For years, delays in property transactions have been quietly attributed to conveyancing. Too cautious. Too slow. Too overloaded.
That framing misses something more fundamental.
Conveyancers didn't slow the system down. They inherited the job of holding it together.
The modern conveyancer is no longer just responsible for legal diligence. In practice, they are now expected to act as coordinators, aligning multiple transactions they do not control, as messengers relaying updates between parties who cannot see each other, and as risk buffers absorbing uncertainty to protect clients from collapse.
None of this is inherently legal work. It exists because the wider system cannot reliably answer a simple question: what is happening elsewhere in the chain?
Where that visibility is missing, coordination work doesn't disappear. It migrates. And it lands with the only party who cannot step away from the transaction.
I'm not a conveyancer. I've worked across industries where there are huge coordination problems - telecoms, media, recruiting - and I've built infrastructure that surfaces how information flows through those systems. I've seen this pattern before. When shared operational truth goes missing, highly trained professionals end up compensating with manual coordination. Phone calls. Emails. Updates. Reassurance.
Conveyancers are highly skilled, highly educated, and deeply risk-aware. It is difficult to believe that many entered the profession expecting to spend large parts of their day acting as a human routing layer for information the system itself cannot surface.
This is not a reflection on individual practice. It is what happens when infrastructure goes missing.
Chasing is often described as process. In reality, it is compensation.
Every call, email, or request for an update exists because the system cannot show what is happening elsewhere in the chain. Whether another link is blocked. Whether progress is genuinely stalled. Whether the delay even matters.
In that vacuum, conveyancers do the only rational thing available: they ask.
Over time, this behaviour becomes habitual. Roles are created around it. Expectations form around it. And the industry begins to treat blind coordination as normal operating practice.
Chain visibility does not make legal work faster. It does not rush due diligence or override professional judgement.
What it does is remove non-legal work that should never have sat with conveyancers in the first place.
When the structure of a chain is visible, effort can be focused where it genuinely controls progress, unnecessary chasing reduces, speculative escalation disappears, and professionals can choose when to intervene, rather than reacting blindly.
The result is not speed for its own sake. It is cleaner decision-making under less uncertainty.
Many delays attributed to conveyancers are not caused by conveyancers at all. They are upstream. Downstream. Or systemic.
What looks like delay is often a professional absorbing uncertainty they did not create, because someone has to.
Until chains are visible, that burden will continue to fall in the wrong place.
The industry does not need conveyancers to work harder. It needs them to work with sightlines.
Until shared chain visibility exists, coordination will keep leaking into roles that were never designed to carry it.
Why does the system still expect conveyancers to compensate for infrastructure that was never built?
#Conveyancing #Proptech #MarketInfrastructure