Why We Built Our Own Conveyancing Software

Earlier this month, we set out our position on artificial intelligence in legal practice. We argued that firms across the UK adopt generative tools, and that reviewing products properly and building in-house is the better route to maintaining the profession's trust.

Publishing a caution is straightforward. This note sets out one area where we use tech: Titlely.

What Titlely is

Titlely is our own conveyancing software. It reads a Land Register title sheet, a Property Enquiry Certificate, a Legal Report and a multisearch, and it drafts the Report on Title, the observations letter to the seller's solicitors, and the Property Standardisation Group due diligence questionnaire.

It was written for this firm, and it is used by this firm. It is not licensed from a vendor, and it is not for sale. We will not describe how it works in any detail, for the same reason no firm publishes its style of missives: it is the product of our own time, and it is one of the things that distinguishes us. What follows is what it means for a client, and the standards we hold it to.

Where client documents go

Nowhere.

Titlely runs on the machine in front of the solicitor. It is not a web service, and it is not a platform we upload files to. A title sheet that goes into Titlely stays on that machine and in this firm's own files.

Some checks do reach the internet, and it is worth being exact about what they carry. The software sends a postcode, or a map coordinate, and nothing else. Where it opens a public register for the solicitor to read, it opens it in their own browser, exactly as if they had typed the address themselves.

That is the whole of it. There is no sixth thing, and no third-party account holding your file.

No language model

There is no generative AI anywhere in Titlely.

Every sentence it produces comes from a rule we wrote, and every finding it raises carries the Act and the section it rests on. A scheduled monument cites the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979. A site of special scientific interest cites Part 2 of the Nature Conservation (Scotland) Act 2004. A point either matches a rule against what the title sheet actually says, or it does not appear at all.

The effect is that there is nothing in the system capable of inventing a case, a section or a clause, because there is nothing in the system generating language.

The cost of that is real, and we would rather state it than hide it. Titlely only knows what we have taught it. Where it meets wording it does not recognise, it says so and puts it in front of a solicitor rather than guessing. That is the right way round. A tool that is confidently wrong is worse than a tool with a known edge.

This is a narrower claim than saying we use no AI at all. As we set out, we use automation for administrative work such as document formatting and research. We will not put a client's file through generative systems/LLMs.

Sign-off is built in

We wrote also wrote that thorough human sign-off must remain non-negotiable. In Titlely, that is not a policy anyone has to remember. It is how the software works.

Nothing a check produces goes into a client's report until a solicitor has read that line and approved it. An unapproved line is not in the report, and the software will not let it be forgotten about. We built it that way because a control you have to remember to apply fails in a busy week, rather than a quiet one.

What this means for a client

The same work happens on every file. Mining and ground stability, flood risk, planning and building control, statutory designations, conservation and heritage, and environmental constraints. The same list, in the same order, whether on a straightforward flat or on a complicated title. Each result is sourced and dated in the report itself so you can see what was checked and when.

Nothing rests on a single record. Where the records we hold disagree, we report the discrepancy to our team and investigate it, rather than taking the first answer as the answer.

Redrafts are legible. When we reissue a report after the searches arrive, it includes tracked changes, so you can see what moved instead of rereading twenty pages to find out.

The tax is shown, not asserted. Land and Buildings Transaction Tax is set out band by band with the arithmetic printed alongside the figure so that you can check it. Where relief turns on facts the software cannot see, such as Multiple Dwellings Relief, it says so and a solicitor works it out by hand.

None of this makes the software the lawyer. It makes the lawyer faster at the mechanical parts, and it leaves the judgement where it belongs.