Internet Newsletter for Lawyers |
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I am a legal conveyancing secretary at Sykes Anderson solicitors, a specialist property practice in Central London. The firm has actively embraced the electronic age but any investment in IT must directly benefit our clients. All the conveyancing search websites claim to cut time and costs but they need to be user friendly and quicker than traditional postal searches, or the temptation is just to go back to the old ways!
I use TM www.tmproperty.co.uk, one of the NLIS sites to carry out local authority, environmental and drainage searches as well as ordering Office Copy Entries. I think the site is helpful but a problem is that results are not returned electronically but via Royal Mail/DX, which seems to defeat the whole object of speeding up transactions. I understand this is because most of the London authorities are not fully online. In addition you have to use a red outline mapping tool which means you have to really study the office copies and try to find the property on the website. Sometimes you then have to scan the office copy plan in and attach it to the search. I don't understand why with some London local authorities we need to send a plan in when the search is done online but we don't need a plan when we do a postal one. If the local authorities did not insist on a plan for e-searches I would be very pleased.
The Homecheck site at http://www.homecheck.co.uk, which I use for environmental searches, takes a few minutes to implement and the results are emailed back to the user within 5-10 minutes. If all search sites made full use of emailing results back straight away then online searches would be a very worthwhile addition to any conveyancing department.
It's easy to develop the software in the research department with all the time you require and peace and quiet, but in a busy conveyancing department, time is precious. The companies developing the software should remember that secretaries are not computer engineers and they should concentrate on user friendliness, as the easier the programs are to use the more use they will get.
Jackie Jones is a specialist property legal secretary at Sykes Anderson.
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