Lorne & Vale
Property law · Intake

In property law, the enquiry arrives with a date on it. The answer should not wait until Monday.

A defect found after completion, a landlord’s notice on a commercial lease, a service-charge demand for major works: these enquiries carry a date, and that date starts a clock. Lorne & Vale captures the enquiry, structures it into a triage brief and puts it on the right lawyer’s desk, with a response target. You keep the decision.

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Isla Murrayisla.murray@example.invalid
Damp in a flat we bought in MarchHello, damp has come through in the bedroom. A neighbour tells us the problem is an old one, and the seller has stopped replying to our letters. Could you call us back?
Website form · a weekday eveningThe office is closed
  1. Received
  2. Structured
  3. Routed
  4. Acknowledged
  5. On the iPhone
The Lorne & Vale iPhone app, Today screen: two enquiries waiting on the fictional firm, the first a family-law enquiry from a fictional prospect scored 8 out of 10, high urgency, past its response target.

Real platform and app, fictional firm and people.

A week in a property law firm

Three situations you will recognise.

Every enquiry arrives with a triage brief: summary, urgency, parties to check, missing information, documents to request. Here is what it would surface.

Sunday, 21:05Website form

A defect found after completion on a flat

“We completed in March. Damp has come through in the bedroom, and a neighbour says the problem is an old one. The seller has stopped replying.”

What the brief would surface
Urgency
Medium. Priority P2, first-response target of 24 hours. Watch point: the date the damp was first noticed, and the completion date.
Parties to check
The seller, the estate agent, the conveyancer who acted on the purchase, and the freeholder or managing agent if common parts are involved.
Missing information
When did the buyers complete, and when did the damp appear? Was the seller a private individual or a developer? What did the survey say, and what was disclosed on the property information form?
Documents to request
The contract and transfer, the survey or homebuyer report, the property information forms, repair quotes, photographs, and the letters already sent to the seller.
Thursday, 08:20Forwarded e-mail

A landlord’s notice on a commercial lease

“A notice arrived yesterday about the end of my lease. My business has traded from these premises for twelve years.”

What the brief would surface
Urgency
High. Priority P1, first-response target of 4 hours. Watch point: the date the notice was served and the date it specifies.
Parties to check
The landlord, the company that owns the building and its directors, and the managing agent, for the conflict check.
Missing information
What date does the notice specify, and how was it served? Does it oppose renewal, and on what stated grounds? Is the lease contracted out of security of tenure?
Documents to request
The lease and any deeds of variation, the notice and its covering letter, the schedule of condition, recent rent demands and service-charge statements.
Saturday, 19:45Missed call

A service-charge demand on a leasehold flat

“The managing agent is demanding £9,400 for major works to the roof. The bill arrived last week and I was never consulted.”

What the brief would surface
Urgency
High. Priority P1, first-response target of 4 hours. Watch point: the date on the demand and the date it was received.
Parties to check
The freeholder, the managing agent and the residents’ management company, for the conflict check.
Missing information
What period does the demand cover? Was a consultation notice received, and when? Is the service charge reserved as rent under the lease?
Documents to request
The lease, the demand and the summary of rights served with it, any consultation notices, the last three years of service-charge accounts, and the correspondence with the agent.

Illustrative examples, fictional people. What a brief contains depends on the enquiry received. The brief summarises, scores and flags; it does not advise and it decides nothing. Someone at the firm assesses the merits and replies.

Demonstration

A demonstration on a real enquiry.

The screens below show the real enquiry in the demonstration data: Charlotte Bennett, a fictional person, writes at 22:47 about a separation. The enquiry is structured within the minute, the acknowledgement goes out in the firm’s name at 22:49, and the brief waits for the partner on the platform and on their iPhone. A property enquiry fills in the same fields: the damp reported by Isla Murray, the lease notice received by Julian Mercer, fictional people too.

The triage brief

What the lawyer reads before deciding.

The same grid at 2 pm and at 11 pm, on a separation as on a latent defect or a lease notice. Nothing is decided in their place.

  • Score 8 out of 10, hot, priority P1, with the score rationale in plain words: a clearly described situation, children involved, an explicit request for quick advice and full contact details.
  • Practice area, routing and next step. On this demonstration enquiry: family law, a suggested first contact, and a confidential call offered within one working day. On a commercial lease notice, the same line would name the practice area, the partner on the property team and the step after that.
  • Needs attention: children involved, safeguarding. On a property enquiry, this is the block that carries the dates: when a defect was found, when a notice was served.
  • Missing information and documents to request. Here: have proceedings already been issued, is there a current child arrangements order, any existing court order. On a latent defect it would be the survey, the property information forms and the letters sent to the seller.
  • Counterparty and conflict check. Here the spouse is named for your own search; in property it would be the seller, the landlord or the managing agent. The list is extracted by the model and requires human verification.

The person’s identifiers are replaced by tokens before any model call. Names are restored only inside your firm’s database.

The triage brief on iPhone: watch points, documents to ask for, missing information and the recommended next step, on a fictional family-law enquiry.
Triage brief of a fictional enquiry on the platform: score 8 out of 10, family law, priority P1, recommended next step, score rationale, watch points and parties to check.
On the iPhone

The same brief, in the partner’s pocket.

What is waiting, with its countdown. A suggested reply, marked as a draft. Two buttons: Approve and send, Edit draft.

  • A countdown on the lock screen, if the partner asks for it, and a reminder half an hour before the response target runs out. The reminder names a practice area and a score, never a client.
  • A draft, not a send. The suggested reply only goes out if a lawyer approves or edits it. The only thing that leaves on its own is the acknowledgement, in wording approved at setup.
  • An append-only history: received, triaged and scored, routed to a fee earner, acknowledgement sent. Entries are never edited or removed.
  • Face ID locks the app as soon as it goes to the background.
The triage brief on iPhone: score 8 out of 10, a fictional prospect, family practice area, high urgency, summary, and the Approve and send, Edit draft buttons.
The suggested reply on iPhone, marked as a draft until it is sent, and the append-only timeline of the enquiry: received, triaged and scored, routed to a fee earner, acknowledgement sent.

Real platform and app, fictional firm and people.

What it is worth

A worked example, with its assumptions.

Not a promise: visible arithmetic, to redo with your own numbers.

Assumptions for a firm of 3 to 9 lawyers
£108,000of fees at stake a year, in this example, that is 27 matters
Enquiries received a month, all channels30
Share unanswered, answered too late or never read30%
Conversion of an enquiry handled in time25%
Fees on a property matter, taken from a range of £2,500 to £6,000£4,000
Annual subscription, Firm tier, list price£11,940
Break-even3 matters a year

30 × 30% × 25% = 2.25 matters a month × 12 = 27 × £4,000 = £108,000 a year

An example, not a promise: a service-charge dispute and a commercial lease renewal are not billed the same way. “At stake” means the fees of the matters concerned, not a forecast of instructions or guaranteed revenue. Put your own figure in place of the £4,000. The setup fee, refundable in full, is left out of the calculation.

What the research measures

67%

of law firms never reply to an enquiry sent by e-mail.

Source: Clio Legal Trends Report, secret-shopper study of 500 law firms, 2024. The figure describes observed response behaviour, not a result to expect from Lorne & Vale.

Security and confidentiality

Confidential matters, handled as such.

Four controls you can verify, described without superlatives.

Anonymised before any model

Names, e-mails, phone numbers and other identifiers are replaced by tokens before an enquiry reaches a model. The mapping is sealed under the firm’s key.

Isolated per firm

Every client-data table carries a per-firm access rule, checked by automated tests on every change.

Documents sealed in the browser

Every document is encrypted before upload under two key exchanges, X25519 and ML-KEM-1024. Uploads are bounded, type-checked and content-inspected: embedded programs are refused.

Chained, signed audit trail

Sensitive actions are hash-linked and the head of the chain is signed daily with ML-DSA-87. The iPhone app verifies the signature on the device.

What we do not claim: no SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, and no external penetration test to date. Hosting on Supabase (EU, Ireland) and Vercel; the model is called through a server-side proxy, with no training on your data under OpenAI’s default policy.

See the security architecture
Pricing

A flat fee for the whole firm.

Property law is the practice area included. An additional practice area is £250 per month. No per-seat or per-enquiry charge. A one-time setup fee, refundable in full under the No-Miss Guarantee. Prices exclude VAT.

Live in 7 days, a 60-day pilot then month to month, cancel any time, export your data any time. Read the guarantee in full.

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