The Law Society Property Conference in Chancery Lane, London, brought together leading industry voices to discuss issues including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digitalisation, updates to the National Conveyancing Protocol and the government’s planned home buying reforms.
Outgoing Society president Mark Evans took the opportunity to say goodbye. “This is my last opportunity to address you all in this capacity. I just want to say thank you, really, on a personal level for what you do in your communities, in helping people move,” he said. “Often the work goes unappreciated or is undervalued, but you do some fantastic work.”
He added: “I know there’s a lot of negative rhetoric out there. But I think we’re becoming a lot more powerful, and we’re expressing our views in a lot more positive and constructive way. We’re seeing less negative feedback and sharing our views more publicly, on social media platforms. I’ve had a lot of hostile discussions, shall we say, with differing views, especially when we were looking at the TA6 forms, but I think we’re in a better place.”
Evans, who was on a panel with to Nick Denys, head of private and commercial law at Law Society and Sushila Abraham, sole principal solicitor, S.Abraham Solicitors, continued: “We need to be calm, we need to be steady, and we need to make sure we express our views in a very practical and informative way and influence the government. We can do it.”
Denys took the opportunity to announce the first consultation on an update to the National Conveyancing Protocol since 2019. “The Conveyancing Protocol, as I’m sure everyone knows, is about standardising the residential conveyancing process so both sides of the transaction are within the same framework. It makes the framework run better. It makes conveyancing more transparent and efficient and hopefully improves the experience for solicitors, lenders and clients,” he said. “We’re interested in any feedback you have about what is or isn’t in it. So please get involved. You don’t have to answer all the questions, but tell us about one or two burning things. We’ll take that information away and hopefully create a really good protocol.”
In a discussion on AI and digitalisation, Richard Harkness, solicitor at LexisNexis, Angela Hesketh, head of government and public affairs at PEXA, and Charlie Davidson, senior associate, Edwin Coe LLP, found some common ground in the potential positives of AI, but shared worries over the risk of trainee lawyers relying on it without adequate supervision.
Harkness said: “It’s a really powerful tool and we’re seeing some incredible time savings already. Some firms are betting on it in the process. But it’s like any tool; it has to be used carefully and properly. Even if a firm is paying for an AI product, it doesn’t mean that it meets the required standard for confidentiality.”
“It’s really important than when a junior lawyer is using AI and producing an output, there is a supervisor who also understands the AI. There’s a temptation for this new tech to be left to the more junior lawyers, but the more senior lawyers need to lead on this and need to understand what they’re checking and what has already happened.”
Davidson cautioned that he doesn’t “know what the ultimate use is going to be” but said he would welcome AI if it can speed things up so solicitors can spend more time advising clients.
“I would like to see AI removing some of the repetitive drudgery…but we’ve got to be careful. I don’t know about you, but I started this career in training by doing the drudgery. If we remove all the drudgery, I don’t know how we train our juniors,” he added.
Hesketh struck a positive note. “There’s a huge amount of opportunity here for junior lawyers. Junior lawyers are much more comfortable with these types of technologies. This is about being able to lift them up higher and quicker and more consistently,” she said.
“People today are not coming into property, or they’re leaving the profession. The pressure in this area is huge, so I think this is a massive opportunity to use AI correctly in the right places.”
The rest of the day included discussions on leasehold reform, questions and answers over HM Land Registry processes, key developments in residential and commercial developments, networking and breakout sessions.
Tom Treadwell, senior strategy advisor, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, concluded proceedings, kicking off his keynote speech by telling the conference: “This conference a year ago was at a point where we’d just begun a consultation exercise and a set of proposals to try and improve home buying and selling. So it’s really great to have an opportunity to come back and update on that work because since that consultation, we’ve published our home buying and selling report roadmap.”
“I’m really keen to talk to you about what we heard through that consultation and ultimately the plans we set out through the roadmap to improve the home buying and selling process. I was going to start off by saying that the roadmap is a really significant piece of work for government. It might sound really arrogant to say that, as one of the people that worked on it, but I think I can get away with it because it’s the first time in a long while that government has thought about home buying and selling as a holistic system from end to end.”
He went on to describe the “heavy reliance on paper-based processes” as “out of step with what many customers expect from a transaction in 2026”, explaining that ministers are keen to bring home buying and selling into the modern era.
The government plans to publish a “code of practice” for property agents before the end of the year, as well as more guidance on material information and property listings.
Treadwell added: “The government view is very much that the responsibilities of conveyancers have grown massively in recent years. The sector is under a huge amount of pressure, and that’s reflected in the number of individuals and organisations that we’ve seen leaving conveyancing in the last few years. While I appreciate a lot of this looks like further change and a lot to get used to, the intention of these reforms is very much to make things easier for conveyancers.”
