The Conveyancing Association (CA) has detailed a number of new membership categories and provided an update on its membership growth.
At its recently-held AGM, the CA entered a number of new membership categories into its Articles of Association. They are:
- Associate membership – for conveyancing firms currently outside the top 200 solicitors and licensed conveyancers who are ‘serious conveyancers’. Associate members are treated as full members of the CA and can attend both the Management Committee and All-Member Meetings.
- Stakeholder membership – these are firms, organisations, trade bodies, etc, that have been specifically invited by the Management Committee to join based on their ability and desire to work collaboratively with the CA in developing best practice within the conveyancing industry.
- Honorary membership – this is available for specific individuals within the industry who the CA believes add significant insight and will work with the trade body by offering their overall expertise.
The CA has announced the first of its new stakeholder members – they are: Council for Licensed Conveyancers (CLC), HomeOwners Alliance, the National Association of Estate Agents (NAEA), the British Association of Removers (BAR), The Property Ombudsman and Atom Bank.
Further stakeholder membership invites will be issued and organisations and businesses who wish to be considered are invited to contact the CA.
The new categories are added to the Full Member and Affiliate memberships. The CA is currently processing the membership applications for 20 new Full Member firms following a 25% growth in members during 2016. 16 new member firms joined the trade body during 2016.
Affiliate members are able to attend select Management Committee and All Member Meetings (AMM). Each Affiliate member has the opportunity to present and their details are prominently advertised on the CA website, its newsletters and on all relevant CA publications. All Affiliate members can also attend, and be promoted, at the CA Annual Conference & Dinner.
The latest Affiliate member to join the CA is LexisNexis UK, the provider of legal research and workflow solutions.
Lloyd Davies (pictured), operations director at the Conveyancing Association, said: “It’s become clear – certainly over the last 12-18 months – that if we want to achieve our aims as a trade body and change the conveyancing process for the better, we need to be a broad church and adopt a collaborative approach. The number of full members has grown significantly over the past year, and we currently have 20 firms going through the application process, however we also wanted to open up membership to those conveyancing firms who might currently be outside the top 200 but are serious about conveyancing. For this reason we have introduced Associate membership and we would welcome enquiries from firms who fit within this category.
“We will not be able to deliver our ambitious Strategic Plan to change the home-moving process without major input from a variety of firms, organisations and individuals. Our Affiliate members are a constant source of insight and expertise, and we will continue to work closely together with them, however we also accept that we require an equivalent level of input from a large array of stakeholders across various sectors and industries. Our new Stakeholder membership is designed to bring these trade bodies, organisations, and like-minded individuals (via Honorary membership) together in order to develop joint proposals and initiatives, secure feedback, seek consensus and to ensure we have solutions that are relevant right across the market.
“Our recently-held AGM brought together a great number of our members from across these categories and the level of interaction and debate generated by attendees certainly showed the benefit of this membership approach. We recognise that we can’t be a closed-shop at the CA and want to develop our membership to reflect our aims and goals, and to ensure we can deliver on them via the support of many others. We’ll continue to do this in the months and years ahead.”
