When it comes to implementing AI in the residential transaction process, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel, Cyber Conveyancer Peter Ambrose explains. Taking small steps to improve what already works will eventually result in a giant technology leap for conveyancing.
It’s a good job ChatGPT wasn’t around in 1969, otherwise when Neil Armstrong did his little hop on the moon, instead of describing it as “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” it might have been ”This singular advancement for an individual represents a transformative and monumental progress for the collective benefit of our entire global civilisation in the modern era.”
But when it comes to people offering technology that offers giant leaps forward in conveyancing involving radical and massive advancements, unfortunately, such grand plans have a habit of fizzling out. Like most law firm owners, I am regularly pitched technology that will apparently revolutionise my colleagues’ working lives, so I’ll no longer have to worry about being sued by a previous client for not advising them they bought a house next to a crack den.
Only, it won’t and unfortunately, such ‘big bang’ discussions can actually undermine the real value that we desperately need from technology to help improve our working lives.
Victory through small changes
Remember when Great Britain won some medals on a Saturday night in 2012, an evening that made VE-day feel more like when your 12 year old was picked for the school third 11 football team? The success was put down in large part to their coach, Dave Brailsford, who had worked out that with just a few tweaks to their training regime they could gain that extra 1% performance which would ensure them a place on the winners’ podium.
When it comes to improving the stressful existence that is Conveyancing’26, these “marginal gains” as Dave called them, are realistically the only way we’re going to be able to introduce the technology we need, effectively. This is because whilst making radical changes to a highly complex process is impractical, we have no choice but to adapt how we work to address a fast-changing landscape, to protect our colleagues from the increasing pressures and complications they face.
Achieving this – a real-life example
Lawyers told us that the time-consuming and convoluted procedure of creating and matching replies to enquiries was (after the hours wasted dealing with our client’s auntie surprising discovery of £100,000 in her ‘savings’) the most frustrating part of their job. It seemed a problem worth addressing so we set out to see if we could fix it.
As a firm, we’d always managed enquiries electronically, so we figured it would make just as much sense to everyone else. The problem was we were asking lawyers to change from a process that fundamentally worked, where they were exchanging emails either with replies embedded or attached as a document. Whilst slow, risky and frustrating, trying to convince people to throw away a working solution was simply too much of a leap.
If we wanted to bring change, we needed to take much smaller steps, starting by working in the same way that people were familiar with. We initially sent enquiries to other firms in a ‘useful but not THAT useful’ PDF format as we figured most would print them and mark them up in finest Stabilo Yellow. But this didn’t made things much more efficient, so instead we switched to a Word version, so lawyers could add their replies in the document itself and email it back to us.
We then built technology to read those replies that people sent in the Word document and match them to the enquiries that had been raised. Once we saw that people were happy to use Word, we extended the technology to read any email or document, and we started to see the process accelerate and, more importantly, stress levels significantly reduce.
So what does this show?
The key was we knew that technology had a vital role to play in reducing the risks that lawyers face carrying out due diligence. However, we quickly realised that trying to change a process that was not really that broken in the first place, was not going to result in adoption.
Instead of beating our head against a brick wall trying to change ingrained behaviours overnight, which, in my opinion, is a total waste of time, instead, by offering much smaller technology changes, we could then start to bring significant improvements.
Just like Armstrong, I believe we must enable lawyers to take small steps to help improve the conveyancing process, which will all add up to a giant leap over time, rather than all at once.
About the author
Peter Ambrose is the managing director of The Partnership, a company modernising the conveyancing process. With a legal background and strong technology expertise, he founded the firm to transform traditional residential transactions. Over the past decade, he has built the company into a respected brand with offices in London and Guildford, a team of over 80 employees, and more than 3,000 cases each year.
