AI isn’t the cause of irrelevant enquiries, Today’s Conveyancer columnist Peter Ambrose points out – but it might be the solution.
If you put on your Speedos and do a forward double pike into the cesspit that is LinkedIn, you’ll read the increasing frustration of lawyers who are now receiving dozens of irrelevant enquiries on seemingly straightforward properties. It’s too easy to say “well, that’s technology for you” followed by a collective shrugging of shoulders as we click on Microsoft Word and begin the tedious game of copy, paste, delete extra spaces; repeated another 57 times.
As the ChatGPT-enabled client is becoming part of Conveyancing2026, evidenced by complaint letters consisting of thousands of floral words highlighting your incompetence as a lawyer, it’s not surprising this problem is being blamed on the apparent increase in the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
However, we need to be cautious when assuming it is this technology that is making up for the ill-trained shortcomings of inexperienced lawyers; it’s part of our world now, and we need to work out how to make the best of it.
Is it AI or just Word templates?
It’s easy to blame our sparkly new AI friend but this change had been coming for a while, facilitated ironically by the villain often viewed as our rock – the aforementioned Word and its irritating daughter, the Word template. Given it is the default technology choice, it’s more likely the use of standardised questions that is a bigger issue, but AI is becoming the scapegoat for all that is wrong in the lack of training of conveyancers.
I’ve seen the use of AI confused with the issue of irrelevant enquiries. They can just be a by-product of the poor use of AI, but we are in the foothills of the Everest that is AI use in conveyancing, so therefore relatively rare. Given that most legal technology is built by technologists not lawyers, if you receive enquiries that are organised by an obscure mix of numbers, letters and roman numerals, you can bet your mortgage this was more likely to be a close enquiry encounter of a very much human-kind.
Keeping a human in the loop
When a technology vendor is waxing lyrical about keeping the “human in the loop” but claiming technology can run cases from start to finish, you know it’s time to end the Teams demo. For example, if AI has identified what it considers to be all the issues in a lease, allowing the user to ‘Select All’ to raise every enquiry, demonstrates well and appears to save time.
However, just because you can automate something, doesn’t mean you should as it causes people to become over-reliant on the technology. Instead, the user must be forced make an informed choice and choose the enquiries manually; that’s why systems often make you type a confirmation word like ‘DELETE’ when you want to delete something important.
It sounds great in theory, but in practice, it’s not so simple. As an owner of a law firm which prides itself on the quality of our work, I was recently approached by a lawyer at a conference. She wanted to learn about our enquiry technology, as she had seen it used on the sale of her own property and was frustrated because they she had received questions that she considered irrelevant. Somewhat embarrassingly, it turned out to be a lawyer from my firm who had raised them; on reviewing the file, the enquiries were indeed picky, but not irrelevant. But just as irritating and annoying.
So what do we do?
Much like the frustration we see where lawyers raise enquiries that are not CQS compliant, trying to stop enquiries considered as irrelevant being raised, has a King Canute type feel about it. No amount of likes and reposts to complaints on LinkedIn are going to resolve this.
With clients increasingly using AI to check our work, this makes the use of technology to raise a wider range of enquiries to protect against this, inevitable. The answer is to deploy technology able to identify and dismiss those that are irrelevant, allowing time to be focussed on those that need addressing. We are seeing this approach to complaint handling today, with firms using AI to reply to AI-generated complaints from clients – clearly this is the direction of travel.
As we don’t get paid to deal with irrelevant enquiries or complaints, we must find much more efficient ways to do this zero-value work and not waste our time on the copy-paste-delete game, because frankly, it’s not much fun, and lawyers have become bored of it.
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.
