The third edition of the British Conveyancing Awards is just around the corner. Alongside a new, larger venue #BCAwards2023 is all about recognising and rewarding the herculean efforts of conveyancing superheroes who, despite hurdles aplenty, continue to go above and beyond to help clients move into their dream home. Ahead of the splendour and celebration on the 21st March, Today’s Conveyancer will recognise those who help make the event possible through a series of Sponsor Spotlight pieces:
First of all, who are you and what do you do?
Originally founded in 1874, Dye & Durham has a long, rich history in the legal services sector. It started life as a legal form business and has since moved on to digitalise processes and offer better practice management solutions for law firms around the world. Dye & Durham has always focused on improving and evolving solutions for our clients, and to this day, it remains our customer-centred mission.
Dye & Durham is now one of the largest providers of property information services in England and Wales, providing access to an extensive network of data. This includes critical information related to environmental and flood, local authority, land charges, planning, drainage and water, mining and subsidence, chancel liabilities, and more. This data enables us to supply the best and most accurate information so our clients can work with certainty.
As a global technology company providing legal, financial and government service professionals with cloud-based solutions for business transactions and regulatory compliance, everything we do focuses on improving the precision and confidence of our customers.
You recently rebranded several companies under the “Dye & Durham” umbrella. What should be expected from this new simplified, streamlined version of Dye & Durham?
Dye & Durham has acquired nine businesses in the UK. The brands of many of the companies that we acquired – including Terrafirma, Future Climate Info, Lawyer Checker, Easy Convey and poweredbypie – have recently been streamlined under Dye & Durham’s master brand, resulting in a simplified, consistent customer experience and making it even easier for clients to access new products and services.
This means we are now serving clients across the UK under a unified and strengthened brand, with the business firmly focused on helping customers fuel growth and cut inefficiencies.
As we’ve grown, we have retained the maximum value for the primary elements of the businesses we have acquired — all for the benefit of our legal customers. This means we offer the skills of key people, the data and data-driven insights of each business, plus the focus to solve customer problems as we pool knowledge to deliver best-in-class solutions. The deep understanding of the challenges our customers face means that together, we can provide the best possible products and services for them.
As the industry marches towards a comprehensive system of digital conveyancing, what role will Dye & Durham play in helping that become a reality?
Our focus is on streamlining the customer journey and making a range of tools available in one place. We’ve worked to create one team, one business and one brand, and we’ve been successful. There are no walls between the different businesses now, and the whole team represents Dye & Durham. These efforts have been the result of a unified product and business strategy with the ultimate aim of providing legal practice management software on a single platform that enables legal professionals to log on in the morning, serve their customers’ needs quickly and efficiently and log out at the end of the working day.
What does Dye & Durham see as the biggest risks confronting conveyancers moving forward? How can they ensure they stay on top of the ever-increasing threat of fraud, climate change, etc.?
Risk management and fraud prevention remain a critical area of focus for conveyancers as fraudsters continue to evolve. It’s critical that conveyancers have consistent processes in place to undertake due diligence to ensure they are not put at risk from scammers or bogus law firms, for example.
From the perspective of homebuyers, they continue to rely on conveyancers for understanding whether there are any risks associated with the property they are purchasing. Physical, environmental or planning risks can have a significant impact on the value, insurability and mortgage-ability of a property. They can also impact the occupier’s quiet enjoyment of a property, and even disrupt plans to repurpose or redevelop. It is therefore critical that prospective buyers understand what they are taking on and that conveyancers have access to insights and reports that buyers rely on.
Because of the multi-dimensional elements of risk, it is essential for lawyers to partner with a consultative, supportive firm like Dye & Durham, which can give them the means to report appropriately on a range of risks to fully inform the client and fulfil their duty of care. This includes potential risks affecting properties today, and also future-facing climate-related environmental risks, which is increasingly on consumers’ radars.
Equally, what do you see as something conveyancers should look to with excitement as we move into 2023?
The last few years have really highlighted that the ways of working in the conveyancing industry are ripe for modernisation. There’s a real driver for buyers to access upfront information and the digitisation of data; both are being worked on. From Dye & Durham’s perspective, we have a great team, solutions and data to really make a big difference here, so it’s exciting times.
