March in Review: Support for our Superheroes

It’s been quite the month. As the daylight lasts a bit longer, so the optimism has grown over trading volumes this year so far from a relatively sluggish start after Christmas.  The doom scrollers have been kept at bay and our clients tell us they are busy juggling workloads, while seeking talent and looking to improve technology and processes on the continual journey toward better efficiency.

For us, a key part of this is ensuring that law firms can review environmental and climate analysis as part of their property searches quickly and with clarity.

At the beginning of the month, we introduced some further enhancements to our ClimateIndex™ analysis, which is provided automatically in our key residential and commercial searches. This has simplified the risk ratings and provided risk-specific guidance to advise the client on possible next steps to understand how these risks could affect the transaction.

But we also wanted to ensure that conveyancers could communicate this to their clients as clearly and simply as possible. So, we improved the climate client care clauses to be used alongside the risk ratings in a clear and consistent manner. By doing this, they have a clear and demonstrable process of managing and advising climate risks ahead of new Law Society Guidance coming out soon.

Conveyancers Wear Capes!

We are here to help make our conveyancers superheroes for their clients – and this was the clear message at the 2023 British Conveyancing Awards held on 21^st March at 8 Northumberland Avenue in London.

We were proud to be headline sponsors on the night and it was a triumphant evening of celebration for all the worthy winners and nominees, reflecting the passion and drive that the best in the business have in delivering superhero performances for their clients.

Malcolm Smith, our Chief Operating Officer, gave a keynote speech about the importance of businesses like Groundsure recognising the increasing complexity of conveyancers’ job and providing solutions to simplify, support and enhance the service they provide to their clients. 

The Award ceremony was expertly compered by David Opie at Today’s Media, with his brilliant team – Allie, Raye and Grace – bringing everything together behind the scenes and were an absolute joy to work with in delivering all of our elements on the night.

Have a look at our Flickr reel of some images from the night: https://www.flickr.com/photos/193951160@N03/sets/72177720307139187/

Recognising Conveyancers Vital Role

The event formed part of National Conveyancing Week – a new and important initiative brought together by Bold Legal Group founder, Rob Hailstone and David Opie.

We were also proud to be a supporter of the series of events that ran across 20-24^th March, spotlighting the challenges they face, the opportunities for collaboration and better processes to make the job easier by understanding the role better and to encourage more to join the industry. More than 200 firms took part, alongside many suppliers and stakeholders including ourselves.

We released the results of a survey we did in conjunction with The Intermediary, who interviewed more than 250 brokers and lenders about their relationship with and perception of the conveyancer’s importance in the process – a staggering 92% of respondents identifying that they performed a “vital role”. While there was plenty of room for both sides to understand the drivers for their roles better, it was clear that the profession is held as pivotal to ensuring the transaction happens.

On the Thursday of the week’s events, we ran a video tutorial session on climate risks – the scale of how they affect property transactions, the legal opinion on duty of care to advise and how to advise clients. If you missed it, you can see it again here:

Again, with Law Society Guidance on advising clients about climate risks coming soon, now is the time for conveyancing teams to be engaging with the climate analysis in our reports and to use the clauses to support your signposting of the risks clients. 

Doing it now will get you ahead of the compliance curve and probably please your COLP and PI insurer into the bargain.

April promises to be another significant month on climate risk and we look forward to supporting our Superheroes save the day on their transactions.