A collaboration between conveyancing firm Simply Conveyancing and property technology business Orbital Witness is the topic of discussion in the latest Today’s Conveyancer podcast
Host David Opie is joined by Sue Bence, Chief Operating Officer at Simply Conveyancing, and Ed Boulle, co-founder of Orbital Witness to discuss the introduction of Orbital’s title checking software, which uses large language model artificial intelligence to support and speed up the title investigation process.
The offering is currently aimed at leasehold transactions where it first digitises the documents before they are fed into the engine developed by Orbital Witness, which incorporates elements of AI, to answer standard form questions within a minute.
It’s not a replacement for a conveyancer, says Ed Boulle, rather it significantly reduces the time it takes to triage a new matter; uncover any issues and roadblocks; enables you to communicate those with the client; allocate the most appropriate fee earner to the case; and importantly introduce greater consistency to the process.
The discussion outlines some of the process and metrics Simply Conveyancing used as part of its initial pilot to understand the potential impact on efficiency and quality improvement for the firm. Sue tackles the benefits of early identification of complex cases and issues, better and more consistent way of reporting, and the costs associated with pilots like this. There has to be a clear cost/benefit analysis and she encourages firms to look at capacity, time and productivity opportunities available to conveyancers.
Sue also explores the response of the staff which ranged from welcoming through to scepticism; and discusses how Simply identified change agents in their business who helped smoothe the transition and support the introduction of new technology. Far from replacing the skills of the conveyancer, the idea here is very much to support them, says Sue.
The Today’s Conveyancer podcast can be found on your preferred podcast provider and also at www.todaysconveyancer.co.uk. Subscribe and listen in for all the latest conveyancing industry news and views.
