The founder of a conveyancing technology provider has launched a CLC-regulated law firm “to show that the variability that has long characterised the conveyancing process is not inevitable”.
Ed Boulle is the co-founder of Orbital, an AI-powered property due diligence platform which provides summarised title documents, leases, deeds, searches and lender requirements for conveyancers. Announcing the launch of Farringdon on LinkedIn, Boulle wrote: “I am often asked to recommend a conveyancing firm by friends and family.
“My answer is always the same: the quality of the experience for any buyer or seller isn’t determined by the name of the firm alone. It depends on the nature of the property, the chain involved, the individual lawyer handling the matter, their experience and the volume and complexity of the other transactions they are managing at the same time.
“I know many excellent law firms and outstanding lawyers, and yet I still cannot make a recommendation that I can stand behind with any conviction, because the variables above shape each person’s conveyancing experience.”
Boulle said he plans to use Farringdon to demonstrate it “should now be possible to build a law firm that is not constrained by traditional capacity limitations, and that delivers a consistently high standard of service irrespective of the individual lawyer handling the transaction or the nature of the property involved”.
Speaking to Today’s Conveyancer, Boulle said Farringdon will begin taking instructions in May and will launch with six conveyancing lawyers initially.
He explained: “These include conveyancing engineers (specialist legal engineers embedded in tech teams building and evaluating AI workflows), transaction lawyers (client-facing, running cases assisted by AI workflows) and the head of legal practice (oversight, escalation, compliance). We’ll be hiring more lawyers into each of these specialisms in due course but we do not have fixed hiring targets.”
Critically, the learnings from Farringdon will inform the work of the wider business and provide the opportunity to share those learning with the sector, Boulle added.
“At Orbital we’ve spent years building technology that helps thousands of property lawyers accomplish technical legal work. We now power 200,000+ property transactions a year across the globe. That includes almost 10% of all residential transactions in England and Wales.
“Every insight we gain from building Farringdon – every repetitive workflow we automate, every bottleneck we solve – feeds back into the technology we provide to our customers. “If Farringdon helps us build a better conveyancing experience, every conveyancing firm that runs on Orbital benefits – and so do their clients.”
On the firm’s use of AI, Boulle explained the firm will use it wherever possible to reduce the number of manual steps in the process, and reduce the latency of information being fed back to the client and agent.
While the initial focus will be on simplifying the onboarding journey and identifying issues early on so they can be addressed earlier the opportunities for AI go far beyond efficiency or communications.
“For example, we’ve also started experimenting with developing a compliance agent that monitors all transactions for any signs of risk or deviation by reference to the firm’s policies and procedures, as well as regulation. Currently, firms operating at any real scale have to resort to sampling files to gauge risk across their pipeline. AI could soon offer a much more robust solution.”
He added: “I can’t speak for other firms, but what sets Farringdon apart is the vision to share the technology that it creates with the wider conveyancing industry. The idea is simple: Clients will be better off if law firms on both sides of a transaction are using agentic conveyancing technology. This applies to transaction chains as well.”
Pressed on what proportion of work will be done by AI, Boulle acknowledged it’s a “hard one to judge”.
“Over the long-term, you could think about it in terms of what work actually needs to be done by a lawyer. Farringdon employs lawyers and I don’t see that changing. My hope is that they will spend more time on things that matter to clients, and less time on things that don’t.”
Orbital has just closed a $60m funding round to invest further in its technology which currently offers services to residential and commercial property lawyers in England and Wales, and the USA.
