A firm stops doing the work on a file in March. In November a complaint arrives, and the partner who picks it up finds a matter with no attendance note since the spring, a hearing date still sitting in the firm's diary, £2,400 held in client account and a court record that still names the firm as acting. Those figures are illustrative. Nobody decided this. The decision to stop acting was taken in substance eight months earlier and never written down.
Retainers end in fact long before they end on paper. Fees go unpaid past the point where anyone is willing to keep working, trust breaks down after a difficult conversation, or the client gives instructions the fee earner will not follow. What happens next in most firms is drift rather than decision. The file goes to the bottom of the pile, the fee earner mentions in supervision that the client has gone quiet, and nobody writes to say the firm has ceased to act, because nobody has framed the position as one that needs a letter.
The firm meanwhile keeps receiving the case. Orders and directions arrive addressed to it because on the court record nothing has changed, and the other side serves documents on the firm and treats service as good. Key dates sit in the diary and roll forward, each one a deadline on a matter nobody is working. Money held for the client stays in client account until it turns up on a balances report. The client, who received no letter, assumes the firm is still on the case, and that assumption is reasonable.
What the client is owed when you stop
Ceasing to act needs a good reason and reasonable notice to the client. What firms underplay is the information obligation alongside it. The SRA Standards and Regulations expect you to give clients the information they need to make informed decisions and to treat them fairly. Applied to the end of a retainer, that means telling the client in writing that you have stopped acting, from what date, what they need to do now, and which dates now fall on them to meet. A client who learns of a limitation period or a directions deadline after it has passed has been failed twice over.
Coming off the record in issued proceedings is a separate step governed by the Civil Procedure Rules, and a letter to the client does not achieve it. Until that step is completed the court and the other side continue to treat your firm as acting. A firm that writes a careful letter to its client and stops there has ended the relationship in its own mind while remaining on the record.
Money held for the client has to be dealt with and the client told what has become of it. Where the firm is thinking about holding papers against unpaid costs, treat that as a decision with its own risks, reasoned and recorded at the time, rather than an entitlement following automatically from an unpaid bill.
Close a retainer the way you open a matter
Firms have a routine for taking a matter on, and ending one deserves the same treatment, with named steps, an owner and a date. Confirm the position to the client in writing in the week the decision is taken. Strip every date out of the firm's diary and tell the client which of them now falls on the client. Complete the court step where proceedings are issued, return or account for money held, and settle the papers question deliberately with the reasoning recorded. Then change the status of the matter so it stops presenting as live work. Once that routine exists, run it backwards across the caseload to find the matters where the work stopped and none of these steps was taken, because those files are where complaints come from.
That backward check is the part firms rarely have capacity for, and it is what the Bracton AI Assistant is built to do. Connected to the case management or CRM system a firm already runs, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim and others, it reads every live matter overnight and marks the ones where nothing has been recorded for months while the diary still holds dates or money still sits in client account. It drafts the letter to the client, shows the working behind every flag, and puts all of it in front of a qualified fee earner for sign off. The same checks run inside Bracton where a firm takes the full platform.
You can find the gap in your own firm this week without buying anything. Ask for every matter with no recorded activity for six months that still carries a diary date or a client account balance, then read the oldest three to see what the client was last told. If you would rather see the check run across your whole caseload, with the working shown on each flag, book a client account review.