Britain has taken the routine legal work off solicitors before. Last time it took an Act of Parliament, and everybody knew it was coming.

For most of the twentieth century, moving house in England and Wales meant paying a solicitor. Not because you had to use one. You could always do your own conveyancing, and that was perfectly lawful. What the law forbade was paying anybody else to do it. Under the Solicitors Act 1974, and the Act of 1957 before it, an unqualified person who drew up a transfer of land committed a criminal offence unless he could prove he had done it without fee, gain or reward.

So the monopoly was never on the work. It was on the market for doing the work for money, which is a different thing, and worth holding on to.

By the mid-1970s it was under sustained attack. In February 1976 an MP moved a Bill in the Commons to widen the class of people allowed to do conveyancing for payment, arguing that the monopoly produced excessive charges and let the Law Society pursue cheaper competitors through the criminal courts. Those were his charges, not findings. But conveyancing had by then been referred to the Royal Commission on the legal profession, and the direction was set.

Parliament acted in 1985. The Administration of Justice Act created an entirely new profession, the licensed conveyancer, for the express purpose of ending the solicitors' hold on transferring land, and established the Council for Licensed Conveyancers under section 12 to regulate it. The relevant provisions came into force on 11 May 1987.

The reaction is the interesting part, because it came before the competition did. Solicitors felt threatened enough that they cut conveyancing charges sharply in anticipation, ahead of a single licensed conveyancer taking a single client. The price fell on the possibility of competition, not the fact of it.

Parliament was not finished. The Building Societies Act 1986 gave the Lord Chancellor power to recognise banks and building societies as conveyancing providers, a far bigger threat than a few hundred specialists. In the Lords on 7 April 1989 it was confirmed that no recognition rules had yet been made. The scheme was postponed, and the reason given was not resistance from lawyers. It was a lack of demand from the institutions that were meant to want it.

Twenty years on, the Legal Services Act 2007 went further and let non-lawyers own legal businesses. The licensed conveyancers took on probate work from August 2008 and those new ownership structures from September 2011.

Consider where that leaves the specialists Parliament invented to break the monopoly. The best count we can find puts the Council for Licensed Conveyancers today at 203 practices and 1,825 lawyers, and it comes from a company that sells the qualification rather than from the regulator. That is the size of the profession created to take on the whole conveyancing market of England and Wales.

So what does the record say? Not that the solicitors were destroyed. They were not. The profession absorbed each round and moved upwards: fewer people doing the routine job, more of them doing the complicated one, and the routine job repriced permanently down. Every time, the argument was framed as the end of the profession. Every time, what ended was the easy money at the bottom of it.

Two things are different now, and only one of them is the machine.

The first is that all of it, 1974, 1976, 1985, 1986, 2007, happened in the open. There were Bills, a Royal Commission, debates, Acts, and a body created specifically to watch the consequences. Somebody was made responsible for knowing what happened next.

The second returns to that distinction at the top. Every previous round was a fight over who could be paid to do work the law had reserved. What is happening now is not reserved, was never anybody's monopoly, and therefore has never been counted: the ordinary paperwork of running a business. There is no Act to amend, because there was never an Act.

The last time Britain took routine work off its lawyers, it did it deliberately, argued about it for a decade, and appointed someone to keep the score. This time it arrives as a software release.