Every morning Lucy Lafferty-Brown starts her day at 6.30 with a wellbeing ritual via Zoom with five other solicitors from her firm, Zen Move. Sometimes her clients even make an appearance, joining their conveyancer for meditation, yoga and breathing exercises. Have any of them ever asked whether the local searches have come back while they’re in downward dog, I ask. “If they are up for doing the ritual, then they probably get it, so that hasn’t happened yet, no,” Lafferty-Brown says.
The property specialist is a partner and main shareholder in the Bournemouth-based law firm Chester & Co, but last year, while meditating, she had a moment of clarity. Now, she realised, was the perfect time to combine her interest in mindfulness with her professional life.
Her fellow lawyers were dropping like flies, burnt out from a property market boom started by lockdowns and the stamp duty holiday deadline, and adjusting to remote working. It resulted in a huge conveyancing backlog as buyers rushed to meet the extended stamp duty deadline at the end of September; exchanges were taking a month longer than usual.
“I’ve heard of 100 cases per lawyer. It’s just not doable. It’s burn-out city,” Lafferty-Brown says. She knows what that feels like. Four years ago she was on medication, living “a life fuelled by stress, anxiety and depression. Everything was really difficult and I was just about coping at best.”
That’s when she withdrew to a silent retreat in the Pyrenees, where she had a “euphoric life change. I was filled with love. It shifted everything.” It inspired her to carry out “law with love” and start Zen Move, an online subsidiary of Chester & Co, with a more manageable workload that would allow its solicitors to practise compassionate conveyancing.
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“I know that a file can stay on a conveyancer’s desk for four weeks without being looked at,” she says. “It’s like law is behind other industries on customer care, where that just wouldn’t happen.”
At the start of the process clients are allowed to set their own conveyancing fee (although disbursements paid to third parties, such as Land Registry fees, cannot be negotiated). Some still prefer to ask for a quote, but more importantly “the budget thing starts a human conversation”, she says. Most suggest a price £100 to £200 below the typical fee (the average is £1,650, reallymoving.com reports).
“We’re remote lawyers, we don’t have huge overheads, so that’s wonderful,” Lafferty-Brown says. “Some of them have gone over and above if they like the idea of what we’re doing. We had one case of £10, so I said give me a call and we’ll discuss it, and they didn’t ring. If we had a discussion and then I thought it was fair I’d do it.”
She gives one example where she carried out conveyancing free of charge for a woman who could not even afford the management pack for her new property because she was going through a divorce and her house was being repossessed.
The Covid fallout means Zen Move is encountering more divorcees and buyers in other stressful situations. She gives an example of a woman who has conceived and given birth to twins in the time it has taken to sell her flat (the sale fell through three times), and a man who is living on a boat with his dog while divorcing and selling the marital home.
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A huge source of conveyancing stress is the weeks of silence that often follow an offer being accepted. Clients don’t mind delays, Lafferty-Brown insists, as long as they’re clued in. Movers can tick items off a checklist provided by Zen Move and they can directly message their conveyancer using the free app.
Her solicitors promise to respond during working hours on the same day, but doesn’t this just pile more pressure on them? “They would definitely say if they were heading towards feeling overwhelmed,” Lafferty-Brown says. “The only time that has happened was due to a really difficult client. The policy is that if the situation gets stressful, we’ll deal with it together.”
Then there’s the morning wellbeing ritual, and an eight-week online meditation course by Burgs, the teacher who ran the Pyrenees retreat. The programme is usually worth £40 but is included in the conveyancing fee.
Zen Move celebrated its first birthday last month and has had 350 instructions since its launch. November looks set to be a record-breaking month and Lafferty-Brown is recruiting more like-minded solicitors to join her six-strong all-female team.
The past year has been a lesson for her. “I’ve realised that you can’t force spirituality on people, so the website has been toned down on that stuff,” she says. Still, she is concerned that her approach seems “woo-woo” to outsiders. “An important part of Zen Buddhism is being clear, organised and orderly; that’s why a lot of business leaders are Zen,” she says. “If just one person can be happier from it, then I’ve done what I set out to do.”