CLC Futures roundtable – hearing from junior lawyers

4 October, 2024

The Council for Licensed Conveyancers recently held its first ever Futures Roundtable, looking at the future of profession with students on the path to qualifying, those recently licensed and people responsible for training the next generation of licensed conveyancers.

Chaired by Neil Rose, editor of the website Legal Futures, it featured:

• Cash Bishop, a licensed conveyancer who qualified last year at London law firm William Sturges;
• Kara Evans, a residential conveyancer at Aconveyancing in Tamworth, currently going through its training academy as a paralegal apprenticeship;
• Shayleigh Isom, a property lawyer at Simply Conveyancing in Daventry
• Natalie Moore, licensed conveyancer and owner of Aconveyancing, where she has several staff studying to qualify;
• Connor O’Dell, conveyancing manager at Swiitch, the conveyancing brand of national law firm Shoosmiths. He is on the last leg of his Level Six diploma to become licenced;
• Vicki Redman, head of training at Swiitch
• Claire Richardson, deputy director of authorisations at the CLC.

So, is becoming a licensed conveyancer an attractive career option? For Kara Evans, the answer is a big ‘yes’. “You’re always learning,” she explained. “There’s always a transaction you’re going to come across that you haven’t seen before. It’s more than just sitting there and doing a title check because there are always questions to be asked and things to be learnt.”

It was the same for Shayleigh Isom: “There’s always room for growth. One thing we say in our office is that no conveyancing transaction is ever the same and I think that’s really interesting and attractive for people.”

At the same time, as the Covid stamp duty holiday proved, it can be an exceptionally pressurised job that pushes people away. Natalie Moore says that, as a relatively new firm, Aconveyancing did not furlough any staff and in fact started recruiting once the SDLT holiday kicked in. But that did not prove enough and at one point “we actually had to turn our referrers off and turn the work away” to ensure that what they had could be done properly.

Vicki Redman recalled that it was so busy that she even found herself doing title checks, 11 years after moving out of a full-time conveyancing role. Swiitch did what it could to offer extra support, along with bonuses and gifts, with “regular communication to see how they were getting on”.

However, employers increasingly want qualified staff for the wider business benefits, Claire Richardson observed – insurers, as well as lender panels and their managers, want a higher ratio of qualified to unqualified as a guarantee of quality.

The group was united on the need to raise the profile of the profession – to make it a more attractive proposition as a career, for consumers to understand better the work conveyancers do and its complexity, and ultimately ease the path to charging higher fees.

Natalie Moore said: “Being the regulated provider of professional services within the home-buying process, it kind of all falls on us. But clients don’t understand, and they don’t want to or don’t need to. There’s a need for more education and, frankly, respect.”

The move to upfront and material information, with the push to instruct conveyancers earlier, might help, she went on. “It’s also about all parties working together, including the lawyers on each side, so it’s not a contentious transaction.”

Shayleigh Isom agreed. “People don’t understand that things take time and not everything’s within our control. So it becomes more overwhelming for the lawyer when they don’t have that right support from the other people in the transaction. I feel like it is getting better but we’ve still got a long way to go.”

It was frustrating, Ms Moore added, that despite all the technology now available, the home-buying process was not as joined-up as it should be – transactions are not happening any quicker as a result. “A lot of that is outside conveyancers’ control at the moment.” What is within their control, however, is culture and providing a bespoke service to build their reputation, she explained.

Younger generations will expect employers to make smart use of technology, with the benefits of artificial intelligence in particular much debated at the moment. Connor O’Dell reckoned technology would only ever take you so far. “There’s always going to be specialised knowledge required. You will still need a conveyancer to look over the detail before it’s produced to a client.” But the promise of seeing the administrative side of the job automated definitely appealed.

Cash Bishop cautioned that, first, clients would need reassurance – “Some struggle to use Thirdfort and that’s a very simple process of using technology to identify who you are. So I don’t know if some of my older clients would be happy that I’m using AI.” Second, they may start demanding lower fees if the technology is doing the work.

“It’s a great tool to help relieve the administrative burden and give us more time to be advisors,” said Natalie Moore, outlining her hope for greater integration between the different systems. “But you’ll never take away the human nature of conveyancing because it’s a personal journey. I don’t think it will reduce our fees. Hopefully, because we’ll have more time to advise, clients will feel they’re getting more value from us and we’ve got to use that to actually increase our fees and recognise our worth.”

The CLC is not a representative body, of course, but Claire Richardson said raising the profile of the profession was an important part of its work. A key challenge is that, of course, the title is not as well known as that of ‘solicitor’, and this can also have a knock-on effect with those talking to young people about careers.

“Schools, colleges, parents and careers advisors don’t say, ‘Oh, you’re a fantastic project manager, do you really like people? Can you manage a high-paced work environment? Have you thought about property law?’

“We’ve been doing lots of work around that, such as with apprenticeships, enabling people to access government-funded learning, and the new T-Levels [a more vocational alternative to A-Levels]. People will be able to take a property pathway in the law T-Level.

“All of those things mean that we’ve taken the term ‘licensed conveyancer’ from being just a professional qualification that people probably happened upon, into the National Curriculum. This exposure will help move people away from that idea of law as just being a barrister or a solicitor. Because actually most people come through law don’t end up being a generalist.”

Vicki Redman said Swiitch has recently extended its outreach beyond colleges and universities to schools so they can get to students earlier – those with law degrees can see a paralegal role in the conveyancing team as a stepping stone, whereas Swiitch wants them to see it as a career. Apprenticeships are part of that picture, and T-levels will help too, she added.

A feature of the profession is that around 80% of both licence holders and students are women. This may reflect both the flexible nature of qualifying, allowing for career breaks, and that some come into the job from administrative roles. It’s certainly the experience of Vicki Redman, who said she had several staff members studying to become licensed conveyancers while they were on or between maternity leaves.

“They definitely feel the flexibility. And we encourage people who want to do it part-time around their other commitments. And I think that’s what’s good about the CLC qualifications is the full flexibility. That people can do lots and then take a break or they can do it in individual modules and there’s not really too much prescriptive of how long things take. You can do things quite quickly or you can take more time depending on your circumstances.

“The fact that you don’t need a law degree and you don’t necessarily need to be qualified to do the job and you can work your way up, that’s probably something that’s attractive to a lot of women.”

Support and supervision during the training process are, of course, vital. Shayleigh Isom explained how the Simply Academy saw her running a caseload alongside her studies, with the training provider holding regular meetings that allowed her to review and reflect. “But I have friends that have gone to other firms where the support just isn’t there.”

Claire Richardson said exposure to “the breadth of what they need to be able to do in order to make their studies real to them” was vital. “In conveyancing, it’s more natural to have a lot of that supervision piece going on anyway. Our monitoring shows it’s mostly a good story across firms.”

The CLC provides the tools, said Cash Bishop, and then it’s up to the student. “If you enjoy it, you’ll get qualified quite quickly.” Connor O’Dell agreed: “You have the support and everything you need, but it is down to yourself how quickly you want to do it and the hours you want to put in.” Both warned though that the accounts unit was particularly hard – harder, in fact, than the one solicitors go through.

Claire Richardson explained: “It’s a really important aspect of the risk-based approach that we take to qualifying as CLC lawyer – and of future career progression. Stakeholders are very reassured with the accounting standards of CLC lawyers.” She commended Cash’s advice that students sit with their firm’s accounts team to help prepare for it.

Kara Evans is enjoying her apprenticeship. “I wasn’t up for uni when I was doing my A-levels. When you’re doing the job and you’re hands-on, you’re learning so much more than just sitting in a lecture theatre with a textbook and coming out with no experience. A lot of my friends come out of uni and it’s hard to find a job because everywhere wants at least a year, two years’ experience. The apprenticeship’s definitely been the right route for me – you just get such a better understanding of what the job entails.”