Best Practice - Conveyancing

The Conveyancing matters in Smokeball have been carefully built to help record the information needed to run your conveyancing matters. Smokeball has contact cards and fields to help you keep track of important details and parties set up for each matter type.

Below are some examples of the key details you can keep track of within a few of our conveyancing matter types. Once you enter the information in your matter, it will populate throughout the automated letters and Court & Authority forms found in the Forms & Precedents library, including HM Land Registry forms.

Enter client details

Your client will sit in the matter details list immediately below 'Info'. Their role will be that relevant to the particular matter type, for example, in a Purchase matter your client will display as 'Buyer'.

To get the most out of our automated Conveyancing documents, be sure to enter:

• Title
• Full Name (First, Middle, Last)
• Current Address
• Contact Telephone Numbers (Home, Work, Mobile)
• Email
• Date of Birth (if requiring ID1 form)

How to add a second Buyer or Seller

As in all Smokeball matters, you can add an additional party by right-clicking on the contact card and selecting 'Add [Party Type]'. 

Alternatively, if there second party is at the same address, you can save time and avoid duplicate data entry by opening the first contact and selecting 'Add another [Party] at same address'.

Property Details

Open Property Details to enter the address, nature of property (residential/commercial), tenure (freehold/leasehold/commonhold), title guarantee (full/limited), title number, and additional details relating to the ownership and holding after the transfer.

For Leasehold properties, select the Leasehold Details tab to enter details of the freehold title, lease start date and term of lease, management company capacity (if applicable) and any leasehold charges to be apportioned.

Did you know? You can lookup the property by typing in the 'Search Address' field. Selecting the address from the search will populate each of the address components, saving time and possible typos when entering the address.

Completion Details

Enter information about the conveyance in Completion Details, including the price, deposit amount, exchange details, completion date, and additional information required for preparing the completion statement. This is where you can calculate Stamp Duty, and set the Land Registry Fee(s) for this matter.

Mortgage Details

Enter any lender (bank, building society, etc) as a Lender contact card, then enter details of the mortgage in the Mortgage Details sub-item. In a Purchase matter, this will include account number, initial rate, term of mortgage, offer expiry date, gross advance, deductions (if any) and the date funds have been received.

Completion Statement

Once all party details, Property Details, Completion Details and Mortgage Details have been entered, you can generate the fully automated Completion Statement document available in the 'Pre Completion' precedent folder for each conveyancing matter type.

Workflows

Workflows help eliminate extra admin work by allowing you to automatically designate tasks that happen for every matter, ensuring that nothing is missed and giving full transparency across the matter.

We have created sample workflows for the following matter flow patterns:

• Purchase
• Sale
• Remortgage
• Transfer

You can download our sample workflows and upload them into Smokeball. 

Since every law firm is a little different, we encourage you to make these workflows your own based on your own preferences or requirements.

Matter Stages

Matter stages are a way to keep track of the progress of a matter. They provide a clear and organised overview of matter progress and help to keep clients informed and involved in the process. You can also sort your Home Page to group by matter stages to give full visibility of progress across all matters.

We have created sample Matter Stages for Conveyancing that you can download at the following links:

• Purchase
• Sale
• Remortgage
• Transfer

You can upload our sample Matter Stages and modify to suit your firm preference.

Dashboard

The Smokeball Dashboard is an alternative entrance into Smokeball that places front and centre, everything you need to know to track and manage your work for the day more effectively. The Dashboard can be configured to your preferences, adding, resizing and configuring widgets to suit your needs.

See more on how to add and customise your dashboard widgets, or contact our friendly team for additional help on setting up dashboards to suit your Conveyancing practice needs.

Reports

Smokeball features many powerful reports which can be used to optimise your firm’s work routines, keep track of your deadlines, or maintain strong relationships with your clients.

Here are some of the helpful reports to help you manage Conveyancing matters. You can access these reports by navigating to the Reports tab in Smokeball, or Reports page on the Smokeball Web App:

• CQS Accreditation Report breaks down your purchase, sale, remortgage, and transfer matters completed within the selected date range, showing the number of completions, average price, highest price, gross fees and average fees within each matter type. 
• Indemnity Insurance Report creates a summary of you purchase and sale matters completed within the selected date range, showing the number of completions, average price, and highest price within each matter type, and the overall figures across both purchase and sale.
• Real Estate Agent Details report generates a list of all Estate Agent contacts and their contact details.
• Matter - Full List report can be filtered to any matter type combination. This can be a helpful report to see all your Conveyancing matters opened within a particular period date range, including a simple summary of the fee estimate and billed amount.

Firm Insights is also available to firm owners to assist with managing and growing your law firm, by providing helpful insights and profitability estimates by matter and matter type. Find out more about Firm Insights and Reports.

Matter Tags

Matter tags allow you to further categorise and organise your Conveyancing matters. You can apply an unlimited amount of fully-editable tags to your matter, and even run custom reports based on your tags, allowing you to use them in any way to suit your needs.

Here are some example matter tags to implement for a Purchase matters

• Additional details on the nature of property:
  • Residential
  • Commercial
  • Freehold
  • Leasehold
  • Commonhold
• Status or critical information:
  • Contract Received
  • Exchanged
  • Chain
  • Deposit Paid
  • Mortgage Received
  • Cash Buyer
• Differentiate between circumstances or process within a matter:
  
  • Registered
  • Unregistered
  • Company/Trust
  • Non UK Resident
  • First Home

Most of the above tags can be useful for other Conveyancing matter types as well. If you are unsure what tags could be useful to your firm, reach out to our friendly team for additional help.

Find out more about how to create and apply matter tags to your matters.

Time and Billing

Smokeball makes it easy to keep track of your time for billing. Whether your matter is fixed fee, time based, contingency or something else entirely, Smokeball has robust settings to help your firm's billing and administration.

Here are some suggestions on how our Billing features can help your Conveyancing practice:

• Configure your Conveyancing matters as fixed fee, saving admin time having to set the billing type on each matter. 
• Set up time and fee activity codes for commonly added time and fees, to save you non-billable admin time from having to enter the same types of entries over and over. Some examples of Conveyancing activity codes include:
  • Conveyancing Fixed Fee (a fee might be created for each conveyancing process) 
  • Telegraphic Transfer fee
  • Leasehold fee
  • ID/AML check
  • Office Copies
  • SDLT Admin fee
  • Acting for Lender
• Set up default fee entries to appear automatically when you open a matter. The feature is helpful to ensure you never forget to add charges to a matter and saves admin time having to add the same item to every matter
• AutoTime is a powerful feature for Conveyancing firms because it helps you understand exactly how much time you are spending on your matters and in turn what is your profitability on each matter. Even if you are charging a fixed fee for the matter, it can also be helpful to send an invoice or invoice receipt that helps your client understand exactly everything you did along the way.