Conveyancing in 2026: digital checks, fragmented communication
InfoTrack’s 2026 index shows a gap between digital checks and client communication. What its figures measure, and how a firm can test its own workflow.
The brief
InfoTrack’s 2026 Digital Conveyancing Maturity Index points to a gap between buying digital tools and joining up a transaction. Its published findings report that 71% of respondents still use phone, email or post for onboarding communication, while 66% make manual calls to check recipient account details.
These are reported practices, not measured fraud rates. Our take is to examine one sensitive instruction from receipt through verification, approval and filing. Record where staff must copy information, change systems or reconstruct an answer. A useful trial should show whether an authorised colleague can retrieve the final instruction and its evidence. A higher adoption score alone cannot answer that question.
The full record
Conveyancing firms can have digital identity checks and still rely on separate messages to move a transaction forward. That is the practical tension in InfoTrack’s 2026 Digital Conveyancing Maturity Index, published at the start of October. The most useful question for a firm is where the information stops travelling with the instruction.
What the figures actually measure
The InfoTrack-supplied release carried by Inside Conveyancing reports that 89% of respondents use digital identity verification, but 71% use phone, email or post for onboarding communication. It also reports manual account-verification calls at 66% and email document exchange before completion at 70%. These are descriptions of respondents’ practices, not an estimate of every firm in England and Wales.
In a September interview previewing the index, InfoTrack’s chief operating officer described shared workspaces connecting both sides of a transaction as a practice used by only 15% of respondents. That does not establish that all other communication is unsafe. It identifies a workflow worth examining.
Read the change in score carefully
Today’s Conveyancer’s account of the launch gives an average score of 59.8% for 2026 and 54.4% for 2024: a difference of 5.4 percentage points, or roughly 9.9% relative to the earlier score. The same account says the benchmark changed and added an AI section. This is not a controlled comparison of identical firms doing identical work.
The index’s own assessment page asks firms to describe how they perform tasks. Its programme-wide participation figure should not be presented as the confirmed sample for the 2026 results. We have not verified that edition’s complete sample, weighting or response rate from a full methodology document.
AI adoption leaves the same unanswered question
The release reports AI use by 85% of respondents, with 14% describing standard practice and 69% individual experimentation. Those figures should not be presented as proof of reliable outputs, firm-wide governance or financial returns.
Our analysis: whether a document was prepared manually or with AI, a colleague still needs to know which version was approved, who approved it and what instruction it implements. The communication record should answer those questions without depending on the memory of the person who handled the matter.
A practical test for the next procurement decision
Choose a fictional change to a payment instruction. Ask the receiving colleague to establish the requester’s identity and authority, verify the change through an independently established route, obtain approval and record the outcome. Include the client and any handoff to another firm in the exercise.
Measure the time to a verified decision, the number of manual transfers between systems, unresolved requests and the time a different authorised colleague needs to retrieve the evidence. Repeat with comparable tasks before and during a trial. Report errors and extra review effort as well as time saved.
Those measures would test a specific contribution of formal communication: whether an attributable request remains connected to its approval and outcome. They would be more useful than a count of logins or messages alone. This is a proposed exercise, not a benchmark The Formal Record has already run. Our earlier pilot scorecard develops the same distinction between adoption and acceptable completed work.
Sources checked on 5 October 2026. This is an analysis of commercial, self-reported research, not an independent survey. We read the published release, interview and assessment page; we did not obtain the complete downloadable report or verify its edition-specific sample and weighting. The 300-plus programme figure is not used as a 2026 denominator. Figures describe respondents and do not establish fraud rates, time savings or causation. The changing benchmark limits comparisons over time. Our proposed workflow test has not been performed.