A box arrives on a Tuesday afternoon, four lever arch files and a memory stick, on a claim then worth, say, £48,000. Your new client rings before you have opened it, wanting to know when the next step happens, and the honest answer is that you do not yet know what the next step is.
A firm taking over a matter part way through records the event as a win. You have gained a client, the work is already underway, and the file looks like a head start on a fresh instruction. What has arrived is a partial record of decisions someone else made, on facts you have not verified, with obligations attached that nobody has listed for you.
What the box does not contain
The papers that reach you are a selection rather than the whole file. Correspondence and pleadings travel well. The previous firm's attendance notes, its internal emails, its notes of advice given and its reasoning behind a tactical choice generally stay where they were, because they belong to that firm's working record rather than to the client's papers. You see what happened without seeing why, and the gap matters most when the earlier decision constrains what you can now do.
Dates are the second problem. Some sit on the face of the papers, and some exist only because a step was taken on a particular day. An order, a request, a notice served or an offer made starts a period running, and that period appears nowhere in the box unless you work it out. A previous firm's diary entry, if you receive one, records what that firm thought the dates were. Adopting it wholesale means adopting its mistakes.
Undertakings are the harder problem. An undertaking binds the person who gave it, so one given by the previous firm remains that firm's obligation, while your client assumes that everything about the matter is now yours. Neither position helps if the undertaking goes unperformed and nobody in either office watches it. The same applies to informal promises made to the other side about disclosure, a timetable or a payment, which rarely appear in a covering letter.
Delivery itself carries a cost. A solicitor is entitled to a lien over papers for unpaid costs, and papers are often delivered subject to an undertaking about those costs, so the file may arrive late, incomplete or on terms you have to consider before accepting it. The client's account of where the matter stands is a memory of conversations, and it seldom matches the record. Both need reconciling, and the record governs.
Treat it as an opening, not a continuation
The answer costs nothing and applies whatever system you run. Open the matter as a new matter. Run the conflict search on your own record and complete identification checks yourself, because the other firm's checks are evidence of what that firm did, not of what you did. Write your own client care letter and set your own scope, since you are not bound by the last firm's retainer and your client should not be left assuming that its terms carry over. What the SRA Standards and Regulations expect here is simple in principle, that you give the client the information needed to make informed decisions about the matter and its cost.
Build the chronology from the papers before your first letter goes out, and derive every date the documents support rather than copying anyone's diary. Write to the previous firm asking for a list of undertakings given and outstanding, and for anything awaited from third parties, then record the reply on the file. Record it too when no reply comes, because the absence is a fact you will want in six months. Read the file for what is missing rather than for what is there.
The Bracton AI Assistant plugs into the case management or CRM system your firm already runs, LEAP, Clio or Proclaim among them, and reads every live matter overnight rather than the one file open in front of a fee earner. It drafts routine work, marks files that have gone quiet and recovers time that never reached a time entry, and every output goes to a qualified fee earner for sign off before it leaves the firm. Hosting is in the UK and client data is never used to train a model. Applied to an incoming file, that overnight read gives you the chronology and the derived date list on the morning the box is opened rather than three weeks later. A firm free to change system takes Bracton itself instead, the case and client management platform underneath the assistant.
The test is a matter you inherited this year. Put the chronology you hold beside the papers that arrived, and see which dates you derived and which you accepted from someone else. To see what an overnight read finds on your own matters, book a client account review.