Explain the journey at the start
Tell clients the stages and roughly how long each takes. The SRA Transparency Rules already ask firms to publish this for conveyancing and probate.
Savings calculator
How much are chasing calls costing your firm?
Slide to the number of live matters your team handles. On fixed-fee work, every “any news?” call is time you're never paid for.
How this is worked out
- Inbound calls: an estimated six inbound calls per matter, per week, from all parties (Moneypenny, via Legal Futures, 2021; an industry estimate, not a measured figure).
- We assume 35% of those calls are clients chasing for an update, and that each takes five minutes to deal with.
- Time is costed at £14.36 an hour: a £28,000 salary (BCL Legal Salary Survey 2025, junior conveyancer) over 1,950 working hours. Salary only, before employer costs.
- Potential saving assumes Matterping's automatic updates answer those questions before clients ring. Your results will depend on your clients and caseload.
- Matterping each year is the plan for your number of live matters, times 12, excluding VAT. Above 400 live matters, pricing is by quote, so the net saving is shown against the Firm plan as a guide.
What the research says
Chasing is built into the way matters run.
of their time is spent chasing stakeholders in a transaction, according to residential conveyancers surveyed by Landmark in 2024 (self-reported, 100 conveyancers; up from 39% in 2023).
of home movers want an update from their conveyancer at least once a week (survey of over 5,400 home movers, published 2016).
was the average time from instruction to completion for a property transaction in 2025, up from 120 days in 2024.
A note on "40% of calls": you will see this figure quoted online, but we could not find an original source for it. Where it appears, it is a software vendor's claim about how many calls its own product removed. We'd rather you measured your own.
Why fixed-fee firms feel it most
The fee is fixed. The calls aren't.
When you quote a fixed fee, you price in the work you expect. Chasing calls are the work nobody priced in. A client who rings every week of an 18-week transaction can quietly turn a profitable matter into a marginal one.
Matterping answers the question clients ring to ask, at every stage, automatically. Fewer calls means more of each fixed fee stays with the firm, and fee earners spend their day moving files forward.
"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
How to cut chasing calls.
Update at every milestone
Don't wait to be asked. A short message when each stage completes answers the question before the client picks up the phone.
Say who you're waiting on
"We're waiting for the seller's solicitor" stops the call. "No news yet" doesn't.
Use the channel clients read
Emails get buried and portals go unvisited. WhatsApp messages get read.
Check in midway
Ask whether clients feel updated enough, and act on every No before frustration builds. Pulse
Measure it
Count "any news?" calls for a week before and after. That's the only figure that matters for your firm.
Questions firms ask
How many calls are chasing calls?
There is no reliable published figure for the share of calls that are clients chasing, so we don’t quote one. What is published: conveyancers in Landmark’s 2024 survey said they spend 43% of their time chasing stakeholders (self-reported), and 70% of home movers want an update at least weekly. The best number is your own: count "any news?" calls for a week.
Why does this matter more on fixed fees?
On hourly work, time spent on a call 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, so cutting them improves the margin on every matter without changing your prices.
Will Matterping stop all chasing calls?
No, and we won’t claim a percentage until we have measured it with firms. What it does is answer the most common question, "what’s happening?", automatically at every stage, which the Legal Ombudsman says can reduce incoming queries over time.
How do I work out our own figure?
Use the calculator above with your own numbers: live matters, how many chasers you get per matter each week, how long each takes, and what the person handling them costs. Leave the fixed fee empty if you don’t want the per-matter view.
See Matterping with your own matters.
Book a short demo and we'll set up a matter type that matches how your firm works, then send an update to your own phone so you can see exactly what your clients would get.