You quoted £1,250 plus VAT to administer a modest estate, priced the way you always price these, from the memory of the last one. Four months on the file has taken eleven hours of a senior fee earner's time, which at a sensible notional rate puts the real cost well past £2,700, and the first anyone knew of it was when the bill went out at the number you promised. These figures are illustrative, but the shape of them will be familiar. The fixed fee looked profitable when you set it and then lost money in silence.
Fixed fee pricing began as a considered judgement and settled into a reflex. When you first moved a work type onto a fixed price, you looked at a few recent files, took a view on the average, added a margin for the awkward ones and set a number. Then that number became the number. It carried across to the next matter and the one after, through changes in the work, in your staff mix and in what clients now expect, without anyone going back to test whether it still held. The price stopped being a measurement and became a habit, and a habit does not notice when the ground underneath it moves.
Take the estate again. The quote assumes a clean administration, one property, a handful of accounts, no dispute between beneficiaries and a straightforward set of assets to gather. The file that arrived had a missing share certificate, a beneficiary abroad who went quiet for three weeks, and a lifetime gift that had to be traced and explained for the return. None of that sat inside the scope you priced. Each piece pulled in another hour or two of qualified time. At an eleven hour spend against a fee that assumed six or seven, the matter crossed from margin into loss around the third week and kept spending after it had crossed. Nobody chose to give that work away. It leaked out one reasonable half hour at a time, each one defensible on its own, none measured against the scope the client had agreed.
Why the timesheet stays silent
Your time recording system holds the evidence and cannot read it. It knows the fee earner spent eleven hours on the matter, because they recorded them. What it does not hold is the scope. It has no record of what the fixed fee was meant to cover, so it has nothing to compare the time against. It will tell you, months later and only if you go looking, that a matter took longer than its fee. It will never tell you, in the third week while the work is live, that you have passed the point the price assumed and the next task takes you into loss. The timesheet counts. It does not judge, because judging needs the scope, and the scope lives in the client care letter, not the ledger.
What good looks like is something that reads both sides. It holds the scope you agreed and watches the work against that scope across every live matter rather than one file a partner happens to open. When a matter reaches the edge of what the fee covered, it says so and drafts the letter to the client that explains the extra work and proposes the variation, ready before the work is done rather than after it has been given away. The recovery is not clever. It is the difference between finding the overrun in time to charge for it and finding it in the write off column at the year end.
Scope is a professional obligation, not only a commercial one
The obligation here is regulatory as well as commercial. You are expected to give clients clear information about costs at the outset and to keep them informed as a matter develops, so that the person paying understands what they are paying for and is told when that changes. A fixed fee that quietly turns into more work, billed either at the quoted price to the firm's loss or at a figure the client was never warned about, sits badly against that expectation. Catching the overrun early and writing to the client keeps your margin and keeps the client properly informed at the same time, which is what you are meant to be doing in any event.
This is where the Bracton AI Assistant sits. It reads the scope you agreed against the work done across the whole caseload overnight, and drafts the variation letter for a qualified fee earner to check and approve before anything reaches the client. The assistant is built into Bracton, the case and client management platform that holds the scope, the time recording and the billing in one place, and it is sold on its own to run inside the system your firm already has, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim and others. It does not price your work or decide your fees. It shows you the matters that have run past the line while there is still time to act. To see the discipline working rather than trust a general argument, watch the demonstration, and to start on your own records in writing, book a client account review.