Tishka Chapman has been a partner in Wolferstans’ Residential Conveyancing team for 16 years. She’s seen the job change: the compliance, the technology, the pace clients now expect. Some of the waiting she can remove. The rest she can’t – so she’s built her team around making sure no client is ever left in the dark about their matter.
A firm you can walk into
Wolferstans has served the South West since 1812. Today it runs two offices in North Hill and Plympton, with over 200 staff covering every area of law except criminal. But ask Tishka Chapman what kind of firm it is, and the answer isn’t about practice areas or headcount.
“We have lots of clients who attend the office to drop documents off, or want a quick conversation with you over something. We open from 8.30am to 5.30pm – I saw clients at half eight this morning before they went into work.”
It’s a small detail that says a lot. In an industry increasingly defined by portals, apps, and national conveyancing chains, personal care, including the ability to choose an early appointment, is of a piece with everything else the firm does to shorten the distance between client expectations and firm delivery.
Local staff, no client distance
Wolferstans’ local identity isn’t incidental; it’s structural. All 200+ staff are employed directly by the firm, with no consultants. Most staff work from the office regularly, including Tishka herself. Her trainee, Keeva Fitzgerald, is in four days a week, with the fifth being her training day.
While hybrid working does feature in Wolferstans, Tishka prefers working in-office but does like the flexibility that hybrid working offers.
“In the office, if you’ve got a question, it’s easier to pop down the corridor and ask. But if you’re at home, you’re trying to get hold of someone on Teams, and they may not be available.”
For a firm built on being reachable, that’s not a small thing. Ensuring that colleagues can communicate quickly and efficiently means that client care remains at the forefront of operations.
Being available isn’t the same as an instant response
Clients today expect things to move quickly. While not every part of the process can be sped up, Tishka believes the client experience can still keep pace.
Her team runs on a simple rule: clients shouldn’t have to ask for updates. A task system keeps clients informed every two to three days as standard, whether or not there’s news to share. The same principle extends outward, with the team chasing lenders and other firms in a chain if responses go quiet.
The burden of compliance
Every conveyancer knows the compliance burden has grown. What gets said less often is where it lands. Source of funds can take some time before any legal work starts, and even longer when the money is coming from abroad.
Still, this tension is not something most clients are aware of, even if it is something that weighs on conveyancing professionals.
“We receive specialist training on compliance and we understand the reasons behind it.”
Tishka’s approach is transparency without over-promising. She tells clients the truth about delays rather than managing around them.
This is the central tension of modern conveyancing, and it speaks to the power of controlling what can be controlled in a transaction. Some of the waiting can be taken out of a transaction. Tishka’s search provider, Dye & Durham, does her chasing on her behalf and answers queries the same day – on the day we spoke, she had three of them – which is time that would otherwise go on chasing. Much of it cannot: For example, a local authority search in Plymouth was running six to eight weeks while South Hams came back in two or three and Cornwall inside a week, and no amount of chasing moves a council that is behind.
In all of those instances, Tishka is careful to manage and set client expectations so the client is never in the dark about the process.
“When we have an estimated date, we tell the client. If it’s been delayed, we tell the client it’s been delayed. Upfront, honest communication is better than hiding it from a client and promising something you can’t achieve.”
When the job becomes more than conveyancing
Sometimes that honesty is tested by cases that go well beyond the paperwork. Tishka recalls an elderly client whose matter was delayed and their move was held up by a stalled chain because a lawyer further down hadn’t completed source of funds checks on money coming from India and had only done this at the point of completion
” There were so many people below our client in the chain, and one of the lawyers hadn’t done source of funds checks. We ended up being involved in an email with every lawyer in the chain – even on the day of completion, I was asking, where’s the money now? Who’s got it?”
It’s a reminder of what’s at stake behind a transaction: for the client, moving house sits alongside the other major turning points in a life.
“It’s one of the four major milestones in your life – death, marriage, divorce and moving house. ”
What sets the standard
For Tishka, the measure of good conveyancing isn’t complicated. It’s whether the client ever has to ask what’s happening.
“What sets us apart is our clients don’t have to chase us. We aim to always provide a client with an update before they ask.”
It’s the same principle that shapes Wolferstans more broadly. The firm has over 2,000 client reviews on ReviewSolicitors, with an average rating of 4.9 out of 5. For Tishka, it comes down to something simpler.
“We want each client to feel they’re special – like they’re your only client.”
The lesson, from Tishka’s experience and Wolferstans’ approach, is to be deliberate about what can be controlled: Remove the delay that can be taken out, using a search partner who answers the same day and does the tracing for you, and be straight with the client about the delay that can’t. Tishka, Keeva, and the team at Wolferstans have built a reputation on delivering exceptional client care, and that approach is still serving clients – including more than 2,000 positively reviewing ones – more than two centuries after the firm first opened its doors.
Read more about how Wolferstans works with Dye & Durham’s conveyancing search team here
This article was submitted by Dye & Durham as part of an advertising agreement with Today’s Conveyancer. The views expressed in this article are those of the advertiser and not those of Today’s Conveyancer.
