essential that estate agents and conveyancers cooperate to ensure they minimise the disruptions currently being caused by the cybersecurity issue.
He said: “The recent cybersecurity incident currently affecting a large number of law firms will be traumatic for those directly, and indirectly involved. The information being passed down to the affected firms is likely to be sparse. Thankfully the market is quieter than usual but to counter that we have the Christmas rush building up.
“Agents and conveyancers need to work together to try to minimise the difficulties that may be being imposed on each other and on clients hoping to exchange a complete. Hopefully a solution will be found sooner rather than later.
The incident is prompting fears among some of an IT data breach akin to the one Simplify experienced two years ago.
The cyber-attack forced Simplify to temporarily take down its systems and eventually cost the company close to £7m, the annual report of its holding company UKLS Acquisitions revealed.
The Simplify incident affected Premier Property Lawyers, JS Law, DC Law and Advantage Property Lawyers – delaying a number of property transactions from moving forward in the process.
