About this episode
A trial starts a week tomorrow, the bundle goes to the court on Monday, and a trainee and a paralegal are still sorting the file at seven in the evening, looking for an expert's report the agreed index lists and nobody can find. Saqib Khan, who owned a law firm for fourteen years and sits as a fee-paid county court judge, works through an illustrative figure for what assembling bundles costs a litigation team in a year, what rule 39.5 of the Civil Procedure Rules, paragraph 27 of Practice Direction 32 and the court's order require, why a bundle shows the state of the file it came from, and what a judge reading it the evening before the hearing sees.
Then five things a well run firm does about it without buying anything, one exercise to run this week on a matter with a trial listed in the next three months, and a plain account of where Bracton fits, with the post set against its file as it arrives, answers from the papers naming the paper and the page, a chronology and case summary drafted for a fee earner to approve and the bundle date carried in the diary with its rule, and the honest limit that it reads only what reached the file and leaves the contents of the bundle to the fee earner.
Chapters
- 0:00 Theme
- 0:09 Cold open
- 0:39 Welcome
- 1:18 The problem
- 3:31 What a well run firm does
- 4:56 Where Bracton fits
- 7:07 One thing to do this week
- 7:39 Close
- 7:59 Theme
Transcript
It is seven on Thursday evening. The trial starts a week tomorrow, the bundle goes to the court on Monday, and your trainee and a paralegal are still in the office with the file spread across the meeting room table. The correspondence runs in three folders, two of them printed from different inboxes. Nobody has written a chronology. The index the other side agreed lists an expert's report that neither of them can find, and the fee earner who knows where it went is on leave until Monday. 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, I sit as a fee-paid county court judge, 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 bundle built the night before. Start with a figure, and treat it as an illustration rather than a measurement. Suppose your litigation team takes forty matters a year to a final hearing, and each bundle costs twelve hours of assembly between a trainee and a paralegal. That is four hundred and eighty hours a year. At an illustrative one hundred and twenty pounds an hour of capacity, the firm spends fifty seven thousand six hundred pounds of its year on putting papers in order, and most of that work repeats reading the firm did on the day each document arrived.
Unless the court orders otherwise, rule thirty nine point five of the Civil Procedure Rules requires the claimant to file the trial bundle not more than seven days and not less than three days before the start of the trial, and the rules count those as clear days. Paragraph twenty seven of Practice Direction thirty two lists what the bundle should hold, asks for one continuous run of page numbers and an index describing each document, and places responsibility for the bundle on the claimant's legal representative, even where somebody else assembles it. The order in your case often adds directions of its own. Read the order first.
None of this is hard to understand. The difficulty is that a bundle shows the state of the file, and a file kept loosely for eighteen months cannot be put right in a weekend. Documents sit in personal inboxes, a letter appears in two versions, and the expert's report was emailed to counsel and never saved to the matter. When I sit, I read the bundle before the hearing, usually the evening before. A bundle with two sets of page numbers, one letter filed three times and the key document missing from the index costs the first part of the morning, while the advocates agree which pages the court will use.
That time belongs to the other cases in the list as well as to yours. I decide the case on the evidence and never on the bundle, but the court has regard to the conduct of the parties when it decides costs, and the bundle is the first thing a judge learns about how a case has been prepared. Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software. One. Save and date every document to the matter on the day it arrives, with a description that someone new to the case would understand. That includes email to counsel, email from the client and anything sent to a fee earner's own inbox. Two. Keep a running chronology from the day the file opens. Add a line whenever something material happens, an offer, a refusal, a change of position, and note where the supporting document sits.
A chronology kept as the matter runs becomes the first draft of the index. Three. On the day the order arrives, put the bundle date in the diary, worked out from the order or, where it is silent, from rule thirty nine point five. Put a second date two weeks earlier for sending a draft index to the other side. Four. Name one person on the file as responsible for the bundle when the trial date is fixed, and give them the time to do it in working hours. Five. Before it leaves, have a second person read the bundle as the judge will, page by page against the index, checking every page reference and that the page numbers run in one sequence.
Points one and two depend on somebody reading every document as it arrives and writing it up, and Bracton takes on the reading and the first draft. 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. He reads the post as it arrives and sets it against its file. Each working night he reads every live file and raises what needs attention by morning, with the next action drafted. Ask him a question about a matter and he answers from the papers on that file, naming the paper and the page so that you check it rather than take it on trust.
For a trial, you can choose up to three hundred papers and twenty questions and he reads them into a table, one column to a question, and he drafts a chronology and a case summary from your firm's own precedents. Inside the platform, the diary entry for a date carries the rule it came from and the arithmetic, so the bundle date shows how it was reached. Every draft waits for a qualified fee earner to read and approve. Nothing leaves the firm in Henry's name, and each answer is recorded on the file. Now the limits. Henry reads what reached the file. A report that went to counsel from a personal inbox and was never saved stays invisible to him, which is why the first point on my list matters with or without software.
Deciding what belongs in the bundle, and agreeing the index with the other side, stays with the fee earner. And where the assistant runs inside another vendor's system, it reaches only what that system's interface exposes, which we tell you at proposal and write into your agreement. We promise no connector until that vendor's access terms are held in writing. 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.
Pick one matter with a trial listed in the next three months. Ask the fee earner for the bundle date and the rule or order it comes from, then check the answer against the order. Next, ask for the chronology. If none exists, sit with the fee earner for half an hour and start one from the file, and note every document that the chronology refers to and the file does not hold. Each of those is a gap you have found weeks ahead, rather than on the night before the bundle goes in. That is AI Legal Case Management for this week. The transcript, with a timestamp on every line, sits with the episode at bracton dot tech, and if you would like to see how your own files would meet a bundle deadline, the free hour on your own files is on the same site.
Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.