​A Practical Guide to Residential Freehold Convey

When I first started work in the world of residential conveyancing as a secretary (shortly before the last Ice Age), there was a serious shortage of information around in the ‘ready reference’ section of the legal library. If you wanted to know something, then you either asked your frazzled training supervisor, or you threw yourself on the mercy of the extremely scary, very experienced secretaries and hoped that they liked you enough to give you the right answers.

There was the book by Abbey and Richards if you wanted to get into the full nitty-gritty, but that could be hard going on the eyeballs and the brain, especially if you were looking for something straightforward. After all, I was there to provide support, not to do the legal work myself.

Frankly, I would have given my right arm for a book that gave me a bit of insight into what the heck I was doing. Something that I could read that gave an overview and enough detail to allow me to understand the job. Something that stopped me from asking the senior secretaries what a local search was (for the third time).

There is an awful lot of information in Lorraine Richardson’s book to get your teeth into. I particularly liked the sections on taking instructions, given my constant beef around newbies never asking enough questions (exchanges along the lines of ‘Mrs Smith phoned and asked if you would sell her house’. ‘Which Mrs Smith, etc’ until we all expire from either exhaustion and/or confusion). I like that it tells you what needs to be asked and why it needs to be asked.

The quality of the information is exceedingly good and, for me, there did not appear to be any gaps in the explanation of the fundamentals of a freehold transaction. There were a few points though where links and footnotes to other areas of the book would have been helpful.

The section explaining how to read registers of title is a great table. This is a clear and succinct trip through everything that you can read on the register. I would signpost our learners to this table. And this portion of the book alone might be worth the ticket price.

I would have liked a section on what to expect from a title plan. But it might be tricky to distil into a paragraph or two the process of having to call a colleague over with the words ‘Georgina, would you say this colouring on the title plan is mauve or lilac?’ while you both peer at it for 20 minutes.

If I had a complaint, it would be around indexing. I know my way around a conveyancing transaction and could find things in the book merely by looking at the contents page. For a novice, it might be a bit difficult to negotiate without reading from cover to cover. I am a great fan of reading things cover to cover, but sometimes you do just need to dip in and out of things, just to check that you are right. I am also a fan of a diagram or a flow chart or two because some learners prefer this. Unfortunately, there is just a stream of text.

In summary, although the information in the book is thorough, the lack of ease of use might put me off buying it. I don’t think this hits the target market because of the need for ‘cover-to-cover’ reading. That may well be because I am not the target, but the overwhelming amount of data – delivered in essay form – does not make the book easily accessible or usable for its intended audience. That said, £30 is money well spent for the taking instructions (p85 and onwards) and the how to read a register (p75 and onwards) sections.

So maybe a bit of self-indexing is worth the effort.

Anna Newport is a solicitor and director at Newport Land & Law, West Yorkshire