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.
What was your career path to your current role?
I started out in the technology industry, working for many years in the US and Europe trying to sell average software to people who didn’t really want it. When I decided that I’d had enough of that, I setup The Partnership, firstly providing home information packs before moving into the legal market to provide conveyancing, wills and probate, before focusing purely on the conveyancing market. I’d been running The Partnership for 16 years when I setup Legalito, which is designed to help improve the lives of lawyers.
Did you have any other career ambitions?
Having watched a number of US TV shows about law students in the 80’s, I had a burning desire to become a barrister. It looked like an incredibly glamorous life where I could spend my time impressing others with my verbal dexterity. Sadly, I had neither the intellect, academic nor linguistic expertise for the role and ended up doing technical support for a software company.
What keeps you motivated in your work?
From the start of the business, my mantra has always been ‘This will not do’ – we should never be satisfied as we can always do better tomorrow. Our brilliant software team helps us to develop solutions that genuinely enable our people to offer brilliant service, which means this job is never done.
If you could change one thing about the transaction process, what would it be?
I would eliminate the black hole of conveyancing by introducing ‘straight through processing’, as the finance industry did 50 years ago. All information is collected and passed through the transaction transparently between parties – eliminating email and swapping it with secure communications across platforms.
What has been the best development in conveyancing in the last 20 years?
The recognition (but unfortunately not yet the implementation) that property data such as titles, leases, searches and mortgages needs to be held electronically and easily retrievable from a single place.
And the worst?
Law firm owners allowing themselves to accept high volumes of cases at low fees, without investing in appropriate technology to support the high caseloads these fees demand.
Do you think conveyancing will ever be fully digitised?
I see digitisation as the conversion of information into electronic form. In this context, unfortunately I doubt it will ever be 100% digitised because there are too many areas where information is unstructured such as management company packs and client paperwork. Small firms typically lack the bandwidth to invest in scanning and processing technology, so information will remain in paper form for many years to come.
Do you think it should be?
We have always held all our data and all our documents digitally – my mantra is, ‘if it’s paper, scan it’, so that everyone always has access to all information about a matter. I see this as fundamental to the conveyancing process, and if all lawyers had access to all information electronically, it would make a huge difference to their lives and vastly improve the service they will be able to offer their clients.
What’s the best piece of advice anyone ever gave you regarding your career?
It doesn’t have to be perfect, but good enough.
What’s the best piece of advice you’d like to give to someone just starting out?
You spend far too long working not to enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, do something else. Given some of the highly negative posts I read online, I would suggest that it’s not only those starting out that should take this advice.
Tell us something people may be surprised to know about you…
As a reasonably accomplished juggler, I performed at Covent Garden, although sadly never fully mastered the classic five-ball shower.
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One Response
Well, in fairness, you have to be able to juggle if involved in conveyancing!