About CQS Conveyancing

Earlier this month 10,000 black-cab drivers brought  the capital to a standstill by blockading Trafalgar Square. They were re protesting Uber, the American mobile phone app that locates the nearest available mini-cab and calculates the fare by distance and time.   Cabbies claim Uber’s GPS pricing system is effectively a taximeter, which only black cabs can use in London.As of this writing ( June 22, 2014 ), action has been started by Transport for London (TfL) to secure a High Court ruling on the legality of the American company’s app. Coincidentally,  digital disruption is stalking the conveyancing process as the Land Registry of England and Wales presses ahead with controversial plans to take over the management of the local land charges register, despite overwhelming opposition. This is of course Part 1 of what appears to be the inevitable privatisation of the Land Registry.   The blog   Brains of Steel  shows a Land...

Several years ago, I was invited to meet with a well-known entrepreneur who had launched a conveyancing venture. The business was having trouble converting online leads into instructions and he wanted frank and open feedback on how to improve the process. After about an hour's conversation, we shook hands, with both of us "looking forward" to the next chat. It didn't happened and we never did business. During the chat, he had a particularly adverse reaction when I brought up the value of seeing clients face-to-face and the virtues of offering a highly personalised service.  I asserted that one side-benefit was ‘creating a better tolerance level from the client’ as the meeting takes a relationship onto a stronger foundation. "Why should you need tolerance?" he countered, implying that my statement smacked of some sort of resignation that conveyancing was an uphill battle of managing client expectations. In the moment, I chalked up an adverse reaction du...