Ask anyone doing conveyancing how they are feeling, and you’ll get a familiar response. It’ll start with a sigh and then they’ll explain how they’re fed up with clients using ChatGPT to raise enquiries or write complaints, by being bombarded by people telling them AI can do their job or that the alleged rush of people leaving the profession makes them question why they are still doing it.
The last point of which, let’s be honest – when you’re awake at 3.00am trying to remember if you’d requested mortgage funds for that flat completing tomorrow, doesn’t exactly make uplifting reasons for staying in conveyancing. A litigious population demanding more accountability coupled with the increasing fraud risk, misuse of client money and the insistence that you deliver a flawless legal and service performance every time, doesn’t inspire childlike joy for the future.
However, if you’re wading through AI slop on LinkedIn, attending wide-eyed conferences or reading crystal-bally whitepapers, it would be easy to be convinced that the white knight that is AI is waiting over the next hill, ready to sweep us off our feet and deliver us to the promised land of happy clients, fast transactions and buns for tea.
So what is really happening?
The reality is it’s a bit messy in the world of conveyancing and technology. We’ve got companies looking at conveyancing from a purely technology and process point of view and suppliers like Microsoft extending their platforms to include legal-specific expertise. It can feel like lawyers are the archetypal boiling frog with increasing pressure that if they don’t get on the AI bandwagon today, they are going to experience a painful, lingering demise.
But here’s the issue – no-one is explaining how firms are going to be left behind, by whom and by what. Platitudes offered from the safety of conference platforms rarely go into detail. Which leads us seeing strange choices made by firms who feel they need to do something, but are not exactly sure what. In the headlong rush to embrace AI, I have seen precious little informed discussion about where to start, but am instead seeing firms signing annual contracts with suppliers, simply because they asked them to.
The problem is that because AI can be used for anything from answering the telephone, creating social media memes or booking a spa day because your watch detected you were stressed, we need to identify which conveyancing problems it is best suited to solve. In my firm, we decided the only way to do this was to give our people a safe place to try it and then see what they used it for. The results were interesting as it was mainly for finding information hidden in documents (leases and management packs in particular) and for unravelling the mess that is source of wealth due diligence. One thing was clear, they didn’t immediately want it to work out what enquiries to raise or for producing a report on title. Which was expected as this is their area of expertise, so why would they open that particular Pandora’s box?
So where SHOULD we use AI in conveyancing?
Given that in recent years, the conveyancing market is definitely more challenging, with fewer deals taking longer to go through, it’s understandable that law firm owners are looking for solutions to help reduce the pressure that lawyers are under, and the increased risk of claims. Different areas are being trialled – we built a voice agent to answer the phone and route the caller to the contact; it’s early days, but our clients seem happy with it. We’re also using AI to improve the accuracy of mortgage reports and for checking the consistency of transfers and titles as part of our pre-exchange checks.
This reinforces the idea that the best place to start with AI is not with legal challenges, but those of administrative risk and compliance, particularly when dealing with issues of concern to clients. For example, when checking sources of wealth, our problem was not getting a client to upload their passport, it was working out what information we are missing. When we’re sending transfers to the other side, how do we check the information is correct? How do we quickly spot there’s only two years’ worth of accounts in the huge management pack we’ve been sent?
Rather than trying to shoehorn AI into the core of what we do as lawyers, we should be looking at the areas where we are making mistakes because we are human, and apply the technology to that first. Only once we have gained the confidence that technology is rather good at spotting mistakes, should we even consider letting loose on our core legal activities. We certainly should not be running to adopt AI before we’ve learned to walk with it, yet.
About the author
Peter Ambrose is the owner of The Partnership and Legalito – specialising in the delivery of transparent and ultra-efficient conveyancing services and software.
The views expressed in this feature are those of the author and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
