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AI Legal Case Management.

Ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, presented by Saqib Khan. A new episode every Thursday.

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Episode 6. The fixed fee that ran past its scope

Thursday 29 October 2026, eight minutes.

A purchase quoted at a fixed fee for a freehold house turns up an extension built in breach of a covenant, and fourteen hours go on a fee priced for six without a word to the buyer. Saqib Khan works through an illustrative figure for what fixed fee work past its scope costs a firm in a year, the three places where scope fails, and the two documents a judge reads first when a fee dispute reaches court.

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The completion statement went out on Friday, and on Monday the fee earner asks you to approve a second bill. The purchase was quoted at a fixed fee of one thousand two hundred pounds plus VAT for a freehold house. Three weeks in, the title showed an extension built in breach of a covenant that needed the consent of a developer dissolved twenty years ago. An indemnity policy and two rounds of questions from the lender followed. The time ledger shows fourteen hours on a fee priced for six. Nobody wrote to the buyer about any of it, and the client care letter promises all the work needed to complete the purchase.

Welcome to AI Legal Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton. I am Saqib Khan. I owned a law firm for fourteen years, sat as a fee-paid county court judge for four, and I now build Bracton, a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the start. Every Thursday I take one problem that every firm owner recognises, set out what a well run firm does about it whether or not it buys anything, and then tell you plainly where Bracton fits. This week, the fixed fee that ran past its scope. Start with a figure, and treat it as an illustration rather than a survey result.

Picture a firm of ten fee earners that opens two hundred fixed fee matters a year. One in five runs past the work the fee assumed. On each of those forty files the fee earner spends five hours beyond the price, at two hundred pounds an hour. That comes to forty thousand pounds a year of work never charged. The loss rarely shows on any report. Many firms stop recording time once the fee is fixed, because the client pays the same either way. On the case list, the file that ran past its budget looks no different from the file that came in under it. Scope fails in three places, and the first is the client care letter, written so wide that nothing falls outside it.

A promise of all work needed to complete the purchase leaves the firm with no extra work to charge for. The second is the moment the matter changes. A covenant, a second property in the estate or a counterclaim arrives on an ordinary afternoon, and the fee earner deals with it. The third is the letter that should follow and does not, telling the client that the work has changed, what it will cost and that they have a choice. The regulator expects that letter. The SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors requires you to give clients the best possible information about how their matter will be priced and, at the start and when appropriate as it progresses, about its likely overall cost.

Where your firm offers residential conveyancing or another service the SRA Transparency Rules list, your website price has to say what it includes and name any service a client would reasonably expect in it that is not. A fixed fee that says nothing about its limits gives the client no warning that the price might ever move. From the bench, a fee dispute usually turns on two documents. The first is the engagement letter, and the judge reads its description of the work closely, because the firm wrote it. Where the client is a consumer and the words bear two meanings, the Consumer Rights Act twenty fifteen requires the meaning most favourable to the consumer to prevail.

The second is the letter telling the client, before the extra work began, that it fell outside the fee. When that letter exists, the argument tends to be short. When it does not, the firm is asking the court to find an agreement nobody wrote down, and a fee earner's memory of a telephone call carries little weight against a client who says the price was fixed. Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software. One. Write the scope of every fixed fee as two lists, what the fee covers and what it does not, with the assumptions it rests on, such as a freehold title, a single property in the estate or an uncontested claim.

Two. Set a budget in hours when the matter opens, and record time on fixed fee matters as you would on any other, so the firm knows when the work has used up the price. Three. Before anyone starts work outside the scope, write to the client. Say what has changed, what the further work will cost and what happens if they decline it, and keep their answer on the file. Four. Name the person who decides whether extra work is charged, waived or absorbed. A fee earner anxious to keep the client happy should not make that call alone. Five. Each month, produce a list of every fixed fee matter where recorded time has passed the budget, and have a partner read it.

Points two, three and five depend on somebody reading every fixed fee file against its scope, and that is the work Bracton takes on. The assistant, which we call Henry, is built into the Bracton platform and also sold on its own to run inside the system your firm already has. Overnight it reads every live file it can reach, and among the matters it raises the next morning is a fixed fee that has run past its scope. Where chargeable work never reached a time entry, it finds that work on the record of the day and drafts the entries for approval. It then drafts the update to the client from your firm's own precedents, setting out what has changed, for the fee earner to price and approve.

It drafts and flags. It does not send, and it does not decide whether the firm charges for the extra work or absorbs it, because that judgement belongs to a qualified fee earner, who signs off every output before anything goes anywhere. Nothing leaves the firm in the assistant's name, and every action sits on the record. Now the honest limit. The assistant flags a fixed fee that has run past the agreed scope, and the only scope it knows is the one the file holds. Where the client care letter promises all work needed, there is nothing to flag against, which is why the first point on my list comes first.

And where the assistant runs inside another vendor's system, it sees what that system's interface exposes. The platform is one hundred and eighty five pounds for each person a month on a standard seat. The assistant on its own is one hundred and fifteen pounds. Both are plus VAT, there are heavier seats for document heavy work, and every price is published on the website. Choose one desk. Take the last ten fixed fee matters one fee earner completed and, for each, set the hours recorded against the hours the price assumed. Where nobody recorded time, ask the fee earner for an estimate from the file.

Then read the client care letter on the two that ran furthest over and mark the sentence that told the client what the fee did not cover. If you cannot find that sentence, rewrite the letter this week. That is AI Legal Case Management for this week. The transcript, with a timestamp on every line, sits with the episode at bracton legal dot co dot uk, and if you would like to see which of your own fixed fee files have run past their scope, the free hour on your own files is on the same site. Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.

Earlier episodes

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Episode 5. The client who went quiet and then complained

Thursday 22 October 2026, eight minutes.

The third email in seven weeks arrives from an executor whose file is in perfect order, and this one asks for the complaints procedure.

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The third email in seven weeks arrives on a Monday morning from the executor of her father's estate, whose probate your firm has handled since February. For the last fourteen weeks the matter has waited on a pension provider that will not release a valuation until a former employer returns a form. The fee earner chased in July and again in September, and noted each chase on the file, none of which the executor saw. Her first email asked what happens next and got two lines back. Her second copied in her brother. This one numbers its questions, reminds you that at the first meeting she was told the estate would be wound up by the summer, and closes by asking for a copy of your complaints procedure.

Welcome to AI Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton. I am Saqib Khan. I owned a law firm for fourteen years, sat as a fee-paid county court judge for four, and I now build Bracton, a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the start. Every Thursday I take one problem that every firm owner recognises, set out what a well run firm does about it whether or not it buys anything, and then tell you plainly where Bracton fits. This week, the client who went quiet and then complained. Start with a figure, and treat it as an illustration rather than a survey result.

Picture a firm of ten fee earners carrying three hundred open files between them. On an ordinary morning, forty of those files have had no outbound contact with the client in six weeks. Most are waiting on somebody else, and a handful have drifted because a chase was missed or a diary entry lost. On the case list the two kinds look identical. Now put a cost on one complaint that reaches the Legal Ombudsman. A supervisor spends twenty hours on the file, the response and the correspondence that follows, and the firm writes off a fee of fifteen hundred pounds to bring it to an end. Those numbers are illustrative too. One figure here is real.

In its complaints data for the year to March twenty twenty five, the Legal Ombudsman recorded poor communication as the most common reason for a complaint, at twenty four per cent, with delay and failure to progress close behind at twenty three per cent. Read those two categories together and they describe one problem. Clients complain about the silence rather than the delay. The executor would have waited fourteen weeks without complaint had someone written each month to say the pension provider still held the valuation. The file can be in perfect order, with every chase noted, and still produce a complaint, because the client sees none of the work that the file records.

Unhappy clients also change how they write before they say they are unhappy. Someone who wrote in loose paragraphs starts numbering questions. A spouse or an adult child appears in copy. The client stops asking what happens next and asks what the position is, which is the question people put when they suspect nothing has happened. They quote the first meeting back at you, or raise cost when no bill is due. Most grievances are lost in the reply. The ninety second answer that says the matter is progressing and the client will be updated in due course reports activity where the client asked for a position, offers no date, and reads as impatience.

The SRA Standards and Regulations expect a firm to keep clients informed about the progress of their matter, to tell clients how to complain, and to deal with complaints promptly and fairly. From the bench, when a dispute between a firm and its client reaches court, the judge reads the correspondence in date order, and the gap where the client wrote twice and the firm did not answer is the first thing on the page. Whatever account the firm gives afterwards, that the matter was in hand and the client knew it, gets weighed against what the file shows was said at the time. An explanation offered a year later does not replace a letter the file shows nobody wrote.

Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software. One. Set a fixed contact interval on every live matter, monthly for most work, and send the holding update when it falls due. Where nothing has changed, the update says so and explains why, naming whoever the matter is waiting on. Two. Give correspondence that carries the markers to a reader other than the fee earner running the file. Three. Write the reply that answers the question the client asked, in the terms they asked it. Acknowledge plainly that they had to ask twice, without defending why, and give one next step with a date on it that the firm then keeps.

Four. Have a senior person decide whether a message is a complaint under the firm's procedure. The fee earner being complained about has the least appetite for logging it. Five. Each month, produce a list of every matter with no outbound client contact in a set period, and have a partner read it. Points one, two and five depend on somebody reading every file and every inbound email, and that is the work Bracton takes on. The assistant, which we call Henry, is built into the Bracton platform and also sold on its own to run inside the system your firm already has. Overnight it reads every live file it can reach and finds the matters where no contact has gone out to the client for a period your firm sets.

It separates the files waiting on a known next step from the ones that have drifted. It reads inbound correspondence for the markers I described, raises the matter to a supervisor with the wording that triggered it, and drafts the holding update or the reply from your firm's own precedents. It drafts and flags. It does not send, and it does not decide that a message is a complaint, because that judgement belongs to a qualified fee earner, who signs off every output before anything goes anywhere. Nothing leaves the firm in the assistant's name, and every action sits on the record. Now the honest limit. The assistant reads what the file holds.

A conversation on the telephone that nobody wrote down is invisible to it. And where the assistant runs inside another vendor's system, it sees what that system's interface exposes. The platform is one hundred and eighty five pounds for each person a month on a standard seat. The assistant on its own is one hundred and fifteen pounds. Both are plus VAT, there are heavier seats for document heavy work, and every price is published on the website. Choose one desk. Take one fee earner's twenty oldest open matters and find the date of the last outbound contact with the client on each. Wherever that date is more than six weeks ago, open the client's last two emails and read them for the markers, the numbered questions, the new name in copy, the question asked twice.

Where you find them, have someone other than the fee earner write the reply this week. That is AI Case Management for this week. The transcript, with a timestamp on every line, sits with the episode at bracton legal dot co dot uk, and if you would like to see which of your own files have gone quiet, the free hour on your own files is on the same site. Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.

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Episode 4. The undertaking still open on a closed file

Thursday 15 October 2026, eight minutes.

A letter arrives eighteen months after completion, the seller's mortgage is still on the register, and the conveyancer who undertook to redeem it has left.

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A letter arrives from the solicitors who acted for the buyer eighteen months ago. Their client wants to remortgage, and the seller's old mortgage still sits on the register of title against a house the seller no longer owns. They enclose a copy of an email from your firm, sent at eleven in the morning on completion day, undertaking to redeem that mortgage and to send evidence of discharge. The conveyancer who wrote it left in the spring. Her file was closed a week after completion and went to storage. Nobody in the office can say whether the money reached the lender, and the letter asks what your firm proposes to do about it.

Welcome to AI Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton. I am Saqib Khan. I owned a law firm for fourteen years, sat as a fee-paid county court judge for four, and I now build Bracton, a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the start. Every Thursday I take one problem that every firm owner recognises, set out what a well run firm does about it whether or not it buys anything, and then tell you plainly where Bracton fits. This week, the undertaking still open on a closed file. Start with a figure, and treat it as an illustration rather than a survey result.

Picture a firm of ten fee earners, half in residential conveyancing and half in litigation, each giving two undertakings in a working month. That is twenty a month and around two hundred and forty a year. If a third of them are waiting on a trigger or on the other side at any moment, eighty promises are live on the firm's files. Ask the managing partner to name those eighty, and in most firms nobody can. The reason sits in how undertakings are given. Nobody sets out to make one. A fee earner is solving the problem in front of them, getting a completion away on time or persuading an opponent to release a document, and the promise goes into the third paragraph of an email or the closing line of a letter.

In litigation it takes the form of an undertaking to hold a document to the other side's order, or to pay a sum on a given date. It lands in the correspondence, not in any field the firm can search. Performance then happens quietly, or not at all. The redemption money goes, the lender's receipt comes back, and nobody returns to the email that made the promise to mark it done. Then the matter finishes and the file closes. Closing a file ends the retainer with the client. It does nothing to the undertaking, which binds the solicitor who gave it and the firm, and which outlives both the archive box and the fee earner's notice period.

The SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors requires you to perform every undertaking you give within the timescale agreed, or within a reasonable time where none was agreed. That is a personal duty, and nothing in the Code makes an exception for a file that has since been closed. From the bench, the picture is plain. The court has a supervisory jurisdiction over solicitors as officers of the court, and it can enforce an undertaking directly. When a judge is asked to enforce one, the first thing to read is the wording, because the words govern what was promised, not what the fee earner meant or what the firm would like it to have meant.

Then the questions are whether the undertaking was given, whether it was performed, and if not, what the person who relied on it had lost. The court can order the solicitor to do what was promised, or to compensate the person who relied on it. Telling a judge that the file was closed, or that she has left, answers none of those questions. Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software. One. Keep a register of undertakings, and record the exact wording against each one, copied from the letter or email that gave it, never a summary. Alongside the wording, record who gave it, who received it, what event or date triggers performance, and when performance falls due.

Two. Decide who in the firm has authority to give an undertaking, and on what approval. Put it in writing, so that nobody junior gives one without sign off. Three. Give the register to a partner, not to the fee earners who give the undertakings, and review it on a fixed cycle, every fortnight or every month. Four. Make it a condition of closing a file that no undertaking on it is outstanding. The closing checklist asks the question, the fee earner answers it in writing, and where the answer is yes, the file stays open until the evidence of performance is on it. Five. Read back. A register started today leaves the back catalogue untouched, and the back catalogue is where the danger sits.

Have someone read the correspondence on files closed in the last year and pull out every sentence that binds, because a form filled in at the moment of giving assumes the fee earner noticed they were giving one. Points one and five both depend on someone reading correspondence, file by file, and that is the work Bracton takes on. The assistant, which we call Henry, is built into the Bracton platform and also sold on its own. Overnight it reads every live file it can reach, correspondence included, and picks out language that reads as an undertaking wherever it was given. The platform's morning list then flags any undertaking still open, with any whose trigger date has passed flagged for attention.

Where the next step is a chaser to a lender, or the completion step itself, the assistant drafts it from your firm's own precedents. It surfaces and flags. It does not decide that an undertaking has been discharged, because that judgement belongs to a qualified fee earner, who signs off every output before anything goes anywhere. Nothing leaves the firm in the assistant's name, and every action sits on the record. The sweep runs every working day. Now the honest limit. The assistant reads what the file holds. An undertaking given on the telephone and never written down is invisible to it, as it is to any register.

And where the assistant runs inside another vendor's system, it sees what that system's interface exposes. The platform is one hundred and eighty five pounds for each person a month on a standard seat. The assistant on its own is one hundred and fifteen pounds. Both are plus VAT, there are heavier seats for document heavy work, and every price is published on the website. Choose one desk. Take one conveyancer's completions from the last six months and, for each sale, check two things. First, that the seller's charge has come off the register of title. Second, that the undertaking to redeem it is on the file, with a note recording that it was performed and when.

Where the charge is still there, find the undertaking and read its exact words today. If you cannot find the undertaking at all, that tells you about the rest of the firm's files. That is AI Case Management for this week. The transcript, with a timestamp on every line, sits with the episode at bracton legal dot co dot uk, and if you would like to see what an overnight read of your correspondence turns up, the free hour on your own files is on the same site. Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.

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Episode 3. The file nobody has opened for a month

Thursday 8 October 2026, eight minutes.

An unless order arrives on a Monday morning, and the file behind it has not moved in seven weeks.

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An order arrives by email on a Monday morning. Unless the claimant serves its list of documents by four o'clock on Friday, the claim will be struck out. The fee earner opens the file to find out how it came to this. The last entry is seven weeks old, a letter to the other side proposing new dates for disclosure, never answered. The client was last told anything in August. Nobody chased the reply, because nobody noticed it had not come. The other side had noticed, and their next communication was the application. Welcome to AI Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton.

I am Saqib Khan. I owned a law firm for fourteen years, sat as a fee-paid county court judge for four, and I now build Bracton, a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the start. Every Thursday I take one problem that every firm owner recognises, set out what a well run firm does about it whether or not it buys anything, and then tell you plainly where Bracton fits. This week, the file nobody has opened for a month. Here is a figure, and it is an illustration, not a survey result. Take a firm of ten fee earners, each carrying sixty live matters.

That is six hundred files. Suppose one file in twenty goes a month without a step that moves it forward. On any given morning, thirty files are drifting, and the firm has no list of which thirty they are. The first reason is that activity looks like progress. A file can show entries every week and still go nowhere. An automated acknowledgement, a time entry for reading an email, a document saved to the file, all of these make a matter look attended to. What none of them does is take the next step. Ask when a file last moved and most firms will answer when it was last touched. Waiting on the other side is the second. When the last letter went out from your office, the file feels as though it is someone else's turn, and a fee earner with a full desk turns to the matters with a deadline this week.

Silence from the other side is rarely neutral. Sometimes they are slow. Sometimes they are preparing an application, or letting a deadline run that suits their client better than yours. Then there is the file nobody wants to open, where the client is difficult or the next step is a hard telephone call. There is always something easier to do first. From the bench, the drifting file arrives in a familiar form. A party has missed a step, a sanction has followed, and the application asks for relief from it. On an application for relief under rule three point nine of the Civil Procedure Rules, the court asks how serious the failure was, why it happened, and all the circumstances of the case.

An explanation that the file was overlooked, or that the fee earner was busy, carries little weight, because pressure of work will rarely count as a good reason. And an unless order is different from an ordinary direction. If the party does not comply, the sanction takes effect without anyone returning to court, and the burden of putting it right falls on the party in default. By the time the file reaches a judge, the month nobody opened it is what the application has to explain. Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software. One. Define substantive activity in writing. A letter of substance sent, a document served, advice given to the client, a step taken in proceedings.

A filing note, a time entry or an automated reply does not count. Two. Give every live file a next action and a date. The field is never blank. When the action is done, the fee earner writes the next one before closing the file. Three. Treat the other side's silence as a date in itself. When a letter goes out that needs a reply, diarise the chase at the same moment. If there is no answer after fourteen days, chase. If there is still nothing after a further fortnight, the fee earner decides, with the supervisor, whether to propose a timetable or go to the court. Where a deadline needs moving, the rules allow the parties to agree an extension of up to twenty eight days in writing, provided it does not put a hearing date at risk.

Four. Run a dormancy list once a month. Every file with no substantive activity in thirty days goes on it, oldest first, and a supervisor reads each entry, not the count. A file that is waiting on a fixed date for a sound reason comes off with a note saying so. Every other file leaves with an action and a name. Five. Fix the client update interval when the file opens. Put it in the client care letter, monthly or whatever suits the matter, and keep to it even when the only news is that nothing has changed and why. A client told that the file is waiting on the other side does not need to complain to find out.

Each of those points depends on someone reading every file on a regular cycle, and that is the work Bracton takes on. The assistant, built into the Bracton platform and also sold on its own, reads every live matter it can reach overnight. By the morning each fee earner has a list of the files needing attention, with the next action drafted. A matter with no substantive activity for a month is one of the things that list is built to flag, and so is a client who has gone quiet. It drafts the chaser for the unanswered letter and the update for the client, both from your firm's own precedents. Nothing leaves the firm unsigned. A qualified fee earner signs off every output, and every action sits in an audit trail.

The sweep runs every working day, never on a Saturday, a Sunday or a bank holiday. Now the honest limit. The assistant reads what the file holds. A telephone call with the other side that nobody noted leaves the file looking dormant when it is not. Where the assistant runs inside another vendor's system, it sees what that system's interface exposes. And the decision whether to apply to the court stays with your fee earner and your supervisor. The platform is one hundred and eighty five pounds a fee earner a month. The assistant, running inside the case management system you already have, is one hundred and fifteen pounds a fee earner a month.

One published price each, the same for any size of firm, and both are on the website. Choose one desk. Take that fee earner's live matters and, for each one, write down the date of the last substantive step, using the definition from point one rather than the date of the last entry. Then sort the list, oldest first. Read the top five files yourself, and for each one ask what happens next and who is doing it. If the answer to either question is nobody knows, you have found your first drifting file. That is AI Case Management for this week. The transcript, with a timestamp on every line, sits with the episode at bracton legal dot co dot uk, and if you would like to see what an overnight read of a caseload looks like on your own matters, the free hour on your own files is on the same site.

Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.

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Episode 2. The date that lived in one person's head

Thursday 1 October 2026, eight minutes.

A client rings to ask whether her claim has been issued, the solicitor is on leave, and the limitation date sits in pencil in a notebook in a desk drawer.

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A client rings on a Wednesday afternoon to ask whether her claim has been issued. The solicitor running it is on a fortnight's leave in Portugal. The receptionist puts the call through to the supervising partner, who opens the firm's diary and finds nothing on the file for the next three months. What he does not know is that the limitation date falls on Friday. It is written in pencil in a notebook in his colleague's desk drawer, beside a note that says issue before leave. Welcome to AI Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton. I am Saqib Khan. I owned a law firm for fourteen years, sat as a fee-paid county court judge for four, and I now build Bracton, a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the start.

Every Thursday I take one problem that every firm owner recognises, set out what a well run firm does about it whether or not it buys anything, and then tell you plainly where Bracton fits. This week, the date that lived in one person's head. Let me give you a figure, and I want to be clear that it is an illustration rather than a survey figure. Take a fee earner with twenty five days of holiday, a week of sickness and a few days of training in a year. That comes to around thirty five working days away from the desk, or roughly one working day in every six or seven. In a firm of ten fee earners, on an ordinary morning, one or two desks sit empty.

If the key dates on those desks live with the person rather than the firm, then on any given day some part of your caseload has nobody watching its deadlines. Why does it happen? The first cause is habit, and the best fee earners show it most, for an understandable reason. They trust their own system. A notebook kept for twenty years, or a colour code in their own calendar. It has never let them down, so they see no need to copy it into a diary that someone else designed. The firm diary becomes a second record, kept up when there is time. A second cause is that entering a date is a separate act from finding it.

A fee earner reads a medical report, works out in their head that limitation now runs from a later date of knowledge, and moves on to the next file meaning to update the diary at the end of the day. The working stays in their head. The diary keeps the old date, or none. The third is the leaver. When a fee earner hands in notice, the firm reallocates the files and closes the mailbox. The private calendar goes with it. Whatever lived there and nowhere else is gone, and the colleague who inherits forty files has no reason to suspect a gap. I will add something from the bench. When a party misses a deadline and asks the court to extend time, or for relief from the consequences, the explanation that the person handling the matter was off sick, or on holiday, or had left the firm is a familiar one.

Courts understand that people fall ill. What they look at is whether the firm had a system that did not depend on that one person being at their desk. An absence explains why an individual did not act. It does not explain why nobody else knew the date existed. And once a limitation period has expired, there is usually no extension to ask for. Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software. One. Make the firm diary the only diary that counts. Fee earners can keep whatever private reminders they like, but a date that is not in the firm's diary does not exist for the purposes of the firm.

Put that in writing. Two. Record the date with its working. A limitation date in the diary should carry the trigger, the rule applied and the arithmetic. A colleague picking up the file cold can then test it. Three. Put two names on every critical date. The fee earner owns it, and a named second person, a supervisor or a paired colleague, sees it too. When the first name is away, the second already knows. Four. Hand over before every planned absence, and review on the first day of an unplanned one. Before leave, the fee earner walks a colleague through every date falling in the absence and the fortnight after.

When someone is off sick without warning, the supervisor reads their diary and their files that morning, not at the end of the week. Five. Run a leaver protocol before the mailbox closes. During the notice period, sit with the departing fee earner, file by file, and set their personal notes and calendar against the firm's diary. Every difference becomes an entry. Each of those five points relies on someone reading the file. The date in an attendance note and the extension agreed by email on a Friday sit in the file whether or not anyone typed them into the diary, and that is where Bracton starts.

On the Bracton platform, the limitation engine reads the file, finds the trigger, applies the rule and writes the date, and the diary entry carries the provision and the arithmetic. The assistant, built into the platform and also sold on its own, works across the whole caseload. Overnight on every working day it reads every live matter it can reach, works through the correspondence and documents for dates that were never entered, and derives the dates that follow from them. By the morning each fee earner has a list of files needing attention with the next action drafted, and a limitation date approaching with no proceedings issued is one of the things that list exists to catch.

Every date it finds goes to a qualified fee earner to confirm or reject. Nothing is written into the diary on its own authority. A person signs off every output, and every action sits in an audit trail. Let me be honest about the limit. Bracton can only derive a date from what the file holds. If the only record of a date is a pencil note in a drawer, no software will find it, and if the assistant runs through another vendor's interface it sees what that interface exposes. That is why point five matters whatever you buy. The platform is one hundred and eighty five pounds a fee earner a month. The assistant, running inside the case management system you already have, is one hundred and fifteen pounds a fee earner a month.

One published price each, the same for any size of firm, and both are on the website. Choose one desk. Sit with that fee earner for half an hour and write down every date in their notebook and their own calendar for the next six months. Then check each one against the firm's diary. Count the dates that appear in their notes and nowhere else. Each one you count is a date your firm would have lost the day that person was not in. That is AI Case Management for this week. The transcript, with a timestamp on every line, sits with the episode at bracton legal dot co dot uk, and if you would like to see what an overnight read of a caseload looks like on your own matters, the free hour on your own files is on the same site.

Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.

A fee earner in a white shirt and glasses laughing on a phone call while she writes a note on a clipboard, at a white desk by tall windows with an exposed brick wall behind her

Episode 1. The time your firm never billed

Thursday 24 September 2026, seven minutes.

Every fee earner did something chargeable this morning that nobody will bill. What twenty unrecorded minutes a day costs a firm of ten, and the three reasons it happens.

Read the transcript

Every fee earner in your firm did something chargeable this morning that nobody will ever bill. A four minute call taken between two meetings. An email answered on the train. A quick look at a file for a colleague who asked. Small things, forgotten by lunch. Add them up across a year and you are looking at the salary of a solicitor you never hired. Welcome to AI Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton. I am Saqib Khan. I owned a law firm for fourteen years, sat as a fee-paid county court judge for four, and I now build Bracton, a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the start.

Every Thursday I take one problem that every firm owner recognises, set out what a well run firm does about it whether or not it buys anything, and then tell you plainly where Bracton fits. This week, the time your firm never billed. Start with a number, and I stress that it is an illustration rather than a survey figure. Take a fee earner charging two hundred and fifty pounds an hour. Suppose they lose twenty minutes a day to work that was done and never recorded. Not idle time. Chargeable work. Over two hundred and thirty working days that comes to seventy six hours, and at their rate it is about nineteen thousand pounds a year.

For a firm of ten fee earners, that is the best part of two hundred thousand pounds of work carried out, paid for in salary, and never invoiced. In my experience twenty minutes a day is a cautious figure. Why does it happen? Three reasons, and none of them is laziness. The first is that recording time is a separate act from doing the work. The work happens at ten past nine. The entry happens at half past five, from memory, if it happens at all. By then the day has filled, and the entries that survive are the big ones. The hour on the witness statement gets recorded. The six minutes on the phone to the other side does not.

The second is the quiet write off. A fee earner looks at a four minute email and decides, at their own desk, that it is not worth troubling the client with. So it never reaches the ledger. Nobody in the firm sees that decision, nobody approves it, and it happens twenty times a day across the building. The third is the system. A timer nobody starts. An entry form with six fields. A telephone call that lives on the phone system and never reaches the file. Every one of those is a small tax on the act of recording, and small taxes change behaviour. I will add one thing from the bench. When a bill was disputed, whether between solicitor and client or between the parties on an assessment of costs, the record made at the time carried the weight.

A file showing that work was done, with no entry made when it was done, was the file that struggled. The firm with contemporaneous records was the firm the court found easier to believe. Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software. One. Record at the point of the work, not at the end of the day. Make the entry the last step of the act. No email goes without its entry, no call ends without its entry. It feels slower for a fortnight and then it is simply how the firm works. Two. Capture the small units. The six minute unit exists for a reason. A firm that records only the hour long tasks recovers only the hour long tasks.

Three. Reconcile the file against the ledger. Once a week, put the activity on the file beside the time recorded on it. The file knows what was done, the letters sent, the documents drafted, the calls on the log. The ledger should agree with it. Where it does not, ask why. This is a supervision point as much as a billing one, because the same comparison shows you the file nobody has touched for a month. Four. Move the write off into the open. Record everything, then decide at billing what to reduce, with a partner's eyes on it. A write off decided by a junior at six in the evening is invisible and unmanaged.

The same write off made at billing is a decision the firm can see, question and learn from. Five. Measure the gap. Count what was done and not recorded, in hours and in pounds, and put the figure in front of the fee earners. People manage what is counted. The reconciliation in point three is the piece firms rarely do, because it takes hours that nobody has. It is the piece Bracton does overnight. On every working day the assistant reads every live matter in the firm, and among the things it brings to the morning list is chargeable work that carries no time entry. The letter on the file with nothing recorded beside it. The attendance note with no units.

The document drafted and never charged. It drafts the entry, with a narrative, and puts it in front of the fee earner to accept, amend or reject. Nothing is charged until a person accepts it. That is the rule for everything Bracton produces. A person signs off every output, and time is no exception. One thing I say plainly. Recovered time depends on what the file holds. Software cannot find a call that was never noted anywhere. It finds the work your record shows and your ledger forgot, and in most firms that is more than enough to matter. The assistant runs inside the case management system you already have, or as part of the Bracton platform.

There is one published price for each, the same for a firm of three as for a firm of fifty, and it is on the website. Pick one fee earner. Take five files they worked on last week. Set the activity on each file against the time ledger and count what was done and not recorded. Multiply it by their rate. That number, from one desk in one week, tells you what the firm is leaving behind. If it is nothing, you run a tighter ship than most and you should be pleased. If it is not, you know where to start. That is AI Case Management for this week. The transcript, with a timestamp on every line, sits with the episode at bracton legal dot co dot uk, and if you would like to see what an overnight read of a caseload looks like on your own matters, the client account review is on the same site.

Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.

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