The problem
A leasehold purchase means reading the lease end to end: term, ground rent and how it rises, service charge, repairs, alterations, subletting and restrictions on use. If a conveyancer handles 10 leasehold purchases a month and each lease takes 2 hours to read and note, that's 20 hours a month, and a clause missed on page 90 can come back as a complaint.
What the AI does
Claude takes PDFs of up to 1,000 pages and up to 20 files in one chat, so the lease and any deeds of variation go in together. The conveyancer asks for a table of the points the firm reports on, each with the clause number and the exact wording, plus anything unusual and 'not found' where the lease is silent. The conveyancer then reads the clauses the table points to, and the rest of the lease as needed, and writes the report on title. Because the lease names the parties and the property, the firm uses the Team plan, which doesn't train on business data by default, with its COLP's approval. The firm stays responsible for the advice under the SRA rules.
A worked example
A three-conveyancer firm in Bristol handles about 10 leasehold flat purchases a month. Two of the conveyancers use Claude Team to produce a clause table for each lease before writing the report on title.
Before
2 hours to read and note each of 10 leases: 20 hours a month
After
About 1 hour 15 minutes each, including checking every row: 12.5 hours a month
What it's worth
About $450£338€402A$649C$635 a month in conveyancer time saved, against about $40£30€36A$58C$56 to $51£38€45A$73C$71 for two Claude Team seats. 45 minutes saved on each of 10 leases is 7.5 hours, at an assumed $60£45€54A$86C$85 an hour.
How to set it up
- Have the COLP and data protection lead approve Claude Team for lease documents after reading Anthropic's commercial terms and data processing addendum.
- Set up Claude Team for the two conveyancers: $20 (about $20£15€18A$29C$28) per user a month billed annually, or $25 (about $25£19€23A$36C$36) billed monthly, minimum 2 users.
- Write a standard prompt listing the points the firm reports on, asking for the clause number, the exact wording and 'not found' where a point isn't covered.
- Upload the lease, any deeds of variation and the landlord's replies to inquiries in one chat, as text-searchable PDFs.
- Check every row against the lease itself, read any clause marked unusual in full, and write the report on title in the case system.
- Have the supervising solicitor review the report before it goes to the client.
What goes wrong
- Claude can miss a clause, merge two, or describe one wrongly. The table is a reading aid; the conveyancer checks each point against the lease and is responsible for the report.
- In PDFs over 100 pages Claude reads the text only. A scanned lease with no text layer can come through partly or not at all, so run it through OCR first and check nothing is missing.
- Free and Pro are personal plans where training is opt-out. Client documents belong on Team, where training is off by default; Team needs at least 2 users.
- A deed of variation or license that isn't uploaded won't be in the table. List the documents you have and ask the seller's solicitor for any that are missing.