By Legal Futures Associate Access Legal
Legal technology specialist, Access Legal, the only accredited Conveyancing Quality Scheme (CQS) training provider outside of The Law Society, has launched updated CQS courses to enable law firms to understand and demonstrate their compliance with the latest CQS standards.
The news follows Access Legal’s acquisition of Legal Bricks in November, which offers firms practising conveyancing a customised online property search platform aimed at speeding up processes, alongside a series of anti-money laundering products.
CQS is a recognised quality standard for firms providing residential conveyancing services and who are authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). The scheme is accredited by The Law Society, which represents solicitors in England.
Existing and new customers of Access Legal’ Learning and Compliance products, can offer the new courses to all their staff to complete and meet the certification requirements.
To obtain the quality standard, certified members must undertake annual mandatory training and staff must complete the core training courses, Financial Crime and Protocol in Practice, within six-months of a firm’s accreditation. New staff must also undertake it within six-months after joining. For those who have previously completed the core training, they must undertake update courses including Conveyancing Practice and Risk and Compliance.
By joining the scheme through Access Legal, firms will demonstrate that they have the expertise to deliver quality residential conveyancing advice, adhere to standardised processes that reduce risk and have the necessary knowledge to educate clients on what to expect from conveyancing services.
CQS helps firms to minimise risk of claims and protect reputation, while also granting access to lender panels involved in property transactions, without having to take on as much due-diligence as unaccredited firms.
Ed Jones, Product Manager for Legal Content at Access Legal says the legal technology specialist has created a CQS offering that goes above and beyond the required syllabi and Quality Assurance Framework:
“Our goal is to give firms everything they need and more to maintain their CQS accreditation and comply with the requirements of The Core Practice Management Standards. By providing not just core required training and update courses including Financial Crime, our Legal Learning Lite package provides additional courses to support firms with their broader working needs.
“This includes courses such as mental health, email safety and phishing, all especially vital now that lots of firms will be working remotely full-time in line with government guidance. Our CQS package is all hosted in Access Workspace.
“Our recent legal learning survey found that 48 per cent of firms struggle with monitoring training so we wanted our courses to be not only easy to do through our LMS (Learning Management System) but easy for firms and staff to track and view progress and allocate courses to others.
“We are thrilled to be the only other accredited provider of CQS training alongside The Law Society in the industry and these updated courses are part of our continued strategy to lead legal learning in the sector.”
For more information about Access Legal’s CQS courses, visit Access Legal.
