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What "any news?" calls really cost a fixed-fee practice
There is no reliable figure for how many calls are clients chasing. What the research says about chasing calls, and how to work out your own cost.
Ask any conveyancer what eats their day and you'll hear the same answer: chasing, and being chased. Clients ringing for news, agents ringing on the client's behalf, the team ringing round everyone else to find out what's holding things up. But how much does it actually cost? It's worth being careful with the numbers.
The "40% of calls" figure
You'll often see it said that around 40% of calls to law firms are clients chasing for updates. We looked for the original source and couldn't find one. Where "40%" does appear, it's usually a software supplier's claim about how many calls its own product removed, not a measure of how many calls are chasing in the first place. So we don't use it.
What the research does show
- 43% of conveyancers' time goes on chasing stakeholders in a transaction, according to a 2024 survey of 100 residential conveyancers. That's self-reported and covers chasing everyone, not just clients, but it shows how much of the job is chasing. (Landmark Information Group, via Legal Futures, October 2024)
- 70% of home movers want an update from their conveyancer at least once a week. (tmgroup and Property Academy, Home Moving Trends, via Today’s Conveyancer)
- 123 days was the average time from instruction to completion in 2025. (Landmark Information Group, via Legal Futures, February 2026)
- 36% of complaints accepted by the Legal Ombudsman in 2025/26 were about residential conveyancing. (Legal Ombudsman, 2025/26 annual complaints data)
A worked example
Take a team with 100 live conveyancing matters. Assume, conservatively, that each client chases once a week (by phone or email), each takes five minutes to deal with, and the person handling them is a junior conveyancer on £28,000 a year (a typical figure in recent recruiter salary surveys).
- 100 matters × 1 chaser × 5 minutes = 500 minutes, or about 8.3 hours a week.
- £28,000 over 1,950 working hours is about £14.36 an hour, so that's about £120 a week.
- Over a month (52 weeks ÷ 12), that's about £519 a month, or £6,222 a year, in salary alone.
- Across an 18-week transaction, each matter soaks up about 90 minutes of chasing: roughly £22 per matter.
Those are illustrative assumptions, not measurements. They leave out employer costs and the time it takes to get back into a file after an interruption, so the real figure is likely higher. The best number is your own: count the "any news?" calls for a week, then try our calculator.
Why it matters more on fixed fees
Most conveyancing, uncontested probate, divorce and wills work is sold at a fixed fee. On hourly work, time on the phone can often be recorded and billed. On a fixed fee it can't: the price was set when you quoted. Every unnecessary call is unpaid time, and every call you avoid improves the margin on that matter without touching your prices.
How to cut the calls
Clients chase because they can't see progress. Tell them before they have to ask, and many of those calls never happen. As the Legal Ombudsman puts it:
"Short, predictable updates, even when there is nothing new to report, can improve consumer satisfaction, prevent escalation and reduce the volume of incoming queries over time."
Legal Ombudsman, reported by the Law Society Gazette, April 2026
That's exactly what Matterping does: a plain-English WhatsApp update every time a matter reaches a new stage, sent automatically when your team ticks it off.