About this episode
A letter arrives eighteen months after completion. The seller's mortgage is still on the register, the undertaking to redeem it sits in an email on a closed file, and the conveyancer who gave it has left. 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 undertakings sit live on a firm's files, why closing a file does nothing to them, and what the court reads first when asked to enforce one.
Then five things a well run firm does about it without buying anything, one exercise to run on a single conveyancer's completions this week, and a plain account of where Bracton fits, with the overnight read that picks out language that binds and flags an undertaking still open for a fee earner to deal with and sign off.
Chapters
- 0:00 Theme
- 0:09 Cold open
- 0:47 Welcome
- 1:26 The problem
- 4:05 What a well run firm does
- 5:33 Where Bracton fits
- 7:14 One thing to do this week
- 7:46 Close
- 8:06 Theme
Transcript
A letter arrives from the solicitors who acted for the buyer eighteen months ago. Their client wants to remortgage, and the seller's old mortgage still sits on the register of title against a house the seller no longer owns. They enclose a copy of an email from your firm, sent at eleven in the morning on completion day, undertaking to redeem that mortgage and to send evidence of discharge. The conveyancer who wrote it left in the spring. Her file was closed a week after completion and went to storage. Nobody in the office can say whether the money reached the lender, and the letter asks what your firm proposes to do about it.
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 undertaking still open on a closed file. Start with a figure, and treat it as an illustration rather than a survey result.
Picture a firm of ten fee earners, half in residential conveyancing and half in litigation, each giving two undertakings in a working month. That is twenty a month and around two hundred and forty a year. If a third of them are waiting on a trigger or on the other side at any moment, eighty promises are live on the firm's files. Ask the managing partner to name those eighty, and in most firms nobody can. The reason sits in how undertakings are given. Nobody sets out to make one. A fee earner is solving the problem in front of them, getting a completion away on time or persuading an opponent to release a document, and the promise goes into the third paragraph of an email or the closing line of a letter.
In litigation it takes the form of an undertaking to hold a document to the other side's order, or to pay a sum on a given date. It lands in the correspondence, not in any field the firm can search. Performance then happens quietly, or not at all. The redemption money goes, the lender's receipt comes back, and nobody returns to the email that made the promise to mark it done. Then the matter finishes and the file closes. Closing a file ends the retainer with the client. It does nothing to the undertaking, which binds the solicitor who gave it and the firm, and which outlives both the archive box and the fee earner's notice period.
The SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors requires you to perform every undertaking you give within the timescale agreed, or within a reasonable time where none was agreed. That is a personal duty, and nothing in the Code makes an exception for a file that has since been closed. From the bench, the picture is plain. The court has a supervisory jurisdiction over solicitors as officers of the court, and it can enforce an undertaking directly. When a judge is asked to enforce one, the first thing to read is the wording, because the words govern what was promised, not what the fee earner meant or what the firm would like it to have meant.
Then the questions are whether the undertaking was given, whether it was performed, and if not, what the person who relied on it had lost. The court can order the solicitor to do what was promised, or to compensate the person who relied on it. Telling a judge that the file was closed, or that she has left, answers none of those questions. Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software. One. Keep a register of undertakings, and record the exact wording against each one, copied from the letter or email that gave it, never a summary. Alongside the wording, record who gave it, who received it, what event or date triggers performance, and when performance falls due.
Two. Decide who in the firm has authority to give an undertaking, and on what approval. Put it in writing, so that nobody junior gives one without sign off. Three. Give the register to a partner, not to the fee earners who give the undertakings, and review it on a fixed cycle, every fortnight or every month. Four. Make it a condition of closing a file that no undertaking on it is outstanding. The closing checklist asks the question, the fee earner answers it in writing, and where the answer is yes, the file stays open until the evidence of performance is on it. Five. Read back. A register started today leaves the back catalogue untouched, and the back catalogue is where the danger sits.
Have someone read the correspondence on files closed in the last year and pull out every sentence that binds, because a form filled in at the moment of giving assumes the fee earner noticed they were giving one. Points one and five both depend on someone reading correspondence, file by file, 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. Overnight it reads every live file it can reach, correspondence included, and picks out language that reads as an undertaking wherever it was given. The platform's morning list then flags any undertaking still open, with any whose trigger date has passed flagged for attention.
Where the next step is a chaser to a lender, or the completion step itself, the assistant drafts it from your firm's own precedents. It surfaces and flags. It does not decide that an undertaking has been discharged, 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. The sweep runs every working day. Now the honest limit. The assistant reads what the file holds. An undertaking given on the telephone and never written down is invisible to it, as it is to any register.
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 one conveyancer's completions from the last six months and, for each sale, check two things. First, that the seller's charge has come off the register of title. Second, that the undertaking to redeem it is on the file, with a note recording that it was performed and when.
Where the charge is still there, find the undertaking and read its exact words today. If you cannot find the undertaking at all, that tells you about the rest of the firm's files. 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 your correspondence turns up, the free hour on your own files is on the same site. Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.