About CQS Conveyancing

The following amendments will be made to the Lenders Handbook for England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland on 19 June 2017: England and Wales A minor amendment to reflect that the FASI and MASI professional qualifications are no longer offered. Scotland Updating the Handbook to reflect the closure of the Register of Sasines to new standard securities Removing reference to obsolete Law Society guidance in relation to coal mining Aligning the Handbook instruction with England and Wales in respect of warranties for new build properties Updating the handbook to reflect the use of digital discharges A minor amendment to reflect that the FASI and MASI professional qualifications are no longer offered. Northern Ireland A minor amendment to reflect that the FASI and MASI professional qualifications are no longer offered. Aligning the Handbook instruction with England and Wales in respect of warranties for new build properties The CML...

A director of VC company recently advised me that ‘there are only two types of industry left..those that have been disrupted and those that are ripe for disruption’.   The legal industry will, sooner or later, witness significant change regardless of how loud the naysayers are. Concluding that because disruption hasn’t happened yet, that it will never happen is a high risk approach. Simply repeating the statement “It won’t happen to us” again and again did not prevent disruption to newspaper publishers, telephone utilities, stockbrokers, record companies, bookstores, travel agencies and the retailers. The reason Kodak failed, was not due a lack of corporate strategy (the top brass saw digitisation coming), and nothing to do with poor technology (in 1975 Kodak built one of the first digital cameras and held more patents than it’s competitors). Kodak failed because it was a chemical company and a bureaucracy, filled with people eager to do what they did yesterday. Li...

If you are not going to be a good conveyancer then you better be a lucky one and hope that events don't conspire to expose errors. I don't fancy your odds in the long term though if you continue to make mistakes.   Conveyancing errors often are allowed to happen for one of two reasons: You're in a huge hurry and you can't process all the incoming information properly. But more common... Our heads our turned in order to focus on short term thinking. The ‘lifting of the carpet’ may happen for months or years and possibly never. You would be amazed to learn how many lawyers tell me ‘I have not been sued in 20 years of practice and therefore clearly I do not make mistakes’. Similar thinking is the reason why most of us don't save for retirement, don't pay attention to long-term environmental issues, continue to smoke and, tragically, tolerate (or fall prey to) irrational rants about things like vaccines. Poor decisions and errors happen not only...

HSBC have become the latest lender to change their CML Handbook instructions to lawyers in relation to ground rents. Policy 5.14.9 of HSBCs CML Handbook Part 2 now reads We will not provide residential or Buy to Let Mortgages in the following circumstances: • The property is subject to an onerous Lease clause regarding an excessive or unreasonably escalating ground rent. This change comes hot on the heels of the Nationwide Building Society change on the 11th May. Despite some mainstream and industry press pointing to the fact that Nationwide were the first lender to make such a change, this is not the case. A number of lenders were making changes introducing new requirements in relation to ground rent five weeks earlier. Other Part 2 sections of CML Handbook for HSBC were also changed yesterday. Law firms wanting to be updated when lenders change their instructions can sign up to the LENDERmonitor Alert Service .   2023 Note: CQS accredited firms who use the LENDERm...

One reason not to use the latest legal technologies reducing conveyancing risk is that it potentially lulls the lawyer into a false sense of security. Lexsure’s intelligent checklist system COMPLETIONmonitor is sometimes met by such an objection. The phenomenon known as ‘inattentional blindness’ is real. This is when you ask people to look for something specific and they develop a startling inability to see things in general — even things that would normally be glaringly obvious. In one rather amazing experiment on ‘inattentional blindness‘ subjects are shown a video of a fast-paced ball game and asked to count how many times the ball is passed back and forth. Partway through the video, a person in a gorilla costume wanders into the middle of the screen, beats its chest a few times, and then wanders off again. Here’s the amazing part: between 33 and 50% of subjects don’t notice this happen. Perhaps this bears repeating: up to half the people instructed to pay close attent...

Sorting by price is the dominant way conveyancing online now happens with most consumers picking the lowest advertised price.  If you think I am wrong, ask those firms who are the most expensive on comparison sites how much business they win compared to those publishing lowest fees. Just like cheapest airline ticket or cheapest insurance or freelancer the lowers price comes up first, and most people click. This is ideal for the comparison sites as it’s simple to build. The price is a number, and it's easy to sort. It suits the lazy conveyancing firm and it’s great for the naive consumer. If a potential client can't take the time to learn about the options, about quality, about side effects, then it seems like buying the cheapest is the way to go--surely all conveyancing lawyers offer the same service anyway? For the law firm nothing is easier to improve than price. Low price conveyancing is the domain of the conveyancing firm who doesn't have anything more meaningful to off...

The recent cyber attack on the NHS is a stark warning to a conveyancing industry targeted and vulnerable to cyber crime. Imagine the scenario..It’s 7 p.m. on a Friday. You are about to finish a report on title due the next day when a message pops up on your laptop. It informs you that a third party has gained control of your system and encrypted all your files. To unencrypt your files, you must pay a ransom. All your files on your computer system are now unreadable. Thanks to this ransomware attack, your firm has basically been shut down while your system is held hostage. Have you completions been compromised? Did clients expecting their balances receive them? How is everyone in the firm going to to work on Monday? Did you open a file that you should not have. A hundred questions and scenarios are going through your mind. The most common ways for the software to be installed on a law firm’s systems is through phishing emails, malicious adverts on websites, and questionable ap...

Following it’s announcement earlier this week to make changes to their lending requirements for new build properties the lender has now updated their CML Part 2 instructions. Sections 5.14.1 and 5.14.9 now have the following paragraph added: NEW BUILD PROPERTIES (includes office conversions but does not apply to Shared Ownership) The following are not acceptable: - The unexpired lease term on a new build flat is less than 125 years - The unexpired lease term on a new build house is less than 250 years - Starting ground rent is more than 0.1% of the property value The lease must be amended to comply with the above. If not the case cannot proceed. Please advise us where the case cannot proceed. Ground rents and event fees: Ground rent and other event fees must be reasonable at all times during the lease term. For example, it is acceptable for ground rent escalation to be linked to RPI (Retail Price Index) or a similar index and where this is the case we do not need...

‘A’ rated insurance company AmTrust Europe Limited have extended their ground breaking agreement with legal software house Lexsure that links the use of risk mitigation software with lower expenditure on professional indemnity (PI) premiums for licensed conveyancers, a move that could be worth thousands of pounds for some conveyancing practices on the JLT/CLC Scheme. Professional indemnity premiums are a great concern for licensed conveyancers, as they constitute one of the largest costs to the business aside from salaries. Licensed conveyancers can now evidence their lower risk profile for conveyancing transactions by using Lexsure’s COMPLETIONmonitor software, an online checklist, tailor-made for conveyancers to reduce and eliminate errors and omissions. Licensed conveyancing firms that reduce their risk profile by using COMPLETIONmonitor in the conveyancing process who insure with AmTrust can expect a per case savings on their PI renewals for each case completed with th...

Conveyancing in recent years puts a premium on speed: the sooner, the faster, the better. You only have to look at most law tech companies in the conveyancing space to see claims of generating  ‘greater efficiency’ or claiming that their software ‘speeds up the process’. I recently attended a managing partners seminar where one of the speakers all but said that if you wanted to be involved in volume conveyancing in any way you would only be profitable if you had systems in place to dramatically speed up the process and cope with bulk work. Pile it high, do it cheap and do it quick. How depressing.   I agree with Malcom Gladwell, journalist and author, who during a recent interview at Wharton Business School said "In any kind of high-stakes job where the penalty for error is high, you can't afford to have hares," Insurers, lenders, regulators and law firms should fear the high output, lots-of-errors lawyer.   My understanding from speaking to insurers and bro...