The recent upturn in the residential conveyancing market has once again brought into sharp focus the weaknesses of our present system.

The recession has caused many firms to reduce the size of their residential conveyancing departments and the revival in the market has left the remaining fee-earners under severe pressure. As one who has been recalled to frontline fee-earning duties, I have gained some fresh insights into how the conveyancing market operates and how it might operate in the future.

Talking to other practitioners, it is clear that most are very busy. You would think that, when everyone is busy, conveyancers would want to make life as easy as possible for each other, but the opposite seems to be the case. For many the priority seems to be making things as difficult as possible for ‘the other side’ by creating as many hurdles as possible in the misguided belief that this is doing a good job for the client. This adversarial approach has to stop.

Solicitors are not operating in a vacuum, of course. We have to work with estate agents, lenders, the Land Registry and our regulator. Again, we do not always seem to be pulling in the same direction. Relationships with estate agents can still be very frosty. Their frustration at the lack of progress is well founded in many cases. Equally, a good agent knows when to push, and when to back off and let the conveyancer do their job.

In the past, conveyancers have felt that the Law Society was not supporting them, but under the enlightened presidency of Paul Marsh last year it has become clear that this is not the case. Hopefully this new era of support will continue.

The Land Registry continues to do a good job against a difficult background of cuts and redundancies.

Lenders’ systems are now far more streamlined and simplified. Redemption figures come through much quicker and the turnaround times for certificates of title have been vastly reduced. However, if you have a specific query that you want to refer to the lender, you can grow old waiting to speak to them in their call centre environments.

Home information packs were, in my view, a well-intentioned attempt to change things for the better, but the initiative was hijacked by sectional interests. The principle of providing more upfront information might sound good, but do prospective buyers want to wade through technical legal documents? Are they making ‘better informed decisions’ as a result of HIPs? Searches go out of date and sellers object to spending significant amounts of money before they can put their properties on the market. Any attempt to salvage HIPs or replace one failed idea with another would be letting the consumer down again.

Things have moved on since sellers’ packs and HIPs were first mooted. With today’s technologies, the pre-contract legal work can be done in a matter of days, once a sale is agreed. It does not have to be done beforehand and left to gather dust while a buyer is found.

What is needed now is fresh thinking, not a recycling of yesterday’s ideas. Solicitors should be at the very heart of any initiatives to reform the homebuying process. We need to give serious consideration to early binding contracts with penalties for time wasters. An overhaul of the ‘transaction’ protocol is pending and we need to embrace technology in key areas such as electronic exchange of contracts. We need to look at how to speed up mortgage offers and combat the ever-present problem of the chain.

In many ways the profession is now at a crossroads. We have a choice as to whether to place ourselves at the centre of the homebuying process and drive forward the right sort of reform that will deliver real benefits for the consumer, or we can stand aside and let others seize the initiative, which will see solicitors pushed to the margins.

Richard Atkins is a property partner with Taylor Walton and a member of the Law Society’s e-conveyancing taskforce