Say your firm wins an application for specific disclosure on a Tuesday morning. The time ledger shows £3,600 of recorded work on the application, the attendance notes show a further two hours of calls with the client that nobody entered, and the statement of costs handed up at ten to ten claims £2,400 because a trainee assembled it from memory before leaving for court. Counsel opposite has had it for twenty minutes. The judge allows £1,500, and the firm writes off the difference together with the time that never reached the ledger. The figures are illustrative, and the sequence is familiar to anyone who runs interim work.
The rules anticipate it. Where the court is likely to assess costs summarily, which is the general rule at the end of a hearing lasting no more than a day and at the end of a fast track trial where costs are not fixed, the practice direction to CPR Part 44 expects each party to file and serve its statement of costs at least 24 hours before the hearing, or at least two days before a fast track trial. A party who fails to do so without reasonable excuse has that failure taken into account when the court decides what order to make about costs. The response ranges from a reduced figure to an adjournment of the costs question, and in a bad case to no order for costs on the application at all.
The statement is the last document anyone thinks about. Preparation goes into the evidence and the skeleton argument, and the costs schedule waits until the evening before, when someone pulls a time report and estimates whatever it does not explain. Work never recorded does not appear at all.
Start the statement on the day the hearing is listed
Treat the statement as a task with its own date. When the court lists the hearing, diarise the service deadline a clear working day ahead of the date the rule sets, and name the fee earner with conduct against it. The spare day absorbs a hearing brought forward.
Build the statement from the time ledger as the work is done. If each entry for the application carries a code or a narrative that ties it to the application, the statement becomes a report run against those entries and sorted under the headings the court uses, attendances on the client and the other side, work done on documents, attendance at the hearing, counsel's fees and court fees.
Before it goes, compare the draft with the file itself. Read the attendance notes, the call log and the sent correspondence for the period and set each item against the ledger. Where the file shows work and the ledger shows nothing, have the fee earner who did the work record it properly, rather than adding a round figure to the statement. A signed figure the record does not support is hard to defend when the other side asks for the breakdown.
Then serve it on the other side and file it with the court by the deadline you diarised, and keep proof of service. A statement served in time lets the paying party raise its points in advance, and the argument over costs at the end of the hearing tends to shrink to the items genuinely in dispute.
The statement drafted from the record
Each of those steps depends on someone remembering it. The Bracton AI Assistant connects through the interface your existing case management system already provides, whether LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another system, under permissions your firm sets, and reads every live matter overnight. When an interim hearing or a trial appears in the diary, it puts the service deadline on the morning list of the fee earner with conduct and drafts the statement of costs from the time recorded against the matter and the disbursements posted to it. Where your system shows less of the ledger than the draft needs, Bracton marks the gaps for the fee earner to complete.
It also reads the file for work that never reached a time entry. A telephone attendance note with no matching entry, or a letter sent the evening before the application with nothing recorded against it, comes forward as a suggested time entry for the fee earner to approve, amend or reject. Nothing is written back to your system without that approval. The statement stays a draft until a qualified fee earner has reviewed the figures and signed it off, and only then does it go to the other side and to the court.
Take the last few applications your firm won and set what each statement claimed against the time the file shows was spent, and you will know whether there is a gap and how large it is. To see Bracton draft a statement of costs from your own live matters, book a client account review.