Farringdon: Three Months On

By Edmond Boulle, Managing Director at Farringdon

When we launched Farringdon, I said we’d share what we learned. Here’s what the industry data and our early work in live cases are starting to show us.

When I announced Farringdon in May 2026, I said we’d share what we learned along the way. Three months on, we’re regulated by the Council of Licensed Conveyancers and taking around 50 instructions a month, spanning on-market, sale agreed and purchase transactions. Our instructions skew towards the more complex end of the residential property spectrum - lots of leasehold, shared ownership, BSA-impacted property.

In other words, we now have a solid basis on which to develop and evaluate our AI-native delivery model, and we’re not getting false positive signals by over-indexing on simple, chain-free transactions.

The problem we’ve set out to solve

When I launched Farringdon, I wrote about how difficult it is to predict the experience someone will have when they move home, even when they spend a lot of money instructing reputable firms. Deeper involvement in the day-to-day realities of conveyancing has only reinforced my belief: capacity is the fundamental issue. Currently, the quality and speed of a client's journey feels like a roll of the dice based on which lawyers handle or touch their transaction, their bandwidth, and how they’re juggling their broader caseload.

Farringdon’s vision is to make a great conveyancing experience a matter of certainty, not a matter of luck. By building and proving an AI-native delivery model in-house, we plan to share this technology with other firms to resolve the industry’s capacity problem on a much larger scale.

We’re still only a few months post-launch and therefore clearly have some way to go before we can say we’ve proved that our approach can comprehensively change the capacity equation in conveyancing, but we’re already starting to see some very promising signs.

The Government’s home buying and selling reform roadmap makes clear how much needs to change in the industry. Transactions now take around six months from offer to completion, roughly 60% longer than in 2007, while the number of conveyancers in England and Wales fell by 15% between 2021 and 2025, according to Law Society data. That alone tells me we have a serious and systemic capacity problem.

Capacity is also extremely difficult to balance. Lawyers have a fixed number of hours in the day, while the volume and complexity of portfolios are hard to predict. A case that looks straightforward at instruction can also become much more involved once the work begins, which makes matching capacity to demand difficult however well a firm is run. When teams are stretched, transactions can move more slowly and responsiveness suffers. Hire too far ahead of demand though, and firms are left carrying expensive unused capacity during quieter periods.

But I think the capacity problem runs much deeper than just a matter of bandwidth and throughput.

Capacity isn’t just about managing workload

Not all capacity is created equal. It’s an expertise problem as well. A conveyancer who’s handled hundreds of straightforward freeholds could have limited experience of BSA-impacted leasehold or new-build work. More experienced lawyers have seen where things go wrong and have better intuition on where to probe further or escalate a risk. In an ideal world, the capacity of those lawyers would be elastic, but of course it isn’t.
Capacity is tied to working hours. The majority of legal work progresses when someone is there to do it, even though clients are often most active outside their own working day. Unless a firm operates across multiple time zones, transactions can spend a large proportion of the week waiting for the next working window. From first principles, it’s hard to argue that you’d design the process that way.
Capacity affects oversight too. Compliance teams and supervisors commonly sample caseloads to check that policies and standards are being met, which means most transactions complete without a second pair of eyes. The same capacity constraint shows up here too, just in a less visible part of the business.

How Farringdon addresses the problem

Farringdon is the first CLC-regulated, AI-native conveyancing firm. We use the term AI-native quite deliberately. For us, it means building the firm around AI from the outset, with the way we work internally and the service we provide designed around the technology, rather than added to an established operating model later on.

If you’re picturing a client-facing chatbot or AI voice agent, that’s not what we mean. Clients and introducers still interact with their Farringdon conveyancer through the usual channels: email, phone, messaging apps. AI may eventually change some of that, but it’s not where we’re focused today.

At the centre of the firm is our conveyancing agent, which internally we call “Ludo”. It’s built by our specialist legal and AI engineers working alongside our conveyancers. The simplest way to describe it is as an expert assistant that works across the transaction from quoting to post-completion, using the information and context within a case, alongside curated conveyancing skills, to support the conveyancer and keep work moving.

In practice, that could mean noticing that a case hasn’t progressed for a few days and preparing a tactful follow-up, or starting work on a document that arrives overnight so draft enquiries are ready for the conveyancer to send when they start work in the morning.

Ludo works 24 hours a day, rather than only when someone is logged on. It’s constantly listening out for and reacting to new information and proactively taking steps to ensure transaction milestones are met. For now, the conveyancing lawyer who is accountable for the file reviews and signs off on anything that goes out externally, so whilst we’re moving more preparation and progression work outside traditional working hours, we haven’t yet removed that constraint entirely.

The details of how Ludo actually works merits a separate technical blog post, but some practical examples of Ludo in action illustrate the impact we’re starting to see on capacity.

What this looks like in practice

We measure human labour time fastidiously on every task. It’s our most important internal metric because it tells us whether Ludo is actually creating capacity.

Responding to enquiries

We estimate that labour time spent resolving enquiries represents between 26% - 37% of the total labour time in a conveyancing transaction. The variance obviously depends on the characteristics of the property. Ludo records, tracks progress, and prepares responses to enquiries within moments of them being received. It takes related actions such as referring questions to clients where more information is needed to support a response. Already 74% of Ludo’s drafted replies are approved at first review across our testing to date, significantly accelerating our ability to respond promptly and comprehensively. That hit rate will only increase over time: Ludo takes feedback from our conveyancers as they work, which we use to continuously refine and improve Ludo’s skills, judgement and capabilities.

Cover for absent colleagues

Providing cover during periods of leave or absence is a well known capacity headache for conveyancing firms. It normally takes a conveyancing lawyer much longer to pick up a file they are not familiar with. Ludo effectively eliminates this problem already by surfacing what needs doing each day so any available colleague can pick it up and ensuring nothing sits buried in an absent conveyancer's inbox. It can pick up on signs of urgency from communication and activity across a transaction and flag them for prioritisation giving the covering conveyancer a clearer view of where their attention may be needed first.

Compliance in real time on all files

Ludo’s can identify, flag and prepare steps to address potential risk and compliance issues faster and more comprehensively than a human doing spot-check supervision. Ludo stores knowledge of Farringdon’s policies, procedures, insurance and regulatory context. Armed with this knowledge, through 24/7 monitoring of transactions, Ludo can raise the bar on risk management and compliance significantly.

As an example Ludo identified that a Whatsapp sent by a colleague referencing the wrong property address and immediately alerted the DPO and HOLP of a potential data breach. There was no breach and the error was so minor the colleague themselves had not recognised it, but the point is that if there had been a problem it would have been visible immediately - not at risk of human determination on whether to report at all, or delay.

Updating our referral partners

Time savings we’ve measured also sit outside the legal work. Each week, we send our referral partners a detailed update on every transaction they’ve referred to us, including very specific actions they need to take to help us keep things moving. Even with support from our CMS and AI drafting tools, producing those detailed updates initially took our conveyancers most of a working day. Ludo now assembles the weekly updates across all transactions ready for the conveyancer to check and send. The whole process now takes under an hour.

What does ‘build and share’ actually mean?

From the outset, our commitment has been to build and share. That ultimately means making the technology we build and prove available to other firms which is key, because every transaction depends on several parties moving together, and progress within one firm only gets you so far.

We don’t yet have all the answers on exactly what that will look like. We’re starting conversations with Orbital customers to understand how this technology could work within their firms, what they’d need from it and how we should approach sharing it more widely.

If we prove that our model can decisively resolve the industry’s capacity crisis, our next step is to expand that impact far beyond Farringdon. This is how we fulfill the vision we started with: a future where the conveyancing experience is defined by certainty, not chance.