Referral fees for conveyancers: the rules, the disclosure, the paperwork

Ask a room of conveyancers whether they can be paid for referring a client and a fair number will say no. The confusion usually traces back to the personal injury referral fee ban, which made headlines when it came in and left a lingering impression that referral fees in legal services are off limits generally.

They are not. That ban applies to personal injury and death claims. Referring a conveyancing client to a regulated financial adviser or a will-writing specialist sits outside it entirely. For solicitor-conveyancers, the SRA's rules permit these arrangements provided the client is told about them. For licensed conveyancers, the CLC's framework works the same way in substance: the client's best interest comes first, and any financial arrangement must be disclosed.

In short: your regulator's rules centre on disclosure, not prohibition. That distinction is the whole game.

Disclosure sounds simple until you sit down to draft it. In practice, a defensible disclosure covers three things.

• The existence of the arrangement. The client should know, before any introduction happens, that you may receive a fee if they proceed with the firm you are referring them to.
• The nature of your interest. You do not need to publish your accounts, but the client should understand that you have a financial interest in the referral, so they can weigh your suggestion accordingly.
• Their freedom to go elsewhere. The client must understand that they are under no obligation — the introduction is an option, not a condition of your conveyancing service.

Get those three elements in writing, dated, on the file, and you have the substance of what most regulatory conversations about referrals come down to. Check your own professional rules and disclose to your client — that is the discipline, and it is not onerous once it is systematised.

Almost no conveyancer gets into trouble for the principle of referring. The problems are administrative: a disclosure that was given verbally and never recorded, a template letter that was drafted in 2019 and never updated, a fee received with no note on the file explaining what it related to, or a referral made by one fee earner that the COLP or compliance partner only hears about at renewal.

Conveyancing firms are, ironically, brilliant at paperwork for everyone else's transactions and patchy at paperwork for their own side arrangements. If a referral relationship is worth having, it is worth having with the same file discipline you apply to a purchase: written disclosure, client acknowledgement, an audit trail of what happened next, and a record of what was paid and when.

This is the specific problem SmartPeer was built to remove. SmartPeer is a UK referral network that connects professionals — including conveyancers — with vetted, regulated advice firms for needs like wills, protection and financial planning. The mechanics are designed around the disclosure obligation rather than bolted onto it.

• The disclosure letter is generated automatically for every referral, so the client is informed in writing every time, without a fee earner having to remember a template.
• Every referral is consent-based. The client opts in online before any contact is made. Nobody is passed anywhere without their explicit agreement, and SmartPeer never contacts your client except through the referral they consented to.
• Live tracking from introduction to completion means your file — and your compliance officer — can see the status of any referral at any time.
• Commission statements that reconcile, so every payment you receive maps to a named referral with a full paper trail behind it.

The result is that the audit trail regulators expect exists by default, not by heroics.

SmartPeer is free to join and there are no monthly fees. When a referral completes, members keep 60–70% of the introducer fee, and the statement showing how that figure was reached arrives with the payment.

If your firm has been avoiding referral income because the compliance felt murky, the honest answer is that the rules were never the obstacle — the administration was. With the disclosure, consent and reconciliation handled systematically, the remaining question is simply whether you want the income line. Joining takes minutes, costs nothing, and commits you to nothing until you choose to make your first referral.