About this episode
A client rings to ask whether her claim has been issued, the solicitor running it is on leave, and the limitation date sits in pencil in a notebook in a desk drawer. Saqib Khan, who owned a law firm for fourteen years and sat as a fee-paid county court judge for four, works through an illustrative figure for how often a desk stands empty, why good fee earners keep their dates in their own systems, and what the court looks at when the explanation for a missed deadline is that someone was away.
Then five things a well run firm does about it without buying anything, one exercise to run on a single desk this week, and a plain account of where Bracton fits, with the overnight read that finds dates in the file which never reached the diary and puts each one to a fee earner to confirm or reject.
Chapters
- 0:00 Theme
- 0:09 Cold open
- 0:38 Welcome
- 1:16 The problem
- 3:37 What a well run firm does
- 5:08 Where Bracton fits
- 7:00 One thing to do this week
- 7:23 Close
- 7:46 Theme
Transcript
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.