On a Friday afternoon the supervising partner sends the email that opens the quarter's file review, asking each fee earner to put forward two files by Wednesday. The folders arrive on time, every one of them tidy, with the attendance notes typed up and the last letter answered.
Take an illustrative firm with ten fee earners and around six hundred live matters. Two files a fee earner a quarter comes to eighty files a year, under a seventh of the caseload, and the person being reviewed chose every one of them. Fee earners send the matters they are proud of, so the same well run files come round each quarter, the review finds nothing, and the partner signs it off as a clean result.
The files that need review never reach the pile. A matter with no substantive activity for seven weeks stays in the cabinet. So does the personal injury claim with a limitation date in the spring and no proceedings issued, the conveyancing file where money on account ran out two bills ago, the client who stopped answering in August and the undertaking given on completion that nobody has discharged. None of these files looks untidy from the outside, and each of them is where claims and complaints start.
When a claim or a complaint lands, the insurer and the regulator ask to see the review record. They read it against the file that went wrong, and the question they put is simple. Did the firm ever look at this matter? If the review picked the same ten files for three years running, a record of nothing found reads as a record of nothing looked at.
Let the case management system choose the sample
Your firm already holds the information it needs to choose a better sample. The case management system records the date of the last substantive step on every matter, the key dates in the diary, the balance on client account against unbilled time, the last contact with the client and the estimate given at the outset. A sample drawn from those fields does not depend on anyone's choice. Pull every file with no activity for thirty days, every file with a key date inside sixty days, every matter where money on account sits below the unbilled time, every client with no contact for six weeks, every open undertaking and every file running past its estimate. The list will run to more than eighty files a year, and it should.
Keep a share of each round for files the fee earner did not choose and did not know would be read. Supervision exists to see the work as the client and the court see it, and a fee earner who knows which files are coming has already shaped the result.
The review itself needs a written trail. For each file, record the finding and the action on the matter, put the action in the diary with a name and a date, and close it when it is done. A finding with no note of what happened next gives a claims handler a problem the firm knew about and no answer to it. Write the record so that a reader from outside the firm, an auditor or an insurer's claims team, can follow what was found, who acted and when.
The SRA Standards and Regulations expect a firm to run an effective system for supervising client matters and to keep the records that show the system works. A professional indemnity insurer's proposal form asks how the firm supervises its fee earners, and the review record is the document that answers it. A log showing that the files chosen by the people under review were in good order answers neither of them.
Where Bracton fits
Bracton connects to the case management system your firm already runs, whether LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another, and reads every live matter overnight. The sample stops being ten chosen files and becomes the whole caseload. Each morning the supervising partner sees a list of the files that carry a risk signal, with the reason stated beside each one (no activity, date near, balance low, client quiet). For each file Bracton drafts the note or the chaser, and a qualified fee earner reads it and signs it off.
Bracton does not review files and does not replace the supervisor's judgement. It puts the files that carry risk in front of the partner and says why, and every output goes before a qualified person before anything leaves the firm. A firm that wants to keep its current system can add the Bracton AI Assistant to the system it runs today. A firm ready to move can take the full Bracton platform, where the file review record sits beside the diary and the ledgers.
The test is your own matters. Take last year's review record, set it against the files that went wrong or came close, and count how many of them the sample ever touched. If you want to see what a full read of your caseload turns up, book a client account review.