The Law Society is to join efforts to develop websites that will display what progress has been made up and down a chain of property transactions.
Law Society President Paul Marsh told the Gazette that the Society’s e-conveyancing taskforce is working with a number of IT firms to enable it to participate in the development of the Chain Matrix web tool.
The Chain Matrix was originally developed by the Land Registry as the centrepiece of a project to computerise the conveyancing process. The aim is to cut the number of transactions that fail because of breaks in chains. However, after a pilot in 2007 the Land Registry shelved work on the system and last week announced its readiness to support businesses developing their own services.
Marsh said that the involvement of solicitors will be crucial. ‘Because solicitors do the vast majority of conveyancing it will be important that any system has universal acceptance within the profession, and the Law Society is the only body that can achieve this,’ he said.
‘The technical aspect of the Chain Matrix is not difficult. It’s not an IT project – it’s a business and process change initiative that will be supported and assisted by technology.’
Marsh said that any system would need to work with the Law Society’s TransAction documents and Protocol, for which the Law Society owns the copyright.
‘This engagement with the use of IT for change in the conveyancing process is at the heart of what the Law Society is doing on behalf of conveyancers,’ he said.
Dominic Cullis, chairman of the Legal Software Suppliers Association, said a number of companies had already done preliminary development work. ‘Now we’ve got reassurances from the Land Registry that they’ll hand it over to the private sector, more firms will look into investing in a solution,’ he said. But Cullis warned that, for the project to succeed, use of the Chain Matrix would need to be mandatory.
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