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 due to lack of knowledge. Often poor decisions happen because a firm can be swayed by short-term comfort and ignore long-term implications. A good example of this is when I was told by one conveyancing firm that they do not do environmental searches (even where their lender client requires it) because the costs made their conveyancing quotes less attractive than their competitors. A bad decision feels good in the short run, easy for someone to justify when the decision is driven by apparent immediate economic pressures. But there's a gap when we get to the long run. In my recent webinar ‘The Future of Legal Technology’ I talk about the concept of ‘Nowism’ as a blocker on innovation and risk management.
The job of the managing partner, HOLPs and COLPs is to elevate the long term risk management of the conveyancing process regardless how hard the marketing and tribal noise around us encourages to fall prey to instant comfort of pushing through transactions at volume and speed.
The future will ultimately ignore short term requirements.
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