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Here we go again: time to change how conveyancing is done. It is, after all, Monday. As I have said before in these and other columns, we just need properly qualified lawyers doing a proper, personal job. Give meaningful sensible advice, get on with it and charge a proper fee. This constantly repeated mantra of cheap one-size-fits-all does not get the job done. In the old days of real letters, transactions took far less time than they do now. Email is the biggest disaster: instead of receiving your morning's post, putting it on a file, and working through it, with a caseload of several hundred files being no problem, we now have emails which arrive al the time with people demanding immediate responses. This means the longer jobs such as title checks and reports being left, whilst starting a battle to give responses more and more quickly which are often full of errors. It also substantially reduces the caseload. The other thing is doing one's own typing. As a professional advisor, the pay rate is higher than for a secretary. Why then give the lawyer the typing to do? Secretarial time is not chargeable to the client so why would a lawyer do it, when theoretically it should not be charged? There are all sorts of ways to improve the conveyancing process but having a client sign electronically is not the way. Pretty much everything else is done electronically anyway. Clients tend not read things they are sent (tags for where to sign does not make a client read something). Generally, of course, clients are not interested in the process or why it is done (partly because generally lawyers don't tell them). All they want to do is move house.

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