Software for UK high-street solicitor firms
Junior fee-earner deposited a client cheque into office account by mistake Wednesday. We had it back in thirty minutes. It’s still a reportable breach.
You’re the managing partner at a four-fee-earner high-street firm in a market town doing conveyancing + family + private client, or the principal at a sole-practitioner conveyancing practice, or the practice manager at a ten-fee-earner mid-tier doing commercial + immigration + PI. The CMS - LEAP or Clio or Actionstep or Quill or OSPREY or Hoowla or Proclaim - is the matter spine. AML lives in Thirdfort or Credas or SmartSearch. Conflict checks are supposed to happen before the engagement letter goes out, and the SRA-expected file-review schedule is months behind because the partner who reviews is also fee-earning. The conveyancing buyer rings every other day asking “where are we”; the estate agent rings every day; you’re taking two phone calls per matter on the same status update. Client account reconciliation is daily, the Solicitors Accounts Rules treat every breach as reportable, and a single mishandled client deposit can trigger SRA intervention. The AML source-of-funds narrative for the £400k buyer who sold a business in Dubai eighteen months ago is a Word doc and a Google Drive folder - neither of which the SRA inspector will find easily.
We make custom software for UK high-street solicitor firms - scoped per practice, sized to the bit between the matter open in the CMS and the matter status visible to the client, the AML narrative audit-ready, the client account reconciled daily, the file reviews not piling up, the partner not the integration layer. Not a LEAP / Clio / Actionstep replacement - the CMS is your matter system of record and works for what it works for. Not a Thirdfort / Credas / SmartSearch replacement - the AML providers do the ID + sanctions + PEP check. The bit between the CMS and the SRA-shaped reality of the firm - the gates that need to fire before a matter opens, the status update the buyer and the agent and the lender all want, the SoF narrative that needs to assemble as you work, the client account breach that needs to be caught in minutes - that’s the bit we build. Tell us what your week looks like and we’ll come back with a sketch.
What you spend your week on that you shouldn’t have to
- New conveyancing enquiry Tuesday - by Friday it’s a matter with a half-done conflict check, an engagement letter that’s gone out but no AML yet, ID verified via Thirdfort but the source-of-funds narrative still in a Word doc.
- Junior fee-earner deposited a client cheque into office account Wednesday. Back in thirty minutes. Still a reportable breach under the Solicitors Accounts Rules; log it, decide if it’s reportable to the SRA, hope the inspector accepts the remediation.
- Conveyancing buyer rings every other day asking “where are we”. Local search ordered, FENSA cert in, mortgage offer pending, indemnity policy quoted. You tell her the same thing on Tuesday, Thursday, and the following Tuesday.
- Estate agent rings every day on the same matter. Two calls per matter, same status update. Sometimes the lender too.
- AML source-of-funds for the £400k buyer who sold a business in Dubai eighteen months ago - bank statements, evidence of the original sale, evidence of the transfer route, narrative explaining the journey. Currently lives in a Word doc the SRA inspector won’t find easily.
- Conflict check on a new family-law instruction Monday - three days in, you discover the firm represented the husband on a small commercial matter five years ago. Embarrassing call to the new client, write-off of WIP.
- File-review backlog - the SRA expects partner review at structured intervals (typically 12 / 24 / 36 months by matter type); the partner does eight a quarter and is supposed to do thirty; always behind, audit risk.
- HMRC SDLT-1 by Friday; HMLR portal logged out three times today; the Local Land Charges roll-out is patchy by council and you’re not sure what’s served from where.
- Interest on client money - owed to the client per matter, calculated quarterly, bookkeeper hates it; the spreadsheet that says who’s owed what is one version drift from being wrong.
- Quote-vs-final-bill on the family-law matter - £8k estimated, £14k actual because she kept changing position; the “I’m not paying £6k more than you said” email is the one you’ve been putting off.
These aren’t problems for a generic CRM. They’re the bit between the matter on the CMS and the matter status legible to the client and the agent, the client account clean daily, the AML pack assembled-as-you-work, the file reviews on schedule, the partner not buried in admin. That’s the bit we build.
Example problems we could solve
Five things we hear most often from high-street solicitor firms - with what the solved version looks like in your week. Two are universal (matter onboarding, matter-status comms); three are solicitor-specific where the regulator-aware spine of the practice genuinely earns the slot. Every build is scoped per firm: a sole-practitioner conveyancer probably needs the first three; a ten-fee-earner mid-tier with commercial + family + private client might want all five. None of it means binning your CMS or your AML provider.
1. Matter onboarding - enquiry to file-open in one workflow, not five
The skipped-gate moment: new conveyancing enquiry Tuesday. Conflict check needs to happen before the engagement letter; AML needs to happen before funds touch the client account; the engagement letter goes out via PandaDoc; the file opens in LEAP. Five separate tools, five separate touchpoints - easy on a busy week to find on Friday that the AML never ran on the matter that’s already had money on account.
Solved looks like: the matter onboarding flow runs as one workflow with every gate explicit. New enquiry lands (web form, referral, email, missed-call to the agent in problem 2) → conflict check runs automatically against the firm’s matter database with a one-tap resolve / flag for partner review on any potential conflict → AML via your provider (Thirdfort / Credas / SmartSearch / Veriphy / FirstAML) with the ID + share-code + sanctions / PEP result captured → CDD evidence (source-of-funds narrative via problem 3, source-of-wealth where threshold applies, beneficial-owner resolution for companies) prompts the fee-earner with templated narrative starters → engagement letter generates from your firm’s templates with the matter-type-specific clauses, the fee structure, the money-on-account terms → file opens in your CMS (LEAP / Clio / Actionstep / Quill / OSPREY / Hoowla / Redbrick / Proclaim) with every gate’s evidence already attached. On the matter dashboard, every open matter shows its current state and which gates are still open - so the “is conflict cleared?” question is one screen rather than a folder hunt. Matter-opening gates are the highest-stakes pre-fee work in the practice and the most likely place for an accidental SRA-Code skip; the build makes the gates the system’s job rather than the fee-earner’s good-day-checklist.
2. The matter-status loop that takes the “where are we” call before the client makes it
The two-calls-same-update moment: conveyancing buyer rings Tuesday - where are we. Local search ordered, FENSA in, mortgage offer pending, indemnity quoted. You tell her. Thursday she rings again. Friday the estate agent rings. Same status, three calls. Across a ten-matter conveyancing book that’s an hour and a half of fee-earner time a week the client thinks is service and the firm knows is repetition.
Solved looks like: every matter carries a live status object - the gates still to clear (local search, drainage, environmental, planning, FENSA, mortgage offer, indemnity, exchange-ready, completion-ready for conveyancing; bundle preparation, Form E exchange, FDR, Final Hearing for family; Grant of Probate, IHT400 / IHT205 submission, asset realisation for probate), each with its current state (ordered, awaiting, received with [outcome], blocked on [reason]). The buyer, the estate agent, and the lender each see their authorised slice on WhatsApp or email - “hi Sarah, current status on 14 Apple Drive: local search received clear, mortgage offer pending lender (typical five-day wait), FENSA cert in. Expected exchange window: two to three weeks. Next update when the mortgage offer lands.” The system pushes the update at every gate transition; the buyer’s “where are we” question is answered before she asks because she’s already had the latest. The estate agent gets her own thread on the same data, scoped to what she’s authorised to see. Per-counterpart authorisation is per matter, with the audit trail showing who saw what when - the bit that respects client confidentiality and survives the SRA inspector reading the file later. Matter-status communication is the single biggest source of incoming phone calls into a high-street firm and the multi-stakeholder reality makes one phone call into three; the build makes the status answer itself rather than be explained five times.
3. The AML / source-of-funds pack that’s audit-ready, not a Word doc
The Dubai-business-sale moment: £400k buyer sold a business in Dubai eighteen months ago. Bank statements, evidence of original sale, evidence of transfer to the UK, narrative explaining the journey. Currently in a Word doc and a Google Drive folder. The SRA AML inspector visit last year took two days the weekend before to assemble the pack - half of which was hunting the third bank statement that proved the holding pattern.
Solved looks like: the AML / source-of-funds / source-of-wealth flow runs as a structured evidence object per matter. Thirdfort / Credas / SmartSearch / Veriphy / FirstAML handles the ID + sanctions + PEP check at onboarding; the SoF / SoW narrative captures via a structured prompt to the fee-earner - “document the journey: original wealth event (when, where, evidence), holding pattern (where the funds sat, evidence of that hold), transfer journey to UK (bank statements covering the path)” - with each step requiring a document upload + a one-line narrative explanation. For complex cases (offshore holdings, gifts from family, business sale, inheritance, gambling winnings, settlement payments), the prompts adapt to the situation type with the SRA-acceptable evidence patterns built in. Open-banking integration imports bank-statement evidence directly where the client consents, with the relevant transactions auto-highlighted. The assembled pack carries the audit trail - every document captured, when, by which fee-earner, what narrative was added, what flags were raised, what risk assessment was applied - one-click ready for the SRA AML annual return + any inspector visit. The SoF / SoW evidence trail is the part most frequently incomplete when scrutiny lands; the build makes the pack assemble itself as the matter progresses rather than be reconstructed retrospectively.
4. Client account reconciled daily - and the SAR breach caught in minutes
The Wednesday-cheque moment: junior fee-earner deposited a client cheque into office account Wednesday by mistake. Back in thirty minutes. Still a reportable breach under the Solicitors Accounts Rules. Daily reconciliation is two hours of the bookkeeper’s morning; she’s not always sure she’s caught everything; the annual accountant’s report is a fortnight’s worry every spring.
Solved looks like: the client account loop runs as a structured reconciliation against the matter ledger. Every bank movement (in or out, client account or office account) writes to a tagged transaction with the matter reference + the fee-earner + the source + the destination; the daily reconciliation runs automatically with the unmatched set flagged for the bookkeeper’s review - typically four to six items a day on a four-partner firm, ten minutes not two hours. Misposted transactions (the client cheque into office account, the office payment from the client account) flag as breach candidates the moment they happen, with the SRA SAR-rule citation surfaced, the remediation steps prompted, and the partner-notified-and-actioned audit trail captured. Interest on client money calculates per matter per quarter against the FCA-mandated rate and the firm’s policy, with the who’s owed what reconciliation one screen ready for the bookkeeper. The annual Solicitors Accounts Rules accountant’s report assembles its evidence in the background - every transaction, every reconciliation, every breach event, every remediation - one URL when the reporter accountant arrives. The client account is statutory, mishandling is ruinous, and the day-to-day discipline is the bookkeeper’s two-hour morning that’s never quite confident it caught everything; the build makes the reconciliation continuous and the breach detection immediate rather than retrospective.
5. The file-review pipeline that catches up - without the partner doing it on a Saturday
The Saturday-only moment: the partner doing the file reviews is also the partner billing thirty hours a week to clients. Thirty reviews a quarter is the firm’s policy; eight is the actual; the rest catches up on the weekends that marriages will tolerate. Lexcel and the SRA both want the cadence held; the cadence is held by Saturdays.
Solved looks like: every matter carries a file-review calendar projected forward against the firm’s policy and the standard cadence by matter type - conveyancing at completion + post-completion + 12-month anniversary, family at progress + final-bill + 12-month, private client / probate at appropriate intervals, commercial at substantive milestones. The partner’s review queue shows the due-this-month + due-next-month + overdue counts, with a one-tap “start review” that pulls the matter’s structured summary (key dates, fee history, status changes, AML state, client-account movements, any flags) into a review template - partner adds the qualitative review note, the outcome state writes back to the matter, the review evidence (the assessment, the date, the named reviewer) attaches to the matter audit trail. Over time the dashboard shows the firm’s file-review cadence as a current state (currently 73% on-schedule vs 65% last quarter); the matter-types with the worst on-schedule rate surface so the next partner-day of review time goes where it counts. The partner who’s qualified to review the files is also the partner whose time is billable; the build makes each review a fifteen-minute exercise from a pre-assembled summary rather than a sixty-minute file-hunt - so the cadence holds within the working week and the Saturday goes back to the family.
The closest things we’ve already built
- mendbuddyour own multi-channel AI agent platform for inbound conversations across voice, SMS, WhatsApp, web chat, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and inbound + outbound voice. The new-enquiry triage that hands off to the matter-onboarding flow in problem 1, and the matter-status comms layer in problem 2, are solicitor-shaped versions of this - trained on your firm’s matter-types, fee structure, and partner voice, with the scope-of-advice line on the firmly-named side of the regulated boundary. See Mendbuddy.
- pharmaceutical-analytics.coma custom analytics dashboard we built for an analytics consultancy. The partner / practice-manager KPI surface - matter age by fee-earner, WIP balance per matter, client-account state, AML pack completeness by matter, file-review on-schedule rate, matter profitability where billable time is captured - is the same shape: operational data captured at every matter touchpoint, decision dashboard for the managing partner. See Pharmaceutical Analytics.
- MMI servicesa legacy insurance-claims surface we’re modernising (older PHP stack, lifting onto a current platform without rip-and-replace). The reference when a firm is running on an older CMS (OSPREY, Visualfiles, an older AdvanceLaw install) where the partner doesn’t want to migrate but the operational layer around it needs lifting - same shape, different domain. See Mmi Services.
- HC Electricala domestic and commercial electrician in Haverhill, Suffolk. Different vertical entirely, but a useful reference for the records-and-deadlines pattern: the cert-and-evidence engine, the recurring recall annuity, the audit-trailed evidence record. The shape ports - a regulator-aware workflow, a daily reconciliation cadence, a customer-facing status thread - even though the regulator and the customer are different. (Named pull-quote and final outcome figures hold until the permission checklist clears - full case study at Hc Electrical.)
Adjacent verticals
- Lettingsfor the conveyancer working alongside letting-agent landlord-purchase pipelines; cross-link from the conveyancing side.
- Accountantsfor the closest existing professional-services relationship most firms have; the cross-practice AML-evidence-sharing that’s becoming more common as supervisors compare notes.
- Recruiters + HRfor the employment-law-led HR-advisory work where the firm’s employment department overlaps the HR consultancy spine.
- Professional servicesfor the non-regulated advisory / consultancy work the firm might run alongside its regulated practice (some firms have a separate non-regulated arm).
- Charitiesfor the charity-trust-management work the private-client department might handle.
FAQ
Will the matter onboarding flow work with LEAP / Clio / Actionstep / Quill / OSPREY / Hoowla / Redbrick / Proclaim?
Yes for all the named ones. LEAP, Clio, and Actionstep expose modern APIs we read and write against - matter create, conflict check, fee-earner assignment, status transitions. Quill, OSPREY, Hoowla, Redbrick, and Proclaim have varying integration surface; we confirm against your install in discovery. The CMS stays your matter system of record; we add the layer that runs the onboarding gates before the matter opens.
Will the AML pack work with Thirdfort / Credas / SmartSearch / Veriphy / FirstAML?
All five. Each exposes APIs for the ID + sanctions + PEP check results; the SoF / SoW narrative engine sits on top, captures the supplementary evidence (the bank-statement journey, the original-wealth-event evidence, the holding-pattern narrative), and assembles the audit pack. Your existing AML provider stays as the ID + sanctions + PEP source of truth.
Will the client account engine integrate with the firm’s bookkeeping (Xero / QuickBooks / Sage / solicitor-specific accounting like ALB)?
Yes for Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage 50 / 200 along with their solicitor-specific add-ons. ALB and the bespoke solicitor-accounting tools - depends on the integration surface; we confirm in discovery. The reconciliation runs against the bank feed and writes the matched entries back to the bookkeeping system.
Will you provide the AML risk assessment or the file-review judgement on our behalf?
No. The AML risk assessment for the firm, the per-matter risk assessment, and the file-review judgement on whether a matter’s been conducted to standard all stay with the named SRA-regulated solicitor. What the system does is assemble the evidence, surface the prompts, and capture the structured record of the assessment-made-by-named-person - so the audit trail reflects the work done, and the partner’s review time is spent on the judgement, not the file-hunt.
Will the matter-status layer respect client confidentiality?
Yes. Each authorised counterpart (the buyer, the estate agent, the lender, the broker) sees only their authorised slice of the matter status; nothing about the AML state, the client account, the partner’s risk assessment, or anything else outside their scope is exposed. Authorisation is per matter and per counterpart, with the audit trail showing who saw what when.
Will you handle our SRA Authorisation Standards / Lexcel / CQS / AML annual returns on our behalf?
No. Each is a firm-level regulator / accreditor / supervisor accountability. What the system does is make the evidence assemble itself as you work - Lexcel-aligned policy + procedure + matter-record evidence; CQS-aligned conveyancing-quality records; the SRA AML annual return narrative pre-filled from the operational data; client-money-and-SAR evidence one-URL ready for the reporter accountant. The submission itself stays with the named compliance partner.
Will the new-enquiry agent give legal advice?
No. The agent triages, captures the enquiry detail, runs the early conflict check, books the call with a fee-earner, and answers high-frequency factual questions (what’s a typical fee range for a residential freehold purchase, what documents will you need, how does money on account work). Anything substantive escalates to a named fee-earner the moment it lands. The line between helpful triage and legal advice stays clearly on the human side.
What does it cost?
Every build is scoped per firm - depends on fee-earner count, matter-type mix, CMS, AML provider, whether the build covers matter onboarding + AML + status + client account + file review all together or a subset. We talk it through, agree the scope and the price in writing, then build. Send an enquiry and we’ll come back with a sketch. See pricing for how we work.
How long until something’s live?
The matter onboarding flow and the matter-status comms layer typically go from scope conversation to a working version inside a few weeks, with a couple more weeks of running real matter work through it before go-live. The AML evidence pack and the client account engine ship together inside a couple of months. The file-review pipeline slots in alongside as the dashboards earn their place in the partner meeting.
Tell us what your week looks like
What firm you run, fee-earner count, matter-type mix (conveyancing / family / private client / commercial / immigration / criminal / PI), CMS (LEAP / Clio / Actionstep / Quill / OSPREY / Hoowla / Redbrick / Proclaim / other), AML provider (Thirdfort / Credas / SmartSearch / Veriphy / FirstAML), where the operational pain lives - the matter-status calls eating Tuesdays, the AML pack the inspector asked about, the client account reconciliation the bookkeeper’s not confident on, the file-review backlog. Send an enquiry - what you do, what’s slowing you down, what you’ve already tried. We’ll come back with a sketch of what we’d build and what it would cost. No calendar, no demo to sit through. Email reply, scoped sketch, you decide.