About this episode
An unless order arrives on a Monday morning, and the file behind it has not moved in seven weeks. 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 many files in a firm drift at any one time, why entries on a file pass for progress, and what the court looks at when a party asks for relief after a missed step.
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 flags a matter with no substantive activity for a month and drafts the chaser for a fee earner to sign off.
Chapters
- 0:00 Theme
- 0:09 Cold open
- 0:41 Welcome
- 1:21 The problem
- 3:38 What a well run firm does
- 5:31 Where Bracton fits
- 7:04 One thing to do this week
- 7:34 Close
- 7:58 Theme
Transcript
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.