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Ten New Year’s Work Resolutions for Local Authority Conveyancers

bruceandholly

It seems strange that in today’s corporate world, the only people to have full secretarial support are those who are least likely to need it. They are the captains of industry who spend most of their time in meetings instead of sitting in front of a screen pushing out documentation in volume. For the rest of us, it’s about making the best of what limited support is available to us. One of the positives coming out of the covid lockdowns was a permanent change in working habits, which means that we can do more of our work from the back bedroom instead of traipsing through the morning and evening rush hours. Who would want to go back to that? It was also fortuitous that this change in working habits coincided with technical developments which enable us to meet on teams at the moment’s notice instead of taking an afternoon out of the office to meet face to face. So what has all this got to do with New Year’s resolutions? Just this! In conveyancing, time is money. A delayed completion often means a delayed rental stream or a delayed capital receipt. And everyone loses.

If progress on a transaction stalls completely, other things will supervene and it will begin to unravel. One of the issues I have with traditional time recording is that it rewards inefficiency, with the slowest most inexperienced fee earner charging out the most time for a transaction. When it should be all about unit-cost, meaning that the faster you are able to work without compromising on quality or accuracy, the better value you are providing to your corporate client. In this post, I provide suggestions for ten New Year work-resolutions which can help you become one of the most efficient conveyancers in your team, simply by making the best use of the resources which are available to you . Here they are:

  1. Dictate! Dictate Dictate! All computers which are Windows 10 and above, have a voice dictation facility. But you will need to find it and enable it. Voice dictation is improving all the time but is still far from perfect. Unlike a secretary, automated voice dictation cannot interpret what you have said. It will simply transcribe what it thinks you have said. So if I dictate the word, ‘ comma’, it will tell me to ‘Call my Mum’. If I say ‘draft’, as in document, it will give me the draught which is blowing in through the open window behind me. So why do I use voice dictation? Because even with its many faults, it is still three times quicker than typing everything out longhand.
  2. Purchase a wired mouse, a wired keyboard, a wide-screen monitor and a wired headset which you are going to use if you are going to dictate. Unless you have micro fingers, don’t try doing all your work on the tiny keyboard which is attached to your laptop. Invest in a wide screen monitor so you don’t have to squint. Using a wide screen also makes it easier to proofread documentation and reduces the risk of mistakes.
  3. Take an interest in legal developments, even if they don’t directly relate to your work. If you are working in a bubble, it is too easy to miss the big changes which are happening in mainstream conveyancing. Subscribe to an online newsletter like ‘Today’s Conveyancer,’ which is aimed at the high street practitioner.
  4. Take time to get to know your corporate clients and learn what they really want from an in-house legal service. It’s not about being ‘cheap and cheerful’. Instead of huddling together with other lawyers, try to become part of the client team.
  5. Be serious about meeting your financial targets, even if colleagues are not meeting theirs.
  6. The 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. core hours slot is sacrosanct. Nothing must be allowed to get in the way of chargeable work. Try to keep training and other distractions out of those core hours.
  7. Be prepared to innovate and discover ways to improve productivity. Set up templates and standardise wherever possible. Don’t send out documentation in draft if you can send out an engrossment.
  8. Look for ways to raise your own professional profile. Remember that meeting continuous professional development (CPD) requirements need not only involve being a passive listener. You can also earn points by presenting training to clients and prospective clients and raise your own profile in the process.
  9. Have confidence in your own professional judgement. And be prepared to provide your client with clear and robust advice. If you don’t have confidence in your own professional judgement, why should anybody else have confidence in you?
  10. Never pass up an opportunity to get into management, even if it’s only for a few months to cover somebody’s maternity leave. Management experience does not only look good on your CV. Leadership is also a valuable life skill which can only be learned by doing. And if you go into management, make sure that you look, act, and sound like a manager, because it will affect the way other people react to you.
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Expert Guidance for Local Authority Conveyancing Professionals

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Photo by SevenStorm JUHASZIMRUS on Pexels.com

Updated guidance for the 34,500 in-house solicitors practising in England and Wales, re-states how those solicitors should respond to the challenges of working for a corporate employer, particularly where employer-demands conflict with the general professional responsibilities which apply to all UK  lawyers.  Published  18 November, 2024 under the heading, ‘Dedicated Guidance Issued to Support In-House Solicitors’, it provides advice on how to identify and deal with potential conflicts of interest as well as client confidentiality.  It also provides advice to corporate employers on how to manage in-house solicitors in a way which does not compromise their professional responsibilities.  But there is a limit as to how much information you can put in a couple of dozen pages.

The opening chapters of Local Authority Conveyancing Law and Practice UK. also deals with the same subject matter, but in much greater detail.  It addresses the circumstances when a practising certificate is required as well as issues relating to anti-money laundering; professional training; avoiding conflicts of interest and client confidentiality.  But whilst the SRA guidance is written for all in-house solicitors, Local Authority Conveyancing Law and Practice focuses on that a tiny proportion of solicitors forming part of an in-house conveyancing team.

It also deals with the challenges facing local authority conveyancing teams, which now exist in a competitive environment where nothing can be taken for granted.  It explains what a corporate client really wants from an in-house team, which is not about being cheap and cheerful.  The book will also encourage you to look seriously at any opportunities for getting into management.  Because management experience does not only look good on a CV.  It is also a valuable life skill.  But no local authority conveyancing book would be complete without a raft of reference material as well as practical tips on how to manage a conveyancing transaction when you don’t have access to a client account.

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Conveyancing – How to Increase Your Productivity and Your Chargeable Output

bruceandholly

Conveyancing – Four Ways to Increase Your Productivity and Your Chargeable Output

Conveyancing is piecework.  Forget hourly rates.  In a competitive legal market, residential clients want to be able to compare quotes.  And professional rules now require transparency when it comes to pricing, so that prospective clients can see at a glance what they are going to have to pay.  But whenever you quote a prospective client, you need to be able to work within budget.  If you overrun that budget because you under-quoted or did not appreciate the extent of the work-tough!  You’ll be doing some free work. That’s not the client’s fault.  Unless you can genuinely say that additional complications cropped up which no one could have ever previously foreseen or because of something your client didn’t tell you.  So it’s all about packing in as much personal productivity as is possible for each working hour of your day.  Here are some tips:

  • Always dictate-dictate-dictate your work.  Never try to hand-type everything.  It’s just too much hard work.  Maybe like me, you lost your secretarial support more years ago than you can even remember.  Never mind.  There is Microsoft voice dictation.  If you’re working on a computer which is Windows 10 or above, you’ll find voice dictation somewhere.  Just go to ‘settings’ and ‘ease of access’.  Dictating your work can be annoying to those around you, particularly if you have to keep repeating the same phrase until your voice recognition gets it right.  Sometimes it never gets it right.  If I say the word ‘comma’, it will tell me to ‘call my mum’.  If I say ‘draft’ as in document, I will always get the draught which blows in from an open window.  So why do I use voice dictation?  Because even with its faults, it’s still three times quicker than trying to type everything out longhand.  Because even if you can touch type, you can’t type as fast as you can speak.  So by using voice dictation I can triple my chargeable output.
  • Standardise-standardise-standardise.  Take a tip from Henry Ford.  Install a conveyor belt.  Metaphorically speaking of course.  Try to create your own all-purpose templates, which you can easily and quickly populate before sending out.
  • Front-load your work, so that you can do as much as possible in one shot.  Don’t wait for the other party solicitor to send across to you their title documentation, download it yourself and save a week.  Never issue documentation in draft if the you can send out something which is a engrossment-ready.
  • Finally, never compromise on the quality of your work or the service which you provide to your client.  Make sure that everything is right first time, the moment it is sent out.  Don’t rely on your client to pick up your mistakes.  Take the trouble to organise your electronic file so that everything is correctly labelled and stored in its correct folder, so that you can find anything in an instant instead of having to trawl through the whole file.  It also makes it easier if a colleague has to look after your file in your absence.
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What a New Labour Government Means for Conveyancers in England and Wales

bruceandholly
Photo by SevenStorm JUHASZIMRUS on Pexels.com

With a new government on 5 July 2024 now a cert, it is time to think about what this means for UK conveyancers.  Here are our own predictions for the year ahead.

Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024

As this non-controversial piece of legislation reached the statute book in the closing days of the Sunak government, it only remains for Starmer to issue regulations bringing it into force.  We expect this to be amongst the first tasks for the new Labour government.  The legislation is important because it changes the process for dealing with statutory residential lease extensions and enfranchisements as well as regulating freehold estate management.

Renters Reform Bill

This bill, which was already part way through parliament, was one of the legislative casualties of the general election.  The key provision of this bill was the removal of section 21 non-fault evictions.  Although the removal of section 21 evictions is not quite a roll-back to the bad old days of rent-controls, it will certainly make many would-be landlords and mortgage lenders think twice before going into this market.  It may also lead to a loss in private rented accommodation as landlords sell up when tenants vacate instead of re-letting.  When it was first introduced on 1 April, 1989, the ability of landlords to regain possession of their properties on two months notice was not particularly problematic because there was a healthy housing market, which made it easier for prospective tenants to pick and choose where they wanted to live and to negotiate how much they wanted to pay.  Unfortunately, that is no longer the case because of the depletion of the social-rented sector.  So our expectation is that the new government will waste no time in re- launching this bill and pushing it through to royal assent.

Right-to-buy

Unlike Scotland and Wales, we are not expecting the new government to abolish right-to-buy in its entirety but simply to scale it back, in terms of discount, to what was available when Gordon Brown left office in 2010.  At that time, the maximum discount on a right-to-buy sale was capped at £16,000.  Our expectation is that this £16,000 cap might be increased to reflect price-inflation but fall well short of the generous discounts introduced by David Cameron when he took power in 2010.  What this means is that purchasing under right-to buy may no longer be the attractive proposition which it is today.  There are also the transitional arrangements which will need to be put in place for right-to buy purchases which are underway at the time the new legislation is introduced.  We are not expecting any changes to right-to-buy to operate retrospectively, which would mean that work-in-progress will be allowed to continue to completion of the transaction.

Reform of the Town Planning System

This is going to be the most difficult task for the incoming government as it will be trying to push back against a bureaucratic inertia which has built up over decades and in which the ‘No!’ lobby has remained supreme.  It is not just about restoring the house building targets which had already existed until the recent abolition by the outgoing Conservative administration.  It is about breaking through the treacle.  The bottom line is that town planning is too politicised.  With too many vested interests.  It shouldn’t be like that.  It’s about making the most efficient use of land.  Key to breaking through this inertia is to simplify and speed up the appeals process, so that any developer who feels that their application is being frustrated by local politicians, can quickly get their planning application referred to a third party for determination.

V. Charles Ward

Solicitor and Legal Associate RTPI – 15th June 2024