Eighty files. That’s roughly where efficiency increases so much that conveyancers can’t provide a quality service, Eddie Goldsmith, Managing Director of You Convey, estimates – and he’s not the only conveyancer or industry expert to think so. While technology has made much of the conveyancing process faster, there remains a practical limit to how many matters anyone can manage while still keeping communication, supervision and quality standards intact.
As part of Dye & Durham’s third Modern Law roundtable on conveyancing – chaired by retired licensed conveyancer Michelle O’Shea – we spoke to eleven conveyancers, operational leaders, and legal technology specialists to talk about how to define success in a modern conveyancing function.
Overwhelmingly, what those participants reported was that, in the face of increasing client expectations and burnout rates and greater recruitment challenges and operational pressure, volume is no longer the metric by which success could be measured. With a resultant dip in service quality and practitioner wellbeing, achieving higher caseloads no longer appears to be the goal for conveyancing firms and departments.
If not volume, however, then what is the new metric for success for conveyancers? Here is what those conveyancers had to say, and the advice they have for other firms attempting to measure success in a changing landscape.
No “One Size Fits All” Approach for Conveyancers
For those who value neat answers, the bad news is that there is no one single way to measure success these days. As the roundtable participants explained, success is increasingly a question of how sustainably and effectively a firm delivers its work rather than how much of it it takes on, and how that works in practice differs depending on whether a business competes on premium service, specialist expertise, client relationships, scalability or flexible working.
For those who are open to individualisation, however, the ability to build a function that truly reflects the firm’s ethos and values has rarely ever been more open.
Four Success Metrics Worth Measuring
While case volume may or may not be the right metric for conveyancers to target – and that is a decision all conveyancing firms and functions should think carefully about – there are four metrics that the roundtable highlighted that guarantee greater success and firm reputation, regardless of raw caseload numbers.
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Measurement 1: Client education and information. Assessing and understanding whether your clients feel informed can be essential components for conveyancing excellence. In the roundtable, the quality of client communication came up repeatedly as the key differentiator clients look for from a conveyancing firm. A great deal of the stress clients report in the conveyancing process comes from the loss of control over the process rather than from the legal complexity itself. Automated updates can form a part of reassuring clients, but as clients often face very human worries (such as death, divorce or debt), embedding human empathy into your process is irreplaceable by a machine. In practical terms, you can measure the success of this metric first through how often clients ring purely to chase an update, then in post-completion surveys that ask whether clients understood what was happening at each stage, and the strength of your referral pipeline.
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Measurement 2: Managing caseloads. While firms can sometimes opt for quantity, this may not be the right approach for conveyancers. Instead, assessing how serviceable your caseloads are can often be a better measurement of success – a caseload creeping upwards, for example, might be more of a resourcing problem rather than a sign of a healthy pipeline.
Here, it’s up to each firm to decide how to proceed. While some firms have responded to the “caseload ceiling” by moving deliberately in the other direction, trading volume for smaller caseloads, higher fees and more attention on each file, that route may not be one that is open to all. This is an area where technology can be hugely helpful, providing visibility and giving owners or partners an honest picture of workload across a team.
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Measurement 3: Employee retention. Whether your employees stay or leave can be one of the best metrics of success a conveyancing firm can measure. With increasing strains across the professions, priorities have shifted for a good number of experienced conveyancers. With a concerted move away from growth targets and towards culture, retention and wellbeing, many firms are now embracing the ideology that happier teams work harder and stay longer. There is a commercial argument to be made here that is as strong as the ethical one. Measuring caseload volume above all does not adequately capture the cost of an experienced conveyancer burning out and leaving, which can lead to depressed earnings in an otherwise busy quarter.
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Measurement 4: Junior professionals’ development. Ensuring continuity of service quality into the future is an investment all firms should be making now. While AI and other technology is changing how conveyancers work, it’s highly unlikely that automation will replace them. Even if AI-driven processes become a larger part of conveyancing, the panelists on our roundtable stressed that training of junior employees remains essential. While AI might be able to handle some of the foundational, repetitive tasks junior staff have always cut their teeth on, professional judgement still needs to be developed in those juniors. That becomes considerably harder without specific training and development targets, particularly when recruitment pressure is already pushing inexperienced people into senior roles without the supervision to match.
None of the above precludes measuring the volume of new and repeat business. Completions and caseload will always matter commercially, and no conveyancing business survives by ignoring them. However, embracing a broader scorecard as a measure of success – one where volume sits alongside the quality of your client relationships, the sustainability of your workloads, the people who choose to stay, and the professionals you are building for the years ahead – will pay off firm-wide. That, in itself, is likely a stronger recipe for success than completions and caseloads alone.
This piece draws on discussion from the third Modern Law roundtable on conveyancing, hosted by Dye & Durham and chaired by Michelle O’Shea. Read the full roundtable in Modern Law Issue 82.
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