I made a costs management order in a multi-track claim, approving a budget of, say, £96,000 across the phases, with £14,000 of it for witness statements. When the parties came back at the end, that phase had run to something near £43,000, and no application to revise had been made at any point in between.
The work had been done properly, and the fee earner who took the statements had no reason to think anything was wrong. What went wrong sat further back. A Precedent H is prepared by one person against a deadline, argued about at a hearing, and then filed away. The exercise ends when the order is made, and nothing in the firm's daily working changes afterwards.
Nobody knows in June what was approved in March
Time recording carries on as it always has. Entries land against a matter number with a narrative that describes the work rather than the phase it belongs to. A firm with an approved allowance of, say, £11,000 for disclosure has no way of saying in June how much of it remains, short of somebody going back through months of entries by hand. Nobody does that, so the first proper count comes when the case is over and the costs are being assessed.
By then the position is fixed. On assessment the court will not depart from the last approved or agreed budget without good reason, and overspend that was never authorised is normally irrecoverable. The work is done, the time is recorded, and the paying party will not carry it. The firm writes it off or asks its own client to meet it.
Permission asked after the money has gone is a different application
The rules allow a party to revise its budget where a significant development in the litigation warrants it, and they expect that revision to be sought promptly. What I saw from the bench, again and again, was firms applying at the end. The money has been spent by then and the judge can see it has been spent, so the application becomes a request to be excused rather than a request for permission, and it gets heard as one. Made within weeks of the development, the same application is straightforward and often agreed without a hearing.
There is a client dimension that firms understate. The approved budget is the number the client has been told will shape what they recover if they win. A firm that runs well past it and says nothing creates a complaint on top of the shortfall, because the duty to keep a client informed about costs runs through the life of the retainer. A letter explaining the gap after judgment lands differently from a call made in the month the development happened.
The fix costs nothing. Map the phases onto the time recording so every entry lands in a phase as it is written, a configuration change in most systems and a habit change in the fee earners. At a fixed point each month, read the proportion of each phase spent against the work still to be done in it, because a phase seventy per cent spent with the statements not yet taken needs attention and one ninety per cent spent with nothing left in it does not. Treat the trigger for a revision as an event on the file, a new expert or a trial window that moves, rather than a number crossing a line on a spreadsheet.
The Bracton AI Assistant connects to the case management or CRM system a firm already runs, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim and others, and reads every live matter overnight. Here it reads the time records against the approved phase allowances and puts two things in front of the costs partner in the morning, the matters where a phase sits close to its limit while substantial work in it remains, and the matters where something has happened on the file that would support a revision and none has been sought. The assistant sees what another vendor's interface exposes, normally matters, documents, correspondence, key dates and time records, while inside Bracton, the case and client management platform, nothing sits in the way. Every output goes in front of a qualified fee earner for sign off, and nothing is written back without that approval.
Whether this is happening in your firm is a question about your own files rather than my example, and it is worth measuring. The first written exercise we run on a firm's own records starts on the client account, reading the client ledgers, the cash book and the bank statements against the SRA Accounts Rules rather than correspondence or matter files, and it shows how much of what a firm believes about its systems survives contact with the records. If you want that, book a client account review.