A firm issues proceedings for unpaid costs of an illustrative £46,000, built up over two years of monthly bills to one commercial client, and the first question at the hearing has nothing to do with the quality of the work. The district judge wants to know whether what went out to the client was a bill at all.
The statute is not demanding, but it is exact. Before a solicitor brings an action to recover costs, the bill has to be signed by the solicitor or by someone on the solicitor's behalf, or accompanied by a signed letter that refers to it. It has to be delivered to the client, and a month has to pass before proceedings begin. Miss any of that and the claim fails, whatever the file shows about the work done.
Form is only half of it. A bill capable of founding an action has to be complete and self-contained for the period it covers, so the firm cannot return later and add to it, and it has to tell the client enough to take advice on whether to challenge it. A single figure with a date and a matter reference rarely does that. The client, or the costs lawyer the client consults, needs to see what was done and on what basis it was charged.
When monthly billing never starts the clock
The harder problem sits in the retainer rather than the bill. Interim bills meant to stand on their own as statute bills, each final for its period, require the retainer to say so clearly. Where the client care letter and the terms of business are silent, or describe payments on account in loose language, a run of monthly bills is treated as requests for payment on account rather than as separate bills. Nothing has started running. Two years of tidy monthly invoices amount, in law, to one matter never billed.
That matters because of the period the client relies on. The right to apply to the court for a solicitor and own client assessment runs from delivery, and for a short period the client can demand one as of right. After that the application falls to the court's discretion, which narrows once a year has passed since delivery or once the bill has been paid. A firm that never delivered a statute bill has never started that period running, and the client stays free to challenge the whole run.
Regulation sits alongside the statute. The SRA Standards and Regulations expect you to tell the client how to complain, to say that the Legal Ombudsman exists and how to approach it, and, where it applies, to say that the client has a right to challenge the bill through the court. Those lines belong in the client care letter and in the correspondence that carries the bill.
The test to run on your own files
Take each matter type you run and read the retainer wording against what your billing template produces on a live file. Ask whether the words give you the right to deliver interim statute bills, or whether they describe something softer. Then look for the record of delivery. On most systems the bill is raised on the ledger and a covering letter sits in the document folder, but nothing records plainly that it went out on a given date and by what route. Last, work out which bills have gone out under wording that does not support them, because that is the population at risk and it is usually larger than the partner expects.
The Bracton AI Assistant reads every live matter overnight through the interface your existing case management system provides, whether that is LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another, under permissions you set. It works across the whole caseload rather than the one file someone has open, and it hands its work to a qualified fee earner for sign off before anything leaves the firm. Through another vendor's interface it reads matters, documents, correspondence, key dates and time. Some systems expose the ledger thinly or not at all, which is why the fullest accounts work happens inside the Bracton platform itself, where no interface stands in the way.
On this question it reads the retainer and the client care letter against the bills delivered on that matter and marks the matters where the wording does not support the billing pattern. The point then reaches a fee earner while it is still fixable, when the firm can correct its terms and deliver a proper bill, rather than at the door of the court with a claim already issued.
Few firms have checked this across a whole caseload, because doing it by hand means opening every file and reading two documents against a ledger. You can see the position on your own matters in a morning, and it is worth knowing before you sue anyone for costs. If that is useful to you, book a client account review.