Liam Killingback
8 August 2026
An Australian conveyancing matter runs through eight stages: intake, contract review, verification of identity, searches and requisitions, finance and adjustments, pre-settlement checks, settlement, and post-settlement. PEXA handles the settlement itself. Everything before and after it lives in your practice management system. MatterFirst extracts contract terms into the matter and calculates key dates automatically.
That split is the thing most firms get wrong when they buy software. PEXA is an electronic lodgement network, not a file. It does not hold your contract, your requisitions, your client authorisation evidence, your trust ledger or your file notes. It settles the transaction and lodges the dealing. The other ninety per cent of a conveyance sits somewhere else, and if that somewhere else is a shared drive plus a spreadsheet of settlement dates, the risk lands on the practitioner, not the platform.
The eight stages, and what software should carry
| Stage | What actually happens | What the system should do |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Intake | Enquiry arrives by phone, web form or referrer. Conflict check. Costs disclosure. | Capture the lead with its source, run the conflict check against existing contacts, convert to a matter with the file already populated |
| 2. Contract review | Contract of sale and vendor disclosure arrive as PDFs. Special conditions, deposit, settlement period, cooling off. | Read the contract, pull the parties, price, deposit, settlement date and special conditions into structured matter fields |
| 3. Verification of identity | VOI for each client, plus right to deal. Evidence retained. | Store the evidence against the matter with the date it was taken and who took it, so it is producible on request |
| 4. Searches and requisitions | Title, planning, rates, land tax, owners corporation. Requisitions on title. | Diarise response deadlines, file returned certificates on the matter, record the disbursement |
| 5. Finance and adjustments | Loan approval, deposit release, statement of adjustments. | Track the key dates, generate the settlement statement from matter data, reconcile deposit against the trust ledger |
| 6. Pre-settlement | Inspection, settlement booking, funds authority, discharge. | Checklist tied to the matter type, escalation when a step is not ticked by its date |
| 7. Settlement | Workspace created, funds and documents exchanged, dealing lodged. | Record the outcome and the lodgement reference against the matter |
| 8. Post-settlement | Notify authorities, report to client, final invoice, archive. | Generate the reporting letter, raise the invoice, close the file with the retention clock started |
Stages 1 to 6 and stage 8 are all practice management. Only stage 7 is the lodgement network. A buyer evaluating software should weight the evaluation accordingly, because a demo that spends twenty minutes on the settlement screen is showing you the one stage you were always going to do somewhere else.
Where PEXA fits, and where it does not
PEXA describes itself as connecting "people, businesses and governments across the property ecosystem", delivering "secure digital infrastructure, integrated solutions and actionable insights". Its own site lists all eight states and territories, and notes that PEXA is now live in Tasmania.
What PEXA does is the financial settlement and the lodgement: the workspace, the funds, the signing, the dealing. What it does not do is run your matter. It has no view of your costs agreement, your client communications, your requisition deadlines, your file notes or your billing.
The practical consequence is that every firm doing property work runs two systems and cares a great deal about the seam between them. Some practice management products create the workspace directly from the matter so the party and property data is not rekeyed. LEAP publishes this on its own conveyancing page: "You can create a PEXA workspace directly from a matter in LEAP." That is a real, checkable advantage for firms with high settlement volume, and it is worth asking any vendor to demonstrate rather than describe.
What the participation rules actually ask of your file
Electronic conveyancing in Australia is regulated through a national model. The Australian Registrars' National Electronic Conveyancing Council was, in its own words, "formed in 2011 under the Intergovernmental Agreement for an Electronic Conveyancing National Law (ECNL) for the purposes of coordinating a national approach among the States and Territories to the regulation of an electronic environment for completing conveyancing transactions."
ARNECC maintains the Model Participation Rules and Model Operating Requirements, which each jurisdiction then adopts. The guidance notes published alongside them tell you exactly what a subscriber is expected to hold on file:
- Client Authorisation
- Verification of Identity
- Certifications
- Right to Deal
- Retention of Evidence
- Compliance Examinations
- Eligibility Criteria
- System Security and Integrity
- Instructing Practitioner Engaging a Subscriber
Those nine headings are a serviceable audit checklist on their own. The one that decides whether your software choice was a good one is number 6. The NSW Registrar General's page on subscriber compliance states that during a compliance examination a subscriber must provide "copies of clients' identity documents, right to deal evidence and client authorisation forms", that subscribers "must cooperate fully in a Compliance Examination", and that "A failure to respond to a Compliance Examination notice can also result in a suspension."
Read that as a software requirement. If a compliance examination notice arrives naming twelve matters from the last four years, can you produce the identity documents, right to deal evidence and client authorisation for each of them, in the window allowed, without a paralegal opening twelve folders? A file where that evidence sits against the matter with a date and an author answers the notice. A shared drive organised by client surname does not, and the consequence attaches to the practitioner.
Check your own jurisdiction's participation rules for the retention period and the specific requirements that apply to you, since jurisdictions adopt the model with local variations and waivers.
What should be a merge field, and what genuinely needs a model
Conveyancing is the practice area where document automation pays for itself fastest, because the documents are high volume and highly patterned. It is also the area where firms most often over-reach and let a language model write text that should have been deterministic.
A useful line to draw:
Should be deterministic. Party names and addresses, lot and plan, certificate of title reference, purchase price, deposit, settlement date, adjustment calculations, standard clauses from your clause library, signature blocks. These have exactly one correct output given the matter data. A model that gets them right ninety-nine times in a hundred is worse than a merge field that gets them right every time, because the hundredth appears in a settlement statement.
May genuinely need a model. Summarising unusual special conditions in a reporting letter, and extracting structured data from an inbound document that has no fixed format. Extraction is the strongest case: a contract of sale from a small suburban agency and one from a national developer carry the same facts in entirely different layouts, and no template handles both.
The test is whether a person reviewing the output would need the source document open. For a merge field they would not. For synthesis they would, and that is the signal that a human should sign it off.
How MatterFirst handles conveyancing
MatterFirst is a legal practice management platform for Australian law firms, built by North Cape Technology in Melbourne.
For a property matter, the workflow starts with the contract. Document AI reads an uploaded contract and writes what it finds into the matter: the parties are matched against your contact database and assigned their role, key dates such as settlement and cooling off go onto the matter's key dates calendar, and financial figures including purchase price, deposit, GST and adjustments map to the matter's financial fields. Property details including address, lot and plan number and certificate of title details are read from conveyancing documents and written to the matter. Firms that need fields beyond the standard set define their own through custom extraction rules rather than requesting a product change.
Matter management supports custom matter types, board and list views, role-based contacts and calendar-synced key dates, and matters can be recorded in all eight Australian jurisdictions. Obligation rules calculate limitation and key dates and cite the governing statute. Automations run trigger, condition and action rules across the file, and generating a document can be a step in a workflow rather than a manual task.
Documents are built from a firm's own document types, assembled from sections that are deterministic by default: merge fields, matter data projections, clause library entries and signature blocks, with AI used only where a section genuinely calls for synthesis. Output is branded PDF and Word. Generated documents file on the matter and can be emailed, shared to the client portal, or routed for e-signature.
Trust accounting is built for Australian jurisdictions, with a compliance review workflow covering NSW, VIC, QLD and WA. Those four, not all eight. Data and AI processing run in the AWS region the firm chooses, Sydney by default for Australian firms, as set out on the security page.
MatterFirst does not connect to PEXA or InfoTrack today. Both are listed as coming soon in the integration catalogue. The connections available now are Xero, Stripe, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, plus a documented REST API with webhooks. For a firm whose settlement volume depends on workspace creation from the matter, that is the specific gap to weigh.
Comparison
Verified from each vendor's own public pages while researching this article.
| Product | Pricing published on the vendor site | PEXA workspace created from the matter | Trust accounting | Data residency stated on the pages checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MatterFirst | Yes: per workspace, from $199 AUD per month with users included | No. Listed as coming soon | Yes, with a compliance review workflow covering NSW, VIC, QLD and WA | AWS region chosen by the firm, Sydney by default for Australian firms |
| LEAP | Not published. Demo request only | Yes. "You can create a PEXA workspace directly from a matter in LEAP" | "Built-in legal accounting". Trust detail not set out on the conveyancing page | Not published on the pages checked |
| Smokeball | Yes: per user per month, from $59 to $249 on its Australian pricing page, with Prosper+ custom | Not published on the pricing page | "Trust Accounting & Reporting", listed on all tiers | "Powered by Amazon Web Services". Australian hosting not stated on that page |
| Actionstep | Not published. Region selector and "Request Pricing" | Not published on the pricing page | "Trust Accounting", listed under Practice Management | Not published on the pages checked |
| Clio | Not verified. The Australian pricing page returned HTTP 403 during research | Not verified | Not verified | Not verified |
"Not published" means the vendor's page did not state it. "Not verified" means the page could not be loaded during research and no claim should be read into the blank. Check any cell that matters to you against the vendor directly, and check it on the date you buy.
Sources: LEAP conveyancing, Smokeball pricing, Actionstep pricing, Clio Australia pricing, MatterFirst pricing.
Who this suits, and who it does not
MatterFirst suits Australian firms of roughly two to twenty fee earners that want onshore hosting, state-based trust accounting review across NSW, VIC, QLD or WA, and extraction that fills the matter from the contract rather than from a paralegal's keyboard.
It suits them less well in three situations. If your trust compliance obligations sit in SA, TAS, ACT or NT, matters can still be recorded there but the compliance review workflow does not yet cover those jurisdictions. If a direct PEXA or InfoTrack connection is decisive for your settlement volume, that connection does not exist today. And if your firm is a single practitioner doing occasional conveyancing alongside other work, the per workspace pricing may cost more than a per seat product until you add a second or third user.
Pricing is per workspace, not per user: from $199 AUD per month with users included, and every paid plan includes the client portal, automations and a monthly AI balance denominated in Australian dollars. The balance is drawn down by metered work such as document processing, and deterministic work such as generating a document with no AI sections draws down nothing. Current rates and inclusions are on the pricing and AI pricing pages.
FAQ
Does MatterFirst integrate with PEXA? No. PEXA is listed as coming soon in the integration catalogue. The integrations connectable today are Xero, Stripe, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, and there is a documented REST API with webhooks for anything else.
Can MatterFirst pull the settlement date and purchase price out of a contract of sale? Yes. Document AI extracts key terms from an uploaded contract and writes them to the matter, including key dates, parties, price, deposit and property details such as lot and plan and certificate of title. Firms can define additional fields through custom extraction rules.
Does MatterFirst handle Victorian trust accounting? Yes. The trust compliance review workflow covers NSW, VIC, QLD and WA. Matters can be recorded in all eight Australian jurisdictions, but the compliance review workflow is limited to those four states.
Where is the data stored? In the AWS region the firm chooses, Sydney by default for Australian firms. AI processing runs in the same region. Details are on the security page.
What should I ask a vendor about conveyancing before I buy? Ask them to demonstrate, on a real contract you supply, how much of the matter is populated without typing. Ask which jurisdictions their trust compliance review covers, by name. Ask whether the settlement statement is generated from matter data or retyped. And ask them to produce the identity and authorisation evidence for a matter from three years ago, in the demo. The evaluation checklist has a longer version of these questions.
Is MatterFirst priced per user? No. It is priced per workspace, from $199 AUD per month, with users included in each plan and additional seats charged on top.
The short version
The conveyancing question is not which product settles better, because settlement happens on the lodgement network either way. It is which product holds the file well enough that a compliance examination is answerable, the settlement statement is generated rather than retyped, and the contract populates the matter instead of a person doing it. Evaluate stages 1 to 6 and stage 8 hard, and treat the settlement screen as the smallest part of the decision.
If you are moving from an older Australian system, the migration pages set out how a MatterFirst assessment works.
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