The draft Law Society Conveyancing Protocol modernises how documents move. Ed Molyneux argues that the reforms already in train will make the next revision about information rather than paper, and sets out the three things a firm should ask for in its consultation response.
Earlier this month the Law Society published its draft of the updated Conveyancing Protocol, the framework of good practice that every CQS-accredited firm must follow, and opened a consultation on it that closes on 14 January.
It is the first revision since 2019, and the Law Society has been open that the aim is to catch up with seven years of change: digital identity checks, HM Land Registry’s online services, lender portals and reporting systems, contract bundles exchanged by link rather than by post, cyber fraud, and the shifting ground of leasehold and commonhold. Its head of private and commercial law has invited firms to respond with “one or two burning things” rather than a line-by-line review.
On its own terms the draft is a sound piece of housekeeping. If every CQS firm worked to it tomorrow, transactions would be a little quicker and a little safer. I expect the profession will be revising it again within three years all the same, not because the drafters got anything wrong but because the ground is moving quickly underneath it, and this consultation is actually the moment to say so.
Three things are in train that the draft acknowledges without yet absorbing. The government’s home buying and selling reform roadmap, published in June, wants sales packs assembled before a property is marketed, digital property records as the norm, and a path to binding conditional contracts once those packs are embedded; the content of the voluntary pack is being defined with the industry now. A large part of the industry has signed up, through the Project 28 charter, to instruct the seller’s conveyancer at listing, to provide upfront information and condition reports, and to rely on trusted data held in a secure, interoperable repository. And the Digital Property Market Steering Group, where the Law Society sits alongside HM Land Registry, the regulators and UK Finance, has the job of turning all of that into standards the regulators can require, including on AI.
Put those together and the shape of the 2029 Protocol is already visible. It will govern a transaction in which most of the facts are known, structured and shared before the buyer appears, rather than one in which a bundle of PDFs is assembled after an offer and read by eye on both sides. The current draft still describes the second world, and that is the gap a consultation response should name. Three questions get at it.
First: what does a verifiable property information form look like?
The draft keeps the TA6 as a form the seller completes and the seller’s conveyancer checks against the title. In a pre-listing world the same facts will arrive from different sources at different times: the tenure from the register, the EPC from its register, the flood designation from the Environment Agency, the extension’s building regulations certificate from the seller’s filing cabinet. A form is a poor container for that. What the Protocol needs is a definition of a property information record in which each answer carries where it came from and when, so that an official record, a seller’s statement and a professional’s summary of a scanned deed are never mistaken for the same kind of fact.
Second: who may rely on digitally shared data, and on what terms?
The draft’s new general obligation says data may be shared digitally across everyone involved, which is welcome, but sharing and reliance are different things. If a search was obtained for the seller before listing, can the buyer’s lender rely on it four months later, and against whom does a claim lie if it was wrong? The reform roadmap raises the same question about pack contents, and the answer cannot be left to each firm’s terms of business. The Protocol is the natural place to say that reliance follows the source and the date of a piece of information rather than the identity of whoever forwarded it, and that a conveyancer who relies on an official record obtained within an agreed currency is not negligent for doing so. Without that, upfront information will be gathered twice, once by each side, which defeats the purpose.
Third: what must an AI output carry before a solicitor can approve it?
The draft says AI-generated content must be reviewed and approved by a qualified solicitor before it is relied on, and leaves it there. Last week I argued that step 15 shows the Law Society can write a precise test when it wants to. The same discipline is needed on the review itself. An output that states its conclusion, the check it was applying, the documents it rested on and which of those were official records rather than party statements can be approved in minutes; one that asserts a conclusion from a pile of PDFs cannot be reviewed at all, only re-done. The Protocol should say that an AI output is approvable only when it shows its working in that form, and that the record of the solicitor’s approval stays on the file. That one sentence would do more for safe adoption than any amount of guidance on sense-checking.
None of this requires the Law Society to design the standards itself. The steering group exists for that, and there is good reason to think it will deliver. What the Protocol can do is point at the destination: a transaction built on information rather than documents, with reliance and review defined in terms a machine and a lawyer can both apply. The consultation invites firms to raise one or two burning things. I would make it these three.
About the author
Ed Molyneux is co-founder and CTO of Moverly and the original author of the Property Data Trust Framework (PDTF), the open standard for machine-readable property data now being adopted across the industry. Ed writes about AI, property data infrastructure, and the future of conveyancing.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Today’s Conveyancer. This article is general information, not legal advice.
One Response
My personal view is that the Law Society has failed miserably to ensure that estate agents act to give all the facts about domestic properties they sell and should be replaced for cause. That they allow estate agents not to disclose when annual estate Rentcharges apply, or other key matters that would-be residential buyers should be told about but are not, is disgraceful and I am pleased this is soon going to be made public on the WWW.