Insights
Supervision, competence and the firm's own records
Supervision is the duty a firm finds hardest to evidence, because it happens in conversations, in glances at a file, in the question a junior did not ask at seven in the evening. When a claim lands, the question is not whether the firm supervised but whether it can show that it did, and the honest answer at most small firms is that the record is thin.
These articles follow the file through the ordinary failures: the matter nobody senior has opened for months, the fee earner who resigns with the work in their head, the fortnight's absence with no cover named, the precedent everybody edits and nobody owns, the competence declared at renewal on the strength of memory. Each shows what the record should have held, and what a system that reads every live file overnight can put in front of a supervisor before the drift becomes a loss.
Twelve articles, newest first. All the writing.
The file no one senior has read for months
What a judge sees at the end of the story, and how good AI assisted supervision closes the gap the SRA expects firms to mind.
The junior working late with no one to ask
The risk is not that a junior gets the point wrong at seven o'clock. It is that nobody ever learns what they did instead of asking.
The handover you get when a fee earner resigns
A fee earner resigns and the firm gets back files and a leaving note. What it loses is the position on every matter, held in one head and never written down.
The fortnight your fee earner was away
Leave is booked months ahead, and the cover list is still written from memory on the last afternoon.
The competence you declared at renewal
Most firms sign the annual competence declaration and hold nothing behind it, when the evidence already sits in the matter files.
The conversation that was never written down
Two accounts of the same telephone call, two years on, and nothing written down at the time. What a court does with a disputed conversation, and what a note made the same day is worth.
The precedent nobody owns
Nobody owns the firm's precedents, so nobody knows when each was last read against current law. What that costs you, and the discipline that closes the gap.
The suppliers nobody wrote down
A firm changes costs draftsman and finds its papers in a personal cloud folder. Every outside organisation holding client data belongs on one list.
The insurance form you fill in from memory
The proposal form asks what your firm knows about circumstances that might give rise to a claim, and in most firms four partners answer it from recollection.
The original nobody produced
A boundary dispute turns on a conveyance the firm holds and cannot locate. Everything held in safe custody belongs on one register that has been tested.
The correspondence that never reached the file
When email never joins the matter record, supervisors, costs and disclosure all work from a partial file. A practical test for what your files hold.
The closed file that was still open
A matter is marked closed and the papers go to storage, and nothing in that sequence asks whether the file was fit to be closed.
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