At twenty past five on a Friday, a fee earner opens a message from a client asking for everything to be sent to their own address tonight, and twenty minutes later a set of GP records and a draft schedule of loss leaves as three attachments on an ordinary email. The address came from the foot of the client's last message, nobody has matched it against the file, and no partner will ever learn that the papers went out.
Set an illustrative figure against that. A firm of twelve fee earners, each sending confidential material outside the building twice a week, makes something near twelve hundred decisions a year about what leaves and by what route, and none of them reaches a supervisor. The firm has a confidentiality policy in its office manual and no part at all in the twelve hundred.
The duty is the firm's, and the client cannot hand it back
A client who asks for everything by email is making a request, and a request is not consent to a method the firm has not decided is safe. The duty of confidentiality rests on the firm and the people it employs, and it does not pass to the client who would rather have the papers quickly. The person who answers for the breach is the solicitor with the file rather than the client who wrote the email. The SRA Standards and Regulations expect a firm to keep the affairs of its clients confidential, and that expectation is not discharged by pointing at what the client asked for.
The address matters as much as the method. A signature block shows what somebody typed rather than what the firm has checked, and an address taken in a telephone call and recorded on the file is worth more than one lifted from the last incoming message. Firms that have watched completion monies intercepted know the argument already, and it applies with equal force to a completion statement or a whole file. Nothing about the material being the client's own reduces the harm when it lands somewhere else.
Settle the level of protection when the file opens. At that point the fee earner has the retainer in front of them, knows what the matter will generate, and has time to ask the client how they want papers sent and note the answer. With a client waiting on the telephone at the end of the week none of that is true, and the decision falls to whoever is at the keyboard. Medical records, and anything else touching a person's health, deserve a different answer from a routine chaser letter, because UK data protection law requires measures appropriate to the risk and expects more care where the material is sensitive.
Whatever the firm agrees with the client, record it. A file note saying the client asked for papers by email to a verified address, and accepted the risk once it was explained, serves the firm better two years later than anyone's recollection. Where the client wants something the firm will not do, that refusal belongs on the file too.
Where the decision leaves the sender's hands
The Bracton AI Assistant is sold on its own and connects to the case management system a firm already runs, whether that is LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another, through the interface that system already provides and under permissions the firm sets. Nothing is migrated and nothing is replaced, so the firm keeps its record and gains a layer that applies the firm's rules on the way out.
Protection is settled for each correspondent when the file opens rather than at the moment of sending, which makes the choice the firm's rather than the sender's. Where material goes to a correspondent the firm has not dealt with before, the client's initials rather than their full name go on the outside of what is sent. Bracton has its own secure message facility, working in the way firms know from Egress Protect, so the recipient opens the material through a protected route instead of receiving it as a loose attachment.
Everything the assistant produces goes to a qualified fee earner for sign off before it leaves the firm. Processing runs on United Kingdom infrastructure, client data is never used to train any model, and every action sits in an audit trail the firm can inspect. What a firm pays for the assistant comes off the price of the Bracton platform in full if it moves within twelve months of starting.
The argument settles faster on your own files than on a worked example. Take a matter that generated medical records and one that generated nothing worse than a chaser, put both through the demonstration, and look at what would have left and by what route. An hour on your own correspondence shows what your firm is sending and to whom, so book a client account review.