The envelope sits in the post tray for two days before anyone opens it. Inside is the interim statement a fee earner sent out in March, returned by the client's daughter with a note saying that her father had died three weeks before it was posted.
Take an illustrative firm of twelve fee earners carrying six hundred live matters across private client, litigation and conveyancing. If three or four of those clients die during the year and the firm hears of each death some five weeks late, that is months of chargeable effort spent acting for people no longer alive to instruct anyone. The figures are invented for the example, and the pattern behind them is one most supervisors recognise once they look.
At common law the death of a client brings the retainer to an end. A solicitor's authority is personal to the client who gave it, so it does not pass to the family, to the executors named in the will, or to whoever has taken charge of the funeral. Every letter written, every application made and every attendance after the date of death is work done without instructions, whatever the fee earner believed at the time.
What ends at the moment of death
The billing position is the one firms notice first. Work done between the death and fresh instructions from personal representatives is work the estate is under no obligation to pay for, and nobody holds authority to approve a bill until a grant issues or the personal representatives confirm their appointment and instruct you afresh. Part of that work gets ratified once somebody with standing picks the matter up, and the rest is written off, better identified deliberately than left on the ledger as work in progress that will never convert.
Money on the client ledger belongs to the estate from the date of death, and you can release it only to personal representatives whose appointment you have established. Paying a balance to a grieving son who has been your main contact for eighteen months breaches the client money rules. Undertakings given in the course of the matter survive the client's death and bind the person who gave them, so they need finding and then either performing or releasing.
Live proceedings cannot go on against or on behalf of a dead party until the court makes an order substituting or appointing someone to represent the estate, and steps taken before that order are open to challenge. A sale by a sole owner who has died cannot complete until a grant of representation issues, which means telling the other side promptly and salvaging what the chain will bear. Limitation periods keep running throughout.
Stopping the file running on by itself
On the day you learn of a death, record what you have been told and who told you, with the date, in an attendance note on the file. Stop every piece of automated correspondence going to that client, statements, reminders, marketing and portal messages alike, and check what is already queued to go out that week. Tell the supervisor, freeze the ledger balance, list the undertakings given on the matter, and put the court dates and the completion dates in front of somebody senior the same day. Then verify the death properly rather than resting on a telephone call.
Across the caseload, search the client's name on every other live matter and on any file where they appear as a party, a guarantor, a trustee or an attorney. Check whether you hold a will, deeds or other originals for them. Where the system carries no field marking a client as deceased, a supervisor's list reviewed monthly does the same work, and a standing question in file reviews about whether anyone has heard from the client in six months will catch several of these before the returned envelope does.
Reading across a whole caseload is what the Bracton AI Assistant does overnight. It works through every live matter rather than the single file a fee earner has open, so a client who appears on four matters shows up as one person rather than four unconnected records, and a file that has gone quiet is flagged before the next review. It drafts routine work and recovers unrecorded time as it goes, and every output reaches a qualified fee earner for sign off before anything leaves the firm. It plugs into the case management system you already run, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim and others, through the interface those systems already expose. The hosting is in the UK, the audit trail records what was done and by whom, and your client data is never used to train a model. The assistant is built into Bracton, the case and client management platform, and a firm contracted to another system buys it on its own.
Reading your own caseload this way costs less than the write off on one matter that ran six weeks past its client. To see which of your files have gone quiet, and what the ledgers behind them say, book a client account review.