By Legal Futures’ Associate poweredbypie
McKeag & Co is a mid-sized high street firm of 50 staff based in Newcastle upon Tyne which has provided a range of legal services, including conveyancing, to clients throughout the North East for over 80 years. Partner, Chris Thomson, heads-up the seven strong conveyancing team dealing exclusivly with conveyancing matters, for both local and long distance clients.
Chris Thomson has overseen the growth of McKeag & Co’s residential conveyancing team over the past decade and became a partner in 2016. Chris and his team have used poweredbypie’s search solutions, ordered through the Brighter Law Suite since 2014. Chris confirms: “We resisted using regulated local searches for a long time as we saw others coming through which just didn’t contain the required information. Many said: ‘information not available, please rely on indemnity’, which is just not how we do business.
“However, poweredbypie’s regulated local searches are different. I had known Shaun Cannell, Brighter Partner, Brighter Law Solutions for many years and trusted him to introduce us to poweredbypie and show us how accurate the searches are. The process is simple: we log-in, generate an address with the smart address search function and the boundary mapping tool ensures that information is accurate and property specific. With as little as a street name, we can get the Land Registry property boundary and the size of the site. It takes about 30 seconds to place an order from start to finish. When the searches are returned, which for environmental and flood can be in just a few hours, they contain full and accurate information, plus they are all CoPSO and PCCB compliant.
“We have never had an issue with the turnaround time. Occasionally a local authority may be experiencing resourcing issues and so there could be a delay but we are always kept informed and so we can keep our clients in the loop. A few years ago, five local authorities came together in Northumberland and this led to searches being delayed for between 30-40 days, it was the same for everyone but poweredbypie kept us informed so we could manage our clients’ expectations intelligently.
“One of the attractions is that the search packs are cost effective. Prices are also consistent nationally. This means that I can provide a quote for someone moving house locally and it doesn’t matter whereabouts they are based in the North East, the price for the searches is always the same. Likewise an estate agent all the way down in Essex can refer a client to us and the price will remain the same too.
“We order the search packs through the Brighter Law Suite which we also use for all our client quotes. The system integrates with our website and I can provide a branded quote with minimal details in just a few minutes freeing up time for billable work. We can track quotes through the system and follow-up any that don’t initially generate instructions. The system really is very simple – everyone can use it! The technology is designed for purpose and backed up by poweredbypie’s friendly and helpful team who are always a pleasure to deal with. As an organisation, McKeag & Co has been pleased to make the move to poweredbypie and its Brighter Law Suite.”
