Mrs Ellis instructs your firm to sell her house, signs the client care letter and leaves the rest to her son, who rings the conveyancer twice a week. Six weeks later he emails to ask that £186,000 of the sale proceeds go to an account in his own name to pay her care home fees, and the completion team, which has dealt with nobody else since the first meeting, sends it. The names and figures in this piece are illustrative.
Nobody on that file thought the request unusual. What the file never recorded was whether he had any authority to give it. A month after completion his sister writes to ask where the money went, and the firm finds that it holds no lasting power of attorney and no signed authority from Mrs Ellis, and that nobody has spoken to her since the day she signed. Whatever the son did with it, the firm paid client money to a third party on the word of someone who was not its client.
The SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors, RELs and RFLs states the principle. A solicitor acts on instructions from the client or from someone properly authorised to give them on the client's behalf, and where there is reason to suspect that instructions do not reflect what the client wants, the solicitor does not act on them until satisfied that they do. Most files record the client and leave who speaks for them to the memory of whoever answers the telephone.
Write down who speaks for the client
The fix starts at matter opening, with one compulsory field. Alongside the client's name, record each person who can give instructions and the limits of what they can instruct on, and keep the document behind that authority on the file. Where a relative helps, a short letter of authority signed by the client and naming the decisions the relative can pass on settles the point.
Where an attorney acts, the file should hold a copy of the lasting power of attorney. Check that the Office of the Public Guardian has registered it, since an unregistered power gives the attorney no authority, and then read it for scope. It has to be the kind that covers property and financial affairs, and it records any restrictions the donor set and whether one attorney can act without the other. A client who still has capacity remains the person you ask.
A managing director will usually have authority to instruct on ordinary business. A sale of the business or a claim against one of the company's own directors usually needs a decision of the board, and the file should hold the minute. In a dispute between shareholders, ask first whether your client is the company or one of the shareholders. Check the register at Companies House at opening and again before any step that pays out money or settles a claim, because directors leave office while a matter is open.
Authority also ends. A client can withdraw it at any time, and an informal letter of authority does not survive the client losing capacity, which is why lasting powers exist. An attorney's authority stops on the donor's death. Look again when a new person starts giving instructions, and when an instruction asks you to pay anyone other than the client, which is also the form payment fraud takes. At either point a fee earner speaks to the client directly, on a number already held on the file, and writes a note of the conversation before acting.
None of this needs new software. It needs a field that people read before they act and a supervisor who asks about it at file review. The habit lapses first on the files nobody senior reads.
Where Bracton fits
Henry, the Bracton assistant, works inside the case management system your firm already runs, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another, through the interface that system provides and under permissions your firm sets. He opens every live file each working night and writes a note of what needs doing. A file where someone it does not name as authorised has started giving instructions, or where an email asks for money to go to a person other than the client, is the kind of file that overnight read is built to raise with its fee earner by morning. He drafts the letter asking the client to confirm the instruction from your own precedents, and that letter waits for a qualified fee earner to read and approve it. Whether an instruction stands is for the solicitor to decide.
What Henry reads depends on what your system's interface exposes, and Bracton tells you that at proposal, before you commit. Correspondence that sits in a personal mailbox and never reaches the file is outside his read.
The place to test this on your own records is the client account, because a payment to someone other than the client appears in the ledger. To have your client ledgers, cash book and bank statements read against the SRA Accounts Rules, book a client account review.