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DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE

CEO

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CEO

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David Jabbari, CEO of Muve. I am sure that all forward-thinking law firms will be keen to embrace any technology that can be proven to simplify and speed up key aspects of the conveyancing process, such as settlement and registration. PEXA's track record in Australia speaks for itself.

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 08 August 2022 14:16 PM

This is an excessively negative view of the market. It places too much emphasis on inflationary and cost of living pressures, and neglects the very significant imbalance between supply and demand for housing. Despite some easing of supply and a slight fall off in demand, both indices are significantly outstripping their pre-Covid 5 year averages. This is a structural alteration in the market, linked to the reassessment of home after Covid, and still has a way to run.

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 08 March 2022 09:32 AM

David Jabbari, CEO of Muve. Happy New Year! It is wrong to link an unfortunate IT incident to completely unrelated issues, such as volume conveyancing and referral fees. Largescale, highly automated, conveyancing is the only future for the industry because the unit economics of conveyancing dictates this. In fact, as organisations get larger their ability to invest in first class IT security should increase, especially as compared to the High Street model. My suspicion is that Simplify's problems ultimately derive from the number of acquisitions made by the Group and the need to bolt together so many different IT systems. We have resisted acquisitions for this and other risk management and marketing reasons, and instead our goal is to be a Top 5 conveyancer in the next 12-16 months purely by organic growth.

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 04 January 2022 11:47 AM

We don't know about the causes of the Simplify incident but it needs to be remembered that the biggest cyber security threats are not necessarily complex. The majority of cyber criminals are not tech geniuses - they are lazy, disfunctional individuals. The biggest threat is often no more than hacking a client email account and pretending to be a law firm, thereby diverting funds. Email is where the majority of the risks lie.

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 12 November 2021 13:04 PM

The focus should be on urging the government to do more to combat cyber crime. Whether it is old folks receiving daily calls from scammers pretending to be HMRC, right through to sophisticated hacking of law firms and banks, we have an epidemic of tolerated criminality in this area. There should be a Minister solely for this issue, and the measures taken to combat it need to be extra-territorial and Draconian. Enough is enough!

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 12 November 2021 09:19 AM

Really, we need to speed up transactions by automation. Why has no one thought of this before? Amazing....

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 29 June 2021 09:57 AM

DAVID JABBARI, CEO, MUVE It is hard to fault the sentiment behind this initiative. It is often felt that there was a 'golden age' of High Street conveyancing, when customers walked in to their local solicitor and chatted with their lawyer, and the lawyers spent time on the golf courses with their local estate agents. I am afraid that those days have well and truly gone however, and not just because golf is a lot less popular! For one thing, the kind of model being discussed here can only work economically at fee rates that many customers will no longer pay, given the intense competion over price. Customers today see conveyancing as an 'unbundled' product that they can buy as a commodity on the basis of price, not something that has to be suplied as part of traditional law firm delivery. I pass no comment on whether that is right or wrong, simply that this is how customers view it. Also, today's customer is much happier interacting through digital portals and the like: they do not want, nor need, to give up hours of their day to go in to a solicitor's office and wait to be seen. Lastly, and this is the killer, while the first wave of volume conveyancing delivered an inferior product to High Street delivery, that is no longer the case. The amount of investment and resource that a large, well capitalised, firm can bring to the improvement of every aspect of the process is far greater than a traditionally run law firm. It is a bit like comparing Amazon with one of those old catalogue showrooms on the High Street: no one today would seriously think that Amazon, for all its volume, scale and absence of local presence, was an inferior product.

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 12 June 2021 13:37 PM

Rob is correct but I think this problem is a lot less acute than people think. Even the seemingly very 'solid' panel arrangements of the 3 largest groups only succeed in converting about 50% of their customers to to the panel conveyancer. This is because local agents refuse to use the system on grounds of quality. Panels are the problem. Don't forget that they can make money from Searches even without the referral fee. The key point here is that local agents should create their own arrangements with firms they trust, not with panels where they have no control over who does the work. I see no problem in referral fees being paid in those circumstances: ie no serious risk of conflict.

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 05 October 2020 11:18 AM

In response to Alan's comment, this may be true, save that the earlier dismissal of so-called 'factory style' conveyancing in this chain is inappropriate. Any analysis of the economics of conveyancing will reveal that it must be provided at volume. Firms that do not understand this - the so-called 'high street' firms - are the wrong side of this particular evolution in the legal market. This is why every year we see the larger firms become larger, buying up large regional firms (as Simplify did again this week), and the number of smaller firms decline. This is simple economics of scale. While there may still be some small service bonus that comes from dealing with the high street conveyancer, prepared to be on the end of every call, every year it gets less and less, as the larger firms invest in better systems. Naturally, if you only take 5 new clients per month you are likely to offer a very individual service but (a) you are not likely to be in business very long, (b) you will be charging a fee that is likely to be not very attractive and (c) you will have no money to invest in the absolutely essential tech needed to respond to the modern customer, and estate agent, demands for seamless communication. The attack on 'factory-style' conveyancing sounds a bit like: "this chap Henry Ford, he doesn't understand the importance of hand made cars: it will never catch on!".

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 22 September 2020 11:47 AM

From David Jabbari, Solicitor, CEO of Muve There is always a tendency in conveyancing firms to get very defensive when this subject is broached, and blame everything but the legal process. This issue has been coming up across the property press recently and I think it is a great opportunity for the law firms to put their hands up and admit they could be doing a lot better. One report was suggesting that sellers who do not list this month are likely to miss the SDLT holiday period. It is truly shocking, and frankly unbelievable, that sellers would need to list this month to get in within the SDLT holiday deadline due to the conveyancing process. The issue is that conveyancers fail to re-examine their processes: they simply say I am working flat out but never stop to ask whether they are working efficiently, whether they are making mountains out of molehills throughout the process. I had a solicitor on the other side the other day who would not accept a completion payment by the Faster Payment method without an undertaking that we would not recall the money (and this was while the csutomers were in a van waiting for the keys!). We did a major review of our processes and created a MuveFast service targeting 28 day exchanges, and we are successful in this in over 90% of cases. The big issue I am seeing is mortgage approvals but this is definitely improving. There is no doubt that lots of law firms were too slow to unfurlough and have not invested in new capacity to keep up with demand. We were fortunate that we raised over £1m new investment during Covid and have ploughed this immediately into new capacity and a new estate agency account management team. Never was there a more important time to ensure that instructed lawyers are committed to faster transaction times and have the resources to deliver this. (david.jabbari@muve.me.uk).

From: DAVID JABBARI - CEO OF MUVE 22 September 2020 10:06 AM

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