Following hard on the heels of your editorial 'United we stand?' (see [2007] Gazette, 16 August, 12) came the government's announcement that home information packs (HIPs) will be rolled out to include three-bedroom properties from 10 September. Make no mistake, this represents the biggest threat to solicitors retaining their share of the conveyancing market that the legal profession has ever seen.


It is all very well saying on the front page of the Gazette that we should 'collaborate with local estate agents to put together an information pack to assist clients', but that is akin to sleeping with the enemy. It is the estate agents who are now gunning for our conveyancing business and your editorial is quite right in advocating looking to Scotland to see how we should now be marketing our conveyancing services in tandem with selling houses.



The really big plus-factor for solicitors in the present marketplace, if we accept that HIPs are here to stay, is that again for the first time in my professional life we actually have the opportunity to get to the clients first before the estate agents and other intermediaries. If we collectively as lawyers work together to promote the fact that, when all is said and done, the HIP is a legal document and as such it can only properly be prepared by a lawyer, then we have a chance to save our conveyancing practices.



If the estate agents and HIP providers win that battle, then we lose the war, because our conveyancing clients are already being sold by estate agents to other solicitors and conveyancers in exactly the same way as the claim farmers have been selling personal injury clients. As a consequence, conveyancing fees will be driven down by the agents and intermediaries playing us off against each other to, in the words of Yvette Cooper, 'get a better deal for the consumer'. All very well, Yvette, but according to the Sunday Times, in the last ten years the average stamp duty levy on each property has increased tenfold, estate agency fees have almost trebled but lawyers fees have dropped on average by 20%.



It's a slippery slope that will lead to ruin for many high street conveyancers unless, as a profession, we act now collectively both to corner the HIP market and start to sell houses direct. Give it five years and estate agents will control the conveyancing market on house sales unless we partner with them or do it ourselves. It has happened in Denmark, and if HIPs are here to stay, then for sure it will be replicated here.



In the same way that our criminal practices have been decimated by the government's disgraceful policies on legal aid, our conveyancing work is now going the same way unless we act now to stop the rot. In the words of Roy Keane, 'fail to prepare and prepare to fail'.



Peter Morgan, Osborne Morris & Morgan, Leighton Buzzard