In January you told the client that the contested matter would run to somewhere between £4,000 and £6,000 plus VAT on the facts as they stood that week. By May the time recorded against the file had passed £6,000, because the other side instructed new solicitors and disclosure came in at three times the volume anyone had allowed for. The bill went out in September at £11,000. The numbers are illustrative, and the shape of them will be familiar to anyone who bills by the hour.
Nothing in that sequence involves poor work. The extra time was earned, the attendance notes support it, and a costs judge would recognise most of it without difficulty. What went wrong sits in the months between May and September, when the estimate stopped being true and nobody wrote to say so. The client went on planning around a figure you gave once, at the point in the matter when you knew least about it.
That gap is a familiar route into a complaint about costs, and the complaint rarely turns on whether the hours were properly spent. It turns on whether the client was kept informed as the cost moved, and on what the file shows about that. The SRA expects cost information to stay current across the life of the retainer rather than to be discharged once in the opening letter. You tell the client in writing when the figure changes, before the money is spent rather than after the bill arrives.
The estimate is a live figure
Firms tend to file the estimate as a piece of history. It sits in the client care letter, it gets referred to in a costs schedule two years later, and between those two moments nobody looks at it. Treat it instead as a number with a shelf life, one that has to be watched against recorded time and rewritten when the work overtakes it. The rewriting is the whole exercise. A revised estimate sent in May, with two sentences explaining what changed and what the new range is, removes the argument in September, because the client agreed to the higher figure while there was still a choice to make about it.
The trigger point matters more than the wording. If the letter goes out when work in progress reaches seventy per cent of the estimate, you are writing while the client still has options, including telling you to stop. If it goes out at a hundred and twenty per cent, you are explaining a bill. The difference between those two conversations is not a matter of drafting skill.
What you can put in place on Monday
You can do the first part of this with the system you already have. Run a report of every open hourly rate matter, with time recorded on one side and the figure quoted in the client care letter on the other. Most case management systems will produce that, even if the estimate has to be keyed into a field once per file. Then decide the percentage at which somebody writes, name the person who writes it, and put a standing paragraph in the precedent bank so the letter takes ten minutes rather than an hour. The first run of that report usually surfaces a handful of matters already well past the number, and those are the ones to deal with this week.
The Bracton AI Assistant is built for the part a monthly report handles badly, which is doing this on every file rather than on the ones somebody remembers to check. It reads each live matter overnight through the interface your existing case management system exposes, works across the whole caseload rather than one open file, and drafts the letter for a qualified fee earner to approve. It writes nothing back without a person approving it, hosting sits in the United Kingdom, client data is never used to train a model, and every step leaves an audit trail. The assistant is built into Bracton, the case and client management platform, and sold on its own to run inside the system your firm already has. It flags fixed fee matters that have run past the agreed scope while the conversation with the client is still an easy one, and the same reading applied to an hourly estimate produces the letter you meant to send in May.
The first written exercise Bracton runs on a firm's own records is a different one, because it starts where the money sits. It reads an export of your client ledgers, cash book and bank statements against the SRA Accounts Rules and reports what it finds there, and it goes no further than that. If you want to see how the work reads on your own figures rather than on an example, book a client account review.