What to ask your conveyancer, and what the answer tells you

This is a practical note for anyone about to instruct a conveyancer, and for anyone running a small firm that does this work.

If you are buying or selling. Ask three things before you instruct.

Ask whether the quoted fee is fixed or an estimate, and what triggers a supplement. The published index tracks quoted costs including VAT, disbursements and expenses, and quotes are what firms compete on. Supplements are where the competition stops.

Ask what the firm expects the timeline to be, and what sits outside its control. A good answer names the local authority search, the lender, the management company on a leasehold, and the Land Registry at the end. A firm that promises speed without naming those four is either optimistic or selling.

Ask whether they use AI on your file, and what a human checks. This is not a gotcha. Eight in ten firms now use it in some form, and the regulator permits it provided the solicitor stays accountable and supervises the output. The answer you want is specific: which parts, and who reads them afterwards.

If you run a firm. The commercial advice being written for you at the moment says to use the time savings to take on more matters rather than to cut your prices, and to widen the gap between cost and price rather than close it. That advice is explicit and it is in print.

It is also a bet, and worth naming as one. The same advisers expect fixed fees to compress as adoption reaches most firms, which they place around next year. A strategy of holding price while volume rises works until the point where everyone has the same tools and price becomes the only remaining lever.

One thing to note either way. If you are asked to believe a piece of software will save your fee earners five hours a week, ask where that number came from and who published it. In this edition we traced the most-quoted figure in British conveyancing back to a case study written by the company selling the platform. That does not make it wrong. It makes it a claim rather than a measurement, and the difference matters when you are signing a licence.