The postie… do you remember them?
I was thinking about my recent musings on AI and enquiries, and about how many unnecessary enquiries land in my inbox every day, and I started to think about how in the ol’days, we would get post.
Do you remember post? Every morning, the office juniors would open the post and place it in trays for the different departments in the office and then it was given to the partner in charge of that department to check and distribute to his or her team, although I don’t think we were called teams!
At about four o’clock every afternoon, the secretary would bring a pile of outgoing post to be checked by the head of department and he/she would either amend, toss aside with a scrawl through the letter, or sign ready to send, before the it was taken back to the post room and sent.
Every so often there would be a letter that was a stray. No-one knew who it was for. We had some idea as to what it was about, but details were scarce and the letter would make the rounds of all departments until someone claimed responsibility for it.
Outgoing post was checked before being sent, incoming post was seen.
Now think about this… is there a connection between the volume of enquiries and emails and a lack of supervision? Do you think that if enquiries were checked by an experienced conveyancer then we would receive so many? I have written before about what I deem to be unnecessary enquiries, approve the plan, who is the seller and so on, but what if someone experienced were to check these queries before they were sent? Would we receive so many? Would we waste so much of our time on unnecessary questions? Would we waste our clients’ time in asking them to answer questions which we know are not relevant?
Time moves on. Technology gets better, but we all need to take a deep breath and think about the enquiries we send. Think about the questions. Would you ask those questions if you had to type them into a letter (or dictate them to a secretary for them to type) and then have them checked before being sent in the post?
Email is quick but is that part of the issue? One email can generate so many more. And would your boss want you to send those questions if you had to pay to send them to the client in the post? Are they not only a waste of time but inadvertently a waste of money? How easy is it now to authorise a system to send a question but where is the supervision? Where is the checking?
This column is written by a real high street conveyancer who wishes to remain anonymous. The views expressed are those of the author and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
Read more in Today’s Conveyancer every week.
