Patricia Rees-Stott has worked with an impressive list of household names, from EE and British Gas and BT to BUPA. A career highlight is almost 12 years at Capita – a leading business process outsourcing company (BPO), with more than 34,000 staff and a global presence.

So why, in October 2025, did Patricia find herself as Director of Operations at Fix My Legals – the conveyancing concierge service that brings estate agents, solicitors and brokers together to achieve faster completion times and more secure transactions.

“Initially, I left Capita for a better work-life balance. My role there spanned both on and off shore and I wanted to reduce my international travel as I’d recently become a grandmother.”

Autonomy for instant change

“I chose Fix My Legals because of the hybrid role but also because of the autonomy and the excitement that sits around that. Working with blue chip companies was amazing but there’s a lot of red tape. I was introducing compliance aspects, making sure there was governance and creating safety nets for customers but these companies are juggernauts. It could take years to alter one process. That’s frustrating but at Fix My Legals, positive change can happen within weeks.”

BPO is big business and much of the customer service we receive as consumers is outsourced. As buying, selling and lettings gets more complex, property too is partnering with third parties to deliver improved experiences. Fix My Legals sits comfortably within that sphere.

Corporate values and accountability

Patricia’s appointment makes sense in light of the Government’s buying and selling reforms, especially as there will be a massive process overhaul and a new emphasis on brand reputation.

“Reputation is everything. Get customer service wrong at BT or Sky, for example, and it can blow up in the national press or spread like wildfire across social media,” says Patricia.

Reputation is everything. Get customer service wrong at BT or Sky, for example, and it can blow up in the national press.”

As such, transparency, training, process and accountability are the core principles Patricia has lived by and now she is introducing that blue chip style to Fix My Legals. After all, big thinking is needed to match the company’s big ambitions.

Fix My Legals is ahead of the Government’s curve, setting a goal to reduce all exchanges to within 50 days. Currently it achieves completions in around 74 days – well below the industry average – and the company is seeking to reduce this timeframe further.

Proactive and reactive reform

Reaching milestones of this magnitude doesn’t happen by chance and Patricia’s appointment is designed to help increase in-house and third-party efficiency even further.

“Although I can draw on past experiences, it’s a shared autonomy at Fix My Legals. The entire Fix My Legals team is shaping the future. We’ve had office days where all 20 employees get together and go through the customer journey, from beginning to end. Around the table are our onboarding team and our customer experience experts, together with Roxane Barker and I, who regularly meet with conveyancing and surveying partners.”

It’s our team who talk to movers and estate agents, noting their pain points and concerns.”

“It’s our team who talk to movers and estate agents, noting their pain points and concerns. They’re best placed to make suggestions. If they have ideas, the attitude is ‘let’s give it a go. Let’s try it.’ Our autonomy allows us to evolve the business and quickly implement ideas for the benefit of all our stakeholders.”

Metrics to be proud of

Customer service standards are one of Patricia’s core focuses. “I’ve worked with big brands who’ve had less than desirable Customer Satisfaction Scores (scores that measure short-term customer sentiment regarding a product, service or interaction using a survey). Reshaping internal business processes lifted those scores and I know what works.”

This focus matters when you’re working at a growing company, such as Fix My Legals. Scalable solutions that come without a loss of quality customer service are a priority. Fix My Legals is enjoying a boon period. Its customer review metrics are impressive across the board: its ESTAS average customer rating is 92.4%, with a Trustpilot score of 4.3, 4.8 on Google and 100s of glowing reviews.

The exercise showed us some people were sitting in the wrong seats in the wrong departments.”

Numbers matter but so do people. Patricia is helping steer a holistic business overview. One of her first exercises was personality profiling with added team building. “As well as fostering better professional bonds, the exercise showed us some people were sitting in the wrong seats in the wrong departments. We had really good customer experience experts sat in sales. There was a reshuffle and now everybody’s more successful and performing better.” Small adjustments, big results.

It’s personal

Having moved home in 2022, describing the transaction as a ‘nightmare rollercoaster’, Patricia brings personal experience, as well as corporate clout, to Fix My Legals. “I was on the phone to my solicitor daily. He was good but had to chase the other solicitors in my chain, and the deal almost collapsed due to delays. So for me, this is personal.”

As such, Patricia sits on Fix My Legal’s quality control team “Part of my role is to monitor the delivery and Service Level Agreement (SLA) of our partners. When it comes to conveyancers, we hand pick them for their credentials, score them internally and are not frightened to pause the relationship or part company, if necessary.”

The latter should be music to the ears of estate agents, as anecdotal evidence often lays the blame for slow transactions at the solicitor’s door. As we move toward buying and selling reforms, Patricia says conveyancers who aren’t focussing on the customer journey and accountability will potentially fall by the wayside. They definitely don’t have a space on the Fix My Legals panel, to the benefit of agents.

Helping agents get ahead

But why wait for mandates? “We shouldn’t have to be told to be accountable by the Government. In fact, we launched our Sale Ready and Buyer Priority products to pre-empt reforms and cut transaction times for people moving now. We study data pulled from Fix My Legals’ portal to establish what we can fix. My corporate background allows us to clarify ownership of processes, tighten workflows and make performance measurable. My advice to agents is to partner with Fix My Legals today to futureproof the customer journey.”

My corporate background allows us to clarify ownership of processes, tighten workflows and make performance measurable.”

Real people behind the processes

Patricia brings more than enhanced processes to the table, with her corporate experience reaffirming that real people are critical. “Some companies have swung too much towards automation, losing the human touch. For example, how we talk to movers is different to how we speak to agents and solicitors – AI can’t separate that out.”

“We also acknowledge it’s not acceptable for people to wait long periods with zero updates. Even a call to the seller saying ‘no news but we are still in contact with everyone’ ensures people don’t feel neglected. Fix My Legals steps up: a real voice on the phone delivering the sales progression and conveyancing support that movers crave. And we give clarity on what’s causing the delays, because people feel vulnerable during a legal process.”

Fix My Legals