About this episode
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, 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 what fixed fee work past its scope costs a firm in a year, the three places where scope fails, what the SRA Code of Conduct and the Transparency Rules expect a firm to say about price, and the two documents a judge reads first when a fee dispute reaches court.
Then five things a well run firm does about it without buying anything, one exercise to run on a single fee earner's last ten fixed fee matters this week, and a plain account of where Bracton fits, with the overnight read that raises a fixed fee gone past its scope, finds the chargeable work that never reached a time entry and drafts the update to the client for a fee earner to price and sign off.
Chapters
- 0:00 Theme
- 0:09 Cold open
- 0:50 Welcome
- 1:31 The problem
- 4:11 What a well run firm does
- 5:16 Where Bracton fits
- 7:04 One thing to do this week
- 7:30 Close
- 7:50 Theme
Transcript
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.