A client you acted for on a house purchase in 2019 telephones on a Tuesday morning. She is selling a commercial unit now, the buyer wants to exchange within three weeks, and she would like the same fee earner as last time. The matter opens in ten minutes because the client record already exists, and nobody stops to ask what that record holds.
What it holds is a scan of a passport that expired in 2023, a council tax bill for an address she left four years ago, and a note that the purchase money came from the sale of a flat. Since then she has become a director of two companies, one of which will receive the sale proceeds, and the unit she is selling stands in her name and her husband’s, a man the firm has never met. Each of those facts bears on the checks the firm owes, and none of them sits on the file.
Take an illustrative firm with 2,000 client records, a quarter of whom come back within five years. That is 500 returning clients, and where each new matter opens against the existing record, most of those files rest on evidence gathered for work the firm finished long ago. Nobody needs to suspect the client for this to matter. The difficulty is that the firm cannot show it looked again, and when a supervisor, an auditor or the regulator asks, “we knew her” satisfies none of them.
Looking again when the client returns
The Money Laundering Regulations 2017 expect a firm to monitor a business relationship while it lasts and to keep the documents and information it holds about a client up to date. They also expect the checks to be applied again to an existing client at the right moments, judged by risk, and a change in the client’s circumstances is one of those moments. The guidance written for the legal sector puts the same point in practical terms, and the firm’s own risk assessment ought to say how a returning client is treated. Most firms write that sentence once and never test whether anyone follows it.
Start with a rule that a new matter for an existing client triggers a short review before work begins. The fee earner confirms that the identity evidence is still in date and the address still current, and asks whether the new work fits what the firm already knows. A conveyancing client who now instructs on the sale of a company presents a different risk from the one assessed six years earlier, and the file should show that someone noticed the difference.
Set a period after which evidence lapses for your purposes, whatever expiry date the document itself carries. Firms choose different periods and vary them by risk, and the choice matters less than writing it down and applying it to every file. Then look at who else has joined the picture. A new company behind the client, a joint owner the firm has never identified, or money arriving from a source the old file never mentions each calls for a fresh look at ownership, sanctions and the source of funds.
Then run the exercise backwards. Pull every matter opened in the last year against an existing client record and ask how old the identity evidence was on the day each one opened. The answer tells you whether your policy works in the office or only in the manual.
Where Bracton fits
Bracton is an agentic AI case management system for law firms in England and Wales, and its assistant, Henry, reads every live file overnight. When a matter opens against a client the firm already holds, Henry sets the date of the identity evidence beside the period the firm has chosen and flags the file where that evidence has lapsed, where the address on the new matter differs from the one checked, or where a company, a joint owner or a payer appears that the old record never names. He drafts the request for a fresh check, and a named person in the firm decides whether it goes. Nothing reaches the client until a qualified fee earner approves it.
A firm that keeps its existing case management system can run Henry alongside it, and he reads the same files through the connection to that system, although what he sees there depends on what the system lets him read.
The quickest test uses your own returning clients. Pick the last five matters you opened for someone the firm had acted for before, check the date of the identity evidence behind each one, and if you want the whole caseload read the same way, book a client account review.