Communicate · Product Deep Dive: Matter Update Agent

How One Firm's Live Deployment Freed Up Conveyancer Time

Inside a month of Matter Update Agent calls, milestone by milestone.

Most conveyancers already know why clients get frustrated. It's rarely negligence. It's that a conveyancer juggling a full caseload doesn't always have five spare minutes to call and say "nothing's changed yet, still waiting on the search." Capacity runs out before goodwill does.

It's a common enough problem that the Legal Ombudsman now tracks it directly. Poor communication is the most common reason people complain, both by raw volume (24% of everything reported to LeO) and by how often those complaints are upheld (25%, the largest category by some distance). LeO's own guidance for conveyancers spells out the fix just as plainly: keep clients posted in line with service level agreements, "even when there is 'no news'."

What the Matter Update Agent does

The Matter Update Agent reaches out to clients automatically at key transaction milestones, delivering a plain-English update on what's happened and what's next, without a conveyancer picking up the phone. Every call is logged straight back into the CMS, so the record stays as complete as if a person had made the call themselves.

Inside one firm's live deployment

To see what that looks like in practice, we looked at a month of real calls from one firm's live deployment: four Matter Update agents, 1,566 outbound calls, 28 July–27 August 2026.

≈63 hrs/month

Estimated

of case-handling time this many calls would take to make by hand, based on typical answer rates

16.8 hrs/month

Measured

actual AI time across the same 1,566 calls, logged directly from the call system

The 63 hrs figure is an estimate built on assumed per-outcome handling times (3 min live answer, 2 min voicemail, 1 min no-answer), not a measured result. It moves if your own team's handling times differ. The 16.8 hrs, call volumes and outcomes throughout this article are measured from the live call log.

Where the calls landed

85%

of calls delivered an update automatically, start to finish

0.3%

needed a live handover to a person mid-call

5.4%

were flagged afterwards for a quick human follow-up

Real call outcomes from the same live deployment, not a lab test.

Milestone by milestone

Breaking the same month down by transaction milestone shows where the volume, and the time, actually sat.

Milestone	Calls	Live answered	Voicemail	No answer	Est. human time
Local Authority Search Received	484	259	177	48	19.6 h
Enquiries Raised	448	222	153	65	17.3 h
Mortgage Offer Received	331	181	115	35	13.5 h
Contract Pack Sent	311	162	118	31	12.6 h
Total	1,566	824	563	179	63.0 h

Estimated hours use the same assumed per-outcome handling times as above (3 min live answer, 2 min voicemail, 1 min no-answer). Call volumes and outcomes are logged from the live call system.

What this means for firms

None of this is about replacing the judgement a conveyancer brings to a transaction. It's about who's making the calls that don't need that judgement in the first place, the routine "here's where things stand" update that the Ombudsman's own guidance says matters, but that's usually the first thing to slip when a caseload gets heavy.

In this deployment, the vast majority of updates went out without anyone needing to pick up a phone, and the small fraction that did need a person were flagged clearly rather than lost in the gaps.

Curious what this looks like for your firm?

We'd like to sit down, look at how your team currently handles these calls, and talk through where Matter Update Agent could take the load off.