I have worked as a qualified solicitor in the conveyancing business for 20 years. Over the most recent few of those years, I, and most likely all of you reading, have practised through the Covid pandemic, through the stamp duty holiday, and through those fateful final days of the Liz Truss era.
In these brief years, I have seen a lot of solicitors leave the profession, many of them completely burned out, and a lot of new starters enter – young, qualified, and at the foot of their careers. It’s the biggest staff turnaround I’ve ever witnessed, and it should be invigorating the sector.
But they are coming into a job and an industry that looks nothing like it did twenty years ago; a job that has lapsed into the mundane.
As solicitors in modern conveyancing, we no longer practise law.
Instead, we spend most of our time arguing about whether a boiler has been serviced, or electrics have been tested, not the legal points of the title.
This is largely due to a change in client expectations. It’s gone from nobody caring whether or not the boiler has been serviced, to the buyer’s solicitors saying, ‘we’re going to advise our client not to proceed if you don’t get your client to service the boiler prior to completion’.
But I don’t care about the boiler. I care that the transaction adheres with all current legislations and laws. After twenty years, I’m no longer looking for extensions that breach a restrictive covenant, I’m arguing about boilers. And our young solicitors are not being allowed to do the job they’ve worked so hard to train for.
There is a simple solution to this problem. A small step to steer ourselves off this prosaic: up-front information provided by the seller to prospective buyers via the estate agent.
The UK industry has thus far resisted the idea of up-front information. But it’s a win-win for all involved. The seller avoids fall-throughs. The buyer wastes less of their own time. The estate agent expedites the whole process and brings forward their pay day.
What other major purchases do we commit to without having all of the pertinent information in advance? Would you book a holiday without knowing anything about the hotel? Or a car without knowing its mileage? It’s bananas to think that most instantaneously transformative improvement to our sector would come from such a simple solution as up-front information.
The conveyancing game is full of young blood. They have new, propellant skills that were never prevalent before, and they have trained specifically to work in property law. Can’t we just let them do it? Because it can’t all be about the boiler.
Ruth Beeton is co-founder of Home Sale Pack, and is partner and head of conveyancing at HS Conveyancing Ltd.
