It is Friday morning. Several purchases are due to complete, but the firm cannot access its case management system. The supplier acknowledges a serious incident and cannot confirm when access will return.
Can your team identify the affected transactions, contact the clients and establish what has already been authorised?
A supplier outage can become a conveyancing emergency even when the firm’s own equipment is working normally. The CLC’s Risk Agenda 2026 highlights the disruption that incidents affecting key suppliers can cause across the sector.
Which services could stop your conveyancing work?
Start by identifying the external services on which your team depends. These may include case management, email, document storage, identity verification, searches, payment systems and transaction portals.
Then consider the connections between them. If your emergency contact list is stored inside the unavailable case management system, having a list does little to help. If several services rely on the same login provider, one failure may affect them all.
Our earlier guide to the CQS Business Continuity Policy and Plan explains why the firm’s arrangements must reflect its actual operations.
Prepare an accessible record of urgent matters
A useful contingency arrangement should enable authorised staff to establish:
- Which matters have exchanged and when completion is due.
- Which deadlines, undertakings and priority periods need immediate attention.
- Whether mortgage funds have been requested or received.
- Who is responsible for each matter and who provides cover.
- How to contact the client and other essential parties.
Any contingency record must itself be protected, kept current and accessible only to appropriate people. Uncontrolled copies of client files can create another problem during an incident.
Decide who can authorise the next step
Staff need to know who leads the response, who speaks to the supplier and who assesses the effect on live transactions.
For an individual matter, the supervising lawyer should establish whether sufficient reliable information is available to proceed. Commercial pressure to complete does not remove the need to check instructions, authority, funds and relevant lender requirements.
Temporary arrangements should preserve the firm’s payment verification and confidentiality controls. Personal email accounts and improvised document-sharing services require particular caution.
The related information management and security policy review guide considers the safeguards that should support recovery arrangements.
Give clients useful, accurate updates
Explain what the firm knows, how the transaction may be affected and when the client can expect another update. Avoid repeating an unconfirmed supplier estimate as a promised recovery time.
Record advice, decisions and communications made during the outage so that the matter history can be reconciled when systems return.
Test the plan before you need it
Run a short exercise: remove access to the main system in a simulated scenario and ask the team to identify tomorrow’s completions. Record what cannot be found, which decisions are unclear and what needs changing.
A successful test produces practical improvements, named owners and a date for checking that the changes work.
Buy the CQS Business Continuity Plan template
Give your firm a structured starting point for documenting responsibilities, supplier dependencies, communications and recovery arrangements.
Buy the Business Continuity Plan
Adapt the template to your practice, brief the team and test the resulting arrangements.
The CLC Risk Agenda addresses CLC-regulated practices. CQS firms should apply their own regulatory and accreditation requirements when reviewing these practical risks.