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Pressure mounting over new e-settlement regime
Lawyers and conveyancers are set to feel the impact of new regulatory regime coming into effect in Victoria today.
Emma Musgrave
From 1 October, practitioners in the state must lodge certain conveyancing transactions using an Electronic Lodgment Network (ELN) unless they qualify for an exception.
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With the mandated lodgement coming into effect today, InfoTrack has unveiled a new settlement service, dubbed SettleIT, which aims to take the pressure off conveyancers struggling to come to grips with the regime.
“We are currently travelling around the country to speak with conveyancers who have confirmed that these new regulations and processes are generating increased pressure and risk. There is a real call for help to deal with these changes which our clients feel have been thrust upon them,” said InfoTrack CEO John Ahern, commenting on the reason behind the move.
The introduction of SettleIT comes after a survey by InfoTrack showed that although the majority of legal and conveyancing professionals in Australia “plan to tackle the challenging transition to processing settlements in-house”, 11 per cent plan to use an agent to complete their settlements, 15 per cent are too busy to deal with the changes that come with the mandate and 7 per cent plan to stop doing conveyancing work altogether.
“We feel that InfoTrack’s role is to champion the needs of practitioners and support them through this transition to digitisation. InfoTrack already has a highly experienced network of settlement staff across Australia that serve over 7,000 clients and process an average of 200,000 settlements per year,” Mr Ahern said.
“It is a logical step to combine the knowledge, expertise and service of our settlements team with our innovative technology to take some burden off our clients’ shoulders, and this is what SettleIT does.”
Speirs Ryan partner James Ryan said the new service has played an integral role in simplifying his business.
“Within our business it’s essential that we are in constant communication with our clients. In using InfoTrack’s SettleIT service Speirs Ryan has been able to reallocate some of our administration team that were focused on the process steps of our settlements,” he said.
“Our team can now spend more time assisting and updating our clients through the conveyancing process. SettleIT has really enabled our business to focus on what our clients need most.”
