Speaking from experience: Interview with a conveyancing law firm management consultant

So, Tom, tell us a bit about your background and the work you do. 

"I qualified as a solicitor in 1985 and later became a licensed conveyancer.  In 1990, I was a partner in a typical high street practice where I worked across a variety of practice areas, including residential conveyancing.  

In 1993, when there was the first of many housing recessions during my lifetime, I joined the University of Huddersfield to help create the then new Legal Practice Course (LPC). I've been a director of Countrywide Property Lawyers (now Conveyancing Direct), and Simply Conveyancing. I’ve also been in-house counsel at non-law firms and am a former CEO of the Council for Licensed Conveyancers. 

Since 2016, I’ve been a management consultant and I’ve been involved in risk and compliance since 1999. I coach and mentor for management skills within legal businesses. I’m also Hogan Assessment qualified (psychometric), which is specifically aimed at business and management – so I’m interested in individual behavioural traits. For me, management is about two things: numbers and people. I’m interested more in people – why they do what they do? Why don’t they do what managers want them to do?"

What are the most common risk and compliance-related pain points for conveyancing firms which you see? 

"There’s quite a lot of them really, so I will give some headlines: 

Cybercrime: I prefer to call it social engineering, because often it’s not about IT, it’s about people. A good con artist who’s not interested in the IT systems will just pick the phone up and talk to people. 

Data overwhelm: One of the problems – which is really being felt in residential conveyancing at this moment – is that frontline conveyancers are overwhelmed by data but there’s not enough information out there. 

Solicitors are taking on a lot of risk for things they’re not actually trained in or sometimes know nothing about. Conveyancers are not giving legal advice; what they are doing is passing on scientific data and risk advice reports on things like climate change.  

Remote working: one of the big things which I don’t think has really reached full bloom yet. While COVID-19 has gone away – touch wood – remote working hasn’t. Solicitors will say “unless I can work partly from home, I’ll work for a competitor.” That’s great for the employee but managing remotely is a whole extra level of difficulty, and law firms have not got to grips with it. Remote supervision is incredibly hard to do, and there’s still no focus on it. But it will come. You'll have insurance companies saying, “you need to improve your remote supervision, because if you don't, then we're not going to insure you.”  

What law firms, for the most part, haven't done is ratchet up the additional skills and management resources that need to be spent on remote work. That's why I think it's a future massive risk pinch point, because if you don't actively manage people remotely, guess what? They go rogue. I don’t think most people set out to break the rules – I think people end up breaking the rules under extreme pressure exacerbated by isolation.  

Money laundering: this is probably the number one pain point and such a hot topic for the SRA. It's really important for residential conveyancing because this is the number one choice practice area for money launderers – they find it a great way to launder money."

You've given quite a few headlines. Is there one that you would like to go into detail on and provide some tips on how to overcome it? 

"Money laundering/AML – with it being such a hot topic. The SRA will issue huge fines to firms – not because they’re committing money laundering, but because they don’t have the right policies and procedures in place. If you’re looking for a tip, my advice to firms is get the policies and procedures in place. If you don’t want to write them yourself, buy them. Make sure you have the relevant policies in place for when the SRA carries out its checks.  

Yet having these documents in place is not sufficient in its own right - you also need to think about how a money launderer might manipulate your firm. How do you work? What are your systems? Who is your typical client? Unless you’re thinking constantly about that, when you open a new branch office or take on a new work provider then suddenly the checks and balances you put in place are no longer of any use. Staff aren’t paid to spot money launderers, but to spot things that don’t quite fit and then to escalate it.  

One firm I visited had quite simple and short money laundering checks, and the rider to their manual was essentially that we are a small firm in a rural town, and our clients are mostly farmers, landowners, and people who live in the town – so we don’t have a problem with money launderers. 

But it’s wrong to assume money laundering doesn’t happen in rural areas. If I’m the money launderer, why wouldn’t I choose your firm, rural or not, to do my money laundering? You need someone whose job it is to think about how they would launder money, someone who can go beyond the typical red flags. You’ve got to make sure your staff are engaged and thinking.   

Training: get some training that actually engages the attention of your conveyancing staff. And makes them think about money laundering. Not just a list of regulations or a set of definitions, or a list of boring red flags. To spot money laundering, you have got to be engaged. You have to stop, think, and ask “why doesn’t this feel right?” That’s the sort of training you want.  

Why is it that conveyancers don’t spot money laundering? Talk to your staff as people and ask them what they find difficult about reporting or identifying money laundering. The people on the front line are not thinking about the Proceeds of Crime Act; they are desperately trying to do the conveyancing tasks they need to do. And it’s so easy to say, “I’ve done what the system needs me to.” Tick, tick, tick, done!  

It’s not about ticking boxes, it’s about thinking: what is it about this client/ this transaction that doesn't add up? What is it that's stopping me making this suspicion referral, telling my MLRO? That's the important bit – if we're going to do anything about money laundering, we need to start thinking about people, not policies, not tick lists. I'm very passionate about that. I think tick lists are the worst when it comes to money laundering, because it doesn’t make you think. When you’ve seen that tick list for the hundredth time, or even the twentieth time, your brain just goes into neutral."

Are there any myths about conveyancing risk and compliance that you would like to dispel? 

"Yes – I have two in mind:  

The first one is “Technomagic” - technical solutions don’t resolve human weaknesses. Your conveyancers – human beings – are your greatest strength but also your most vulnerable weakness. Don't be fooled into thinking just because you've got the best whizzy technological solution that your risk and compliance issues have been solved. They haven’t. You might have changed how people get things wrong, but you won't stop people getting things wrong. As soon as you put human beings in there, they are fallible, and they make mistakes. 

The second myth is actually that legal technical training is enough to eliminate risk. It doesn't. Technical training increases the level of knowledge of your staff. And it might hopefully get a staff member to say, “ah, this is an area which is really complicated, I went on a course, I need to stop, slow down, read my notes, get up to speed before I attack it.” For example, enfranchisement under the Leasehold Reform, Housing and Urban Development Act. But legal training, alone, is not enough.  

The report ‘Conveyancing Negligence’ by the Council of Mortgage Lenders, now UK Finance, says at paragraph 38: ‘The research findings strongly indicate that conveyancing-related negligence claims are almost always caused by careless attention to simple procedures or by failure to take sensible steps to protect the lender-client’s interest, rather than by careless advice on complicated issues.’ And that report was written in 1996. So, nearly 30 years ago we realised that it's not about technical knowledge, it's about process. Has anything changed? I don't think so."

Is there a part of the Law Society's Core Practice Management Standards that conveyancers may be likely to overlook or not appreciate? 

"Absolutely - Paragraph 4.2: “practices must conduct an appropriate documented induction for all personnel.” If you don't have a proper induction, you don't capture who your new employees are and what they know and don’t know. And if you don't capture that at the outset, then you never recover as a business. New members of staff never actually become part of the firm, and they never understand its culture. They pick things up as outsiders. They do what their colleagues do, or they do what they used to do in their last workplace.  

Senior management assume they know what their staff do, but actually, if you don't induct them properly into your firm's culture, then forget having a risk and compliance culture, because people do whatever they think is right and what they can get away with. There's no ‘firm culture’ that they can attach to, so they make it up. If as a new starter you're going to buy into a new firm, you have to understand the firm; if you don't do an induction that never happens. 

New starters provide a great opportunity to get ‘gold-dust’ feedback on what it’s like to work at your firm, and how it really operates. You can say to the new members of staff, “Okay, you've been here a week or so, what do we do as a firm that you think is complete and utter waste of time? You're not going to lose your job; I’m not going to get angry with you. In fact, I will praise you, and if it's a really good idea that comes out of it, you might even get an early bonus. So, what do we do that's rubbish?” Because the problem with being an established employee – and certainly the problem with being a boss – is that we no longer see what is clear and obvious. It's only obvious to people who are external and objective, who have not been indoctrinated, and are still looking and saying to themselves: “that's weird.” 

To give a practical example, which does apply to risk and compliance:  

“Why is the photocopier outside of the room in the corridor?”  

“Oh, it's always been there.” 

“Yeah, but why? People have to get up from their desks and have to walk and open the door and then have to go to the photocopier. Why isn't it in the middle of the office space in the room?” 

“Well, there's no plug there.”  

“Yeah, there is. We can get an extension lead. There’s loads of plugs.”  

Something as ridiculous as that can mean that the photocopier never gets moved, and people do bulk photocopying and then they go out and they pick up a batch, and they pick up somebody else's photocopying, or they don't realise that the page is missing or whatever. Innocent, but hang on, where is that page? “Well, it's certainly not in the document that my client signed, so you might think that that covenant applies, but it doesn't, because it’s not in the document that we signed.” 

New members of staff are brilliant at pointing out obvious issues. Give them six months, and they don’t even see it anymore – it becomes ‘the way we do things around here.’ 

The new CQS Conveyancing Practice course looks at changes being introduced by the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024. What are your thoughts on the likely impact of the changes for conveyancers? 

"The Act is quite far-reaching, because it's going to change quite a lot around enfranchisement and lease extensions. That's one of the headline things regarding when you get a new lease, what the rent will be, smoothing away the processes, how long the new lease term will be.  

However, I think it’ll be viewed by the public as merely tinkering. The public have been sold, and they believe – wrongly in my opinion – that the only tenure worth having is freehold. It’s not true but that’s the story they’ve been told. Conveyancers will have to get to grips with the changes in leasehold, but I think the effect of the Act will be that commonhold will be reintroduced and they need to get ready for it.  

The public doesn’t want tinkering, they want freehold. It won’t solve their problems. But what that means for conveyancers is they’ll need to get to grips not only with leasehold but commonhold, so they’ll have even more to do. Nobody gets taught about it, and nobody in practice has done much on commonhold, if any at all. It could be like 1926, when the Law of Property Act 1925 came into effect, and all those conveyancers said “I don’t want to learn all this new stuff. I’m going to retire.” It’ll have a big impact."

What do you find most fulfilling about being a conveyancing law firm management consultant? 

"For me, the most fulfilling thing is, as an objective outsider, I get to listen to frontline conveyancers as they explain why they don’t follow their firm’s documented policies and procedures, and how the case management system makes the job harder because it introduces unnecessary tasks and steps. I get to listen to them say what the one thing is that would make their job easier and make them more productive in their work. 

I then review what the conveyancer has said and how they work. I think about the feedback they've given to me. Then I make recommendations to the senior partners, and their initial reaction is often that they don’t want to believe what is actually happening because it isn’t what they thought or believed was happening.  

It’s scary as a manager to see that it’s more chaotic than you thought. Most firms will go “well there’s one or two things we need to do,” then when they find out what their staff actually do, they’ll say “No, no, they can't do that. The case management system doesn’t allow them to do that.” And then I show them: if I'm a conveyancer in your firm, this is how you fiddle that step.” “That shouldn't happen” – “I know, but it does, and this is what can be done about it…” 

Any final thoughts? 

With the various challenges facing conveyancing firms which I’ve touched upon in mind, I recommend that you get a strong foundation with Access Legal’s CQS training and policies & precedents upon which you can then build an effective risk & compliance culture for your law firm. 

Access Legal is an accredited provider of CQS training, supporting over 1,000 firms to meet their CQS training requirements. Our updated courses – Conveyancing Practice 2024/2025 and Risk, Compliance and Client Care will be released on 20.01.25.  

For firms looking for template policies, Access Legal’s Policies and Precedents for Law Firms library contains AML and CQS policies which can be adapted to meet your own internal requirements.  

The content in this blog is for information purposes only and should not be seen as any kind of legal advice – readers who rely on the content, do so at their own risk.