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I am not now and never have been a conveyancer, although I have bought and sold a few properties over the years, and had conveyancers as colleagues. In my experience, and distilling the anecdotes from former colleagues and non-legal friends, the principal reasons for delay are (a) finance, necessitating the chain (as few are prepared - or able - to take on bridging finance) and chains do sometimes break as someone pulls out for whatever reason; (b) its often the biggest financial decision people make, and some people need time to consider it properly (which can lead to them pulling out); (c) oddities arising, which people get fixated on - an example would be Mr Prior's stream (although I am unclear what this has to do with the lawyers - riparian rights? Fishing rights?).

And there are some legal issues of course, which may cause problems, such as oddities in leases, or sometimes just oddities. Our first property was a leasehold flat in a block of 20. It turned out that each flat owner had their own buildings insurance covering just their flat, although the unexceptional lease required block insurance by the (resident owned) management company with flat contributions. Thus the common parts were uninsured. The block was some 20 years old, and perhaps 30 flats had changed hands before. My seller was a surveyor. Noone before us had seemed to notice the odd - quite possibly unworkable - and non lease compliant insurance arrangements. As I recall, it took a couple of months to resolve this point alone, as the seller had to run around getting the whole block insurance arrangements changed. (Not a good advertisement for conveyancers I know, even though it was over 30 years ago.)