Managing a conveyancing team through the current compliance climate: an interview with Victoria Marshall

We recently sat down with Victoria Marshall, Director and Head of Property at Pearson Solicitors and Financial Advisers, to talk about what compliance actually looks like on the ground in conveyancing right now – from the coming shift in AML supervision to the day-to-day reality of managing a team under sustained regulatory pressure. Pearson is a CQS-accredited firm with offices across Oldham, Rochdale, Uppermill and Failsworth, and was named a Legal 500 UK Leading Firm for both 2025 and 2026.

Conveyancing has always sat at the sharp end of compliance in a law firm: high volume, high risk, and increasingly high scrutiny. Victoria’s perspective, shaped by more than two decades in the profession, is candid, occasionally sceptical of the regulator, but ultimately pragmatic about where things are heading.

A regulator in transition

The prospect of AML supervision moving from the SRA to the FCA is one of the more consequential changes on the horizon for conveyancing teams, and Victoria doesn’t see much to lose. Her view of the current regime is blunt: she isn’t convinced there’s meaningful supervision in the current system at all, describing much of what firms hear from the SRA as noise rather than substance. For her, effective oversight needs two things – enforcement, and the regulator actually demonstrating how compliance should be done – and she feels the second part is largely missing.

That scepticism doesn’t extend to optimism about the FCA specifically, so much as a sense that change itself is overdue. Victoria has no direct experience of how the FCA regulates, and is careful not to overstate the case either way. But she draws a useful distinction: the FCA brings deep, long-standing expertise in monitoring money movement through banks, insurers and financial advisers, even if it knows nothing yet about solicitors’ professional principles. “You’ve got a Financial Conduct Authority that deals with people handling the finances of a transaction,” she says, “so how can it be any worse?”

It’s a view she’s careful to frame as personal rather than universal – she expects plenty of disagreement across the profession – and one she’s clear applies as much to smaller high street practices as it does to City firms handling higher-value, higher-risk transactions.

The hidden cost of compliance

Ask Victoria how much compliance now shapes her day-to-day work, and the answer comes without hesitation: roughly 40 minutes are added to every file touched, and that’s before revisiting a risk assessment to check nothing has changed, which adds a similar amount of time again. What was once dismissed as a quick tick-box exercise has, in her account, become close to half the workload on a typical file – time that’s genuinely difficult to recover through billing, and that has to be absorbed while the firm stays commercially competitive.

 It’s a theme that recurs throughout the conversation: compliance isn’t resented in principle, but the practical burden of it – particularly the time involved in completing risk assessments across multiple areas – is real and rising.

Looking back to look forward

Victoria has been in conveyancing long enough to remember a very different starting point. In the 1990s, client identity checks were essentially non-existent – a client could register a property under whatever name they gave, with no ID or proof of funds required at all. It’s a useful frame of reference: however burdensome today’s AML regime feels, it exists because of a genuine, historical gap in due diligence.

That said, Victoria is not uncritical of where responsibility currently sits. She argues that a meaningful part of source-of-funds due diligence properly belongs with banks, which already profit from holding client funds and are well placed to have done the underlying checks – rather than falling, by default, to the conveyancer at the point of transaction. She’d like to see closer collaboration between banks, the Land Registry and legal practices, including through emerging digital verification tools, so that responsibility for AML checks is shared more sensibly across the chain rather than concentrated at the conveyancing stage. She’s equally realistic that broader monitoring of this kind brings its own resistance – not everyone welcomes closer scrutiny of their financial activity, whichever part of the chain it sits in.

Digital ID: a rare point of unreserved enthusiasm

If there’s one area where Victoria’s usual pragmatism gives way to something closer to enthusiasm, it’s digital ID and biometric verification. She recalls the anxiety of manually checking photo identification in the past – colleagues gathering round reception to debate whether a passport photo, sometimes years out of date, genuinely matched the person in front of them. Biometric checks, in her view, remove exactly that kind of subjective judgement call, replacing it with a more reliable, evidence-based standard. It’s a rare case of new technology being welcomed unreservedly rather than viewed as an added compliance burden.

CQS, and the limits of paperwork reform

The updated TA6 and TA7 forms, now mandatory for CQS-accredited firms, were designed to reduce delay by surfacing more information upfront. Victoria’s experience suggests the reform hasn’t achieved that in practice – and her explanation is more cultural than procedural. The pressure to move transactions along quickly, she suggests, means the forms themselves are too often processed rather than properly read, with gaps only surfacing later rather than being caught at the outset.

She illustrates the point with two contrasting transactions. In one, a delay arose because necessary planning consent hadn’t been resolved before a sale began, leaving the buyer’s solicitors waiting on paperwork that should have been sorted much earlier. In another, a seller who checked building regulations consent and secured a completion certificate before marketing the property went from listing to completion in a matter of months without the same friction. The difference, in Victoria’s words, was simply whether the problem was addressed before or after the transaction started – “the difference between 350 days and 50 days.”

Her broader point is about the number of parties now typically involved in a single transaction, each moving at a different pace, each with their own undisclosed pressures – a buyer further down the chain who hasn’t yet arranged their mortgage, for instance, but doesn’t want to say so for fear of losing their place. The effect, she says, is that transactions which should reasonably take eight weeks stretch to six months. Crucially, she doesn’t see this as risk being shared more broadly across the chain – simply as risk being delayed, while remaining exactly where it always sat.

Leading a team under sustained pressure

Compliance has changed what leading a conveyancing team actually involves. Victoria describes team management as now a full-time undertaking in its own right – the days of a partner managing their own caseload alongside overseeing others are largely gone. With a team of thirteen, everyone broadly understands what’s expected of them, but someone still needs to verify it’s actually happening, since it’s easy to be drawn into the day-to-day pressures of a transaction and let oversight slip. It’s here that she sees genuine value in independent, third-party review – an outside perspective that isn’t blinkered by familiarity with a particular transaction or a colleague’s usual way of working.

Recruitment, retention, and a culture built on trust

Given how demanding the role has become, a decline in recruitment or retention might be expected. Victoria’s experience runs counter to that: retention at her firm has been strong, growth has continued, and she attributes this directly to culture rather than circumstance. The firm operates, in her description, on a genuinely collective basis – compliance changes are approached as a shared challenge rather than something imposed from above, with regular updates across departments keeping everyone informed of both progress and setbacks. The result, she suggests, is a workplace where mistakes are treated as things to learn from rather than blame, and where – memorably – departing staff often return.

The value of an outside compliance partner

Pearson has worked with Enderley Consulting for several years, having been introduced through the previous owner of a firm Pearson took on, who had used and recommended Enderley’s services. Before that, the firm had never outsourced compliance at all – building compliance capability internally as needed, but without a third party talking the team through the process.

Asked what that support actually looks like day to day, Victoria is clear the value lies less in constant oversight and more in having an experienced, independent voice available exactly when it’s needed. It isn’t a heavy daily or weekly presence – more, as she describes it, a guiding hand: general audits, ongoing training, and support renewing certifications, alongside more hands-on input when something more significant arises, such as working through an SRA visit. When something does need attention, she can expect a response from Ed or Anne within a couple of hours, whether by phone or email.

What she values most about that relationship isn’t being handed a single definitive answer – since compliance rarely offers one – but being talked through a problem in a way that draws on precedent and outside perspective. That external vantage point, in her view, is precisely what’s hard to maintain from inside a single firm’s own established habits: without it, she suggests, it’s easy to stay circling within what a firm has always done, rather than benefiting from how other firms have handled the same issues, what’s worked, and what hasn’t.

Does this add up to a sector under control, or one still finding its footing?

Taken together, Victoria’s account doesn’t describe a profession in crisis, but nor does it describe one that’s comfortable. The individual pieces – a new regulator, updated forms, digital verification, tightening timelines – each arrive with good intentions, but their cumulative weight lands squarely on conveyancing teams already stretched thin. What emerges most clearly isn’t resistance to compliance itself, but a plea for it to be applied with more common sense: responsibility shared sensibly across banks, regulators and firms, rather than defaulting, as it so often does, to whoever happens to be holding the file at the time.

For firms managing that balance, the message from this conversation is a familiar one: proactive preparation – checking consents and certificates before a transaction starts, building genuine team culture rather than top-down compliance, and bringing in outside expertise before problems escalate – consistently outperforms reacting under pressure once a deadline or a regulator’s attention is already bearing down.

Whatever stage your firm is at with AML supervision, CQS compliance or team-level risk management, Enderley Consulting can help. We offer:

• Compliance and AML audits and gap analysis
• COLP/COFA support retainers, including AML spot checks, file reviews, complaints management and advice on SRA and other compliance issues
• Reviews and updates of risk assessments, policies and procedures
• CQS applications
• Annual declaration preparation
• Compliance training – bespoke and interactive, and via our Infohub webinar platform
  
  

Get in touch if you’d like support reviewing your firm’s approach to conveyancing compliance.

This article is based on an interview conducted by Enderley Consulting in July 2026 with Victoria Marshall, Director and Head of Property at Pearson Solicitors & Financial Advisers. Views expressed are Victoria’s own observations, drawn from her professional experience.