The average remortgage transaction in the UK requires approximately five hours of fee earner time. That figure might surprise people outside the legal profession, but anyone who has worked in residential conveyancing will recognise it immediately. Those five hours are not spent on complex legal analysis. They are consumed by data gathering, document checking, form filling, email chasing, and the endless administrative overhead of moving a transaction from instruction to completion.
At LEXcelerate, we have set ourselves an ambitious target: fifteen minutes of fee earner time per remortgage transaction. Not fifteen minutes of total processing time, but fifteen minutes of qualified human attention. The rest is handled by our AI-driven workflow system.
To understand how this is possible, it helps to break down where those five hours currently go. Roughly half is spent on information gathering and verification. Checking the title at the Land Registry, confirming client identity, reviewing lender requirements, and ensuring all the necessary documentation is in place. This is essential work, but almost all of it involves comparing data from one source against data from another. It is pattern matching, and that is precisely what AI does best.
Another significant portion goes to communication and chasing. Following up with lenders, updating clients, coordinating with the existing mortgage provider for redemption figures. In a traditional workflow, each of these communications is a separate manual task. In our system, status updates, requests, and confirmations are triggered automatically based on the state of the transaction. The system knows what information is needed, when it is needed, and who to ask for it.
The remaining time is spent on the genuinely legal elements: reviewing the title for unusual restrictions, assessing any risks that fall outside standard parameters, and exercising professional judgment on matters that require it. This is the fifteen minutes. This is the work that justifies having a qualified professional involved in the transaction.
Our approach to achieving this is rooted in three principles. First, capture data once and reuse it everywhere. If information has been provided or verified at any point in the process, no one should have to look it up again. Second, automate every decision that follows a clear rule. If the answer can be determined by applying a known set of criteria to known data, the system should determine it. Third, present only the exceptions. The fee earner should see only the transactions and issues that genuinely need their attention.
This is not a theoretical model. It is the architecture we are building, and the numbers are based on detailed process analysis of every step in the remortgage workflow. Five hours to fifteen minutes is not magic. It is the result of refusing to accept that things have to be done the way they have always been done.