Prevention is Protection

We have done a lot of work to reduce fraud but vendor conveyancer fraud remains an area of growing concern. That is why I welcome initiatives like Lawyer Checker that help our panel firms manage the risk associated with transmitting our money to vendor conveyancers. All conveyancers should reassess the checks they make before they send money to organisations offering undertakings.

What about a product that you could log into and insert the client account details and the system will confirm back to you if this is an account that is recognized as being regularly used for large sums of money. A product that tells you if the account is unknown and appears to be dormant? Alarm bells will be ringing now. The service can then obtain additional information for you and reports back to you with specifics about the firm. It could be that the firm recently changed their bank but it would allow you to investigate further and obtain the assurances you need to act in the best interests of your client. This is exactly what Lawyer Checker does and what a great addition to the current risk management policies and procedures that are already out in the market.

We received an infrequent search result for a completion today. When it was queried it appears that the firm in question has recently merged with another firm and now uses a different bank account. If this hadn't been checked and queried the funds could have been sent inadvertently to a dormant account which would have delayed completion as no doubt it would have taken the bank sometime to locate the funds and either send them back to us for onward transmission to the correct account or transfer them direct to that account. So this is not necessarily just about fraud but also provides a check to prevent this kind of scenario happening.

When we first started a pilot with Lawyer Checker I admit that I thought I wouldn’t see the benefit and might only use it if a lender or regulator forced me to. Within a few weeks of the start of the pilot one particular case stood out and made me realise the value. Lawyer Checker identified that we were about to send £270,000 to a firm that had only just opened and was a phoenix from a firm that had previously been intervened by the SRA. There was no way that I wanted to be one of the first conveyancers to rely on an undertaking from partners who have recently emerged from an intervention. Without Lawyer Checker we wouldn’t have spotted this issue. I would encourage all firms to try Lawyer Checker and see the value for themselves.

Even though we were vindicated and won our case at the Court of Appeal we still feel that it was something of a hollow victory. The distraction of the case, the refusal of the Nationwide to allow us to act for them whilst this was ongoing, and the doubling of our P.I. insurance premium could have had devastating results had we not been tightly managed. We did everything we were supposed to do but got caught up in a nightmare situation. For these reasons we use Lawyer Checker and suggest you do too

We use Lawyer Checker on our cases because of the real threat of fraud to all conveyancers associated with sending client money to the vendor's conveyancer. Criminals are out there trying to defraud law firms client accounts and we treat this risk seriously for our clients.

We believe you can’t be too careful in this market. Therefore as the integration was easy we use our case management system to conduct a search in every case electronically. The results have already proven how Lawyer Checker helps us mitigate risks associated with money transmission.