A conveyancing giant whose businesses suffered a major IT outage last month says it has lost only a ‘very small proportion’ of clients to competitors as it continues to restore its systems.

Premier Property Lawyers, JS Law, DC Law and Advantage Property Lawyers, which are part of the Simplify group, were the subject of a ‘security incident’ late on 7 November.

Simplify told the Gazette that it is continuing to work non-stop to bring more systems back online. Advantage Property Lawyers operates on different infrastructure and case management systems have been fully restored, allowing the firm to operate as normal.

Simplify said the incident, which is the subject of a criminal investigation, limited access to some of the company’s key IT systems and a specialist response team, including external security experts, was quickly deployed.

Asked how many transactions were affected, Simplify said the combined market share of purchase completions for Premier Property Lawyers, DC Law and JS Law was 4.1% and the share of the entire market is in line with this. ‘From this it is very hard to assess how many transactions may have been involved as any transaction can be at risk from a whole host of factors,' a spokesperson said. 'Since the incident we have made good progress on restoring systems and are now completing hundreds of transactions daily, allowing our clients to move.’ 

Simplify said all clients who exchanged contracts prior to the incident have now completed their transactions through Simplify’s firms, without needing to move to a different conveyancer. As far as Simplify is aware, no client has moved to a different conveyancer after contracts were exchanged.

A ‘very small proportion’ decided to instruct another conveyancer. ‘The vast majority who have spoken to their conveyancer about the progress and next steps on their transaction understand that it is likely that their case will progress more quickly continuing with their chosen Simplify firm than starting again with a different conveyancer,’ the spokesperson said.