Instructions and papers go to counsel on 12 March for an advice on quantum. Nothing goes in the diary, and by the last week of June neither the fee earner nor the supervisor can say whether counsel was ever chased.
Take the arithmetic as illustrative. Fifteen weeks pass and the client, told in March that the file was with counsel, hears nothing. If the advice was to settle whether to issue against a limitation date in the autumn, a third of the remaining time has gone on a document nobody asked after. If it was to feed a direction for exchange, you are applying to vary an order you agreed to. That is exposure rather than delay, and it sits on the firm.
Nothing about this is personal to the fee earner. The item leaves the building and the obligation leaves with it. While the papers sit on a desk, somebody owns the work and you can see it. Once they go out, no attendance note is written, no letter is sent and no time is recorded.
Run an activity report and a file waiting on counsel and a file nobody has touched look identical, because both show the same last date of activity. The report tells you when something last happened, not why nothing has happened since, so the supervisor guesses. The fee earner guesses too, in their own favour, because waiting on somebody else feels like progress.
The same gap opens wherever your firm hands something out, whether that is an expert report commissioned in January, medical records from a practice that answers when it answers, a search result, counsel's draft pleading, or a reply the other side's solicitor promised. To the client they all look the same, being a file that has gone quiet. The SRA Standards and Regulations expect effective systems for supervising the work your people do, matters carried forward properly, and clients kept informed. A firm that cannot say what is outstanding with third parties cannot show it meets any of that.
Fix the return date before the papers leave
The repair starts at the point of instruction. Agree a date for the advice to come back instead of leaving the return open, because a clerk will give you one if asked. Record what went out, to whom, what was asked and when it is expected back, as a fact held on the matter rather than a line in a covering letter. Then treat that date as a diary date in its own right, so the chase happens on a date rather than when somebody remembers.
Tell the client in the same week. Set out what has gone to counsel, when you expect an answer and what you will do if it does not arrive. A client who has that letter in March does not ring in June wondering whether you forgot.
The list your records already hold
You need no new data. The correspondence carries the letter of instruction with its date and its request. The disbursement ledger carries counsel's fee or the expert's fee, and a fee paid out on a matter that has produced nothing since is a reliable sign of something outstanding. The diary carries the dates the item was meant to serve. Read those together and you have what is out, with whom, since when.
Then settle the number of weeks after which an outstanding item stops belonging to the person who sent it. Six weeks, or eight, whatever suits the work, and past that point it goes to a supervisor rather than sitting with a fee earner who feels awkward about chasing chambers they instruct every month. Expect the harder case too. Sometimes the papers were never sent, and the matter has waited three months for a document that never left the office.
This is the work the Bracton AI Assistant does inside the case management or CRM system your firm already runs, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another. It reads every live matter overnight, derives the outstanding items from the correspondence and the ledger, and shows each fee earner which matters have something out with a third party and how long it has been out. Where a chaser is due it drafts one, and every output reaches a qualified fee earner for sign off before it leaves the firm. Firms wanting that discipline built into the record itself run Bracton, the case and client management platform.
A client account review works from different papers, reading an export of your client ledgers, your cash book and your bank statements against the SRA Accounts Rules and nothing else. It does not open the correspondence, the diary or the matter file, and it will not tell you whether the advice came back. Payments to counsel and to experts do pass through the accounts, so the ledgers show what was paid on which matter, when, and whether that disbursement reached a bill. If that is where you want to start, book a client account review.