A fee earner with sixty live matters hands in notice on a Tuesday morning. Put an illustrative two hours of unbilled reading against each file before the successor knows where it stands, and that is a hundred and twenty hours before anyone bills a minute of new work.
Notice in firms of this size runs to one month or three, on the assumption that three months is enough to put things in order. What comes back at the end tends to be a set of files and a leaving note written in the final week. The files were the firm's all along, and the note is thin because its author has been thinking about the next job for weeks.
What the firm loses is the material that never reached the file. It knows the claim was pleaded on one basis and not the fallback if that basis failed. Nothing on the file records that the client never reads an email and will only speak on the phone, that an undertaking has been chased twice with no reply, or that counsel has been in the papers since the first conference and knows where the weak point sits. The precedent documents sit on a personal drive because saving them there was quicker, and the informal arrangement with the solicitor on the other side, which has kept two applications off the court's list, exists nowhere but in a memory that is leaving.
Reallocation then follows capacity rather than fit. The matter goes to whoever has room in the diary rather than the person whose practice suits it, and the successor rebuilds the position by reading from the start. That reading is slow, it is unbilled, and it is where dates slip. Clients go quiet as well, because a client asked to run through the history again for a new name draws the obvious conclusion.
A handover is a by-product, not a document
The lesson holds whether a firm buys software or not. A handover produced in the last week of notice is written by someone whose attention has gone elsewhere, and nobody left behind can verify it. A handover worth having is the by-product of a file that stays legible from the day it opens.
That means recording the position as it changes, in attendance notes and file notes that say what was decided and why. Most fee earners record what happened. Fewer record the reasoning, and the reasoning is the part nobody can reconstruct later from correspondence alone.
Knowledge escapes a firm through personal drives and personal inboxes. Precedents kept locally, correspondence run from an individual account and a spreadsheet of key dates nobody else opens all go with the person, and none of it is recoverable after the leaving date. Firms close this off by making the case management system the only place work lives, then auditing whether that holds.
What the successor needs is smaller than a full chronology. They need the next steps with their dates and the reasoning behind the last few decisions. A summary reciting everything from instruction onwards is a second file to read, not a route through the first. The supervising partner should also read a sample of the leaver's matters while the leaver is still there to answer questions, not months later when the answer has gone.
One regulatory point holds in principle. The SRA's Standards and Regulations expect a firm to supervise the work it does, to act competently and to keep clients properly informed. Where a handover leaves a matter unattended or a client uninformed, that is the firm's failure and not the departing fee earner's.
The pack on the morning the resignation arrives
Bracton is a case and client management platform, and the Bracton AI Assistant is an add-on that plugs into the case management or CRM system a firm already runs, LEAP, Clio or Proclaim among them, through the API those systems publish. It reads across the whole caseload overnight rather than one open file, drafts routine work, flags matters that have drifted, and puts every output in front of a qualified fee earner for sign-off before anything leaves the firm. It also produces a handover pack for a named fee earner on demand, built from the matter record rather than memory, covering the live matters, the position on each, the next dates, the open undertakings and the outstanding client correspondence. Everything in the pack cites the file it came from, and the firm gets it on the morning the resignation arrives rather than at the end of the notice period. A firm free to change system takes the platform, a firm tied into another contract takes the assistant on its own, and what it pays for it is credited against the platform in full if it moves within twelve months of starting.
Test this against your own files. Pick the fee earner whose resignation would cost you most, and ask what the firm holds on those matters without asking them anything. If the honest answer is not much, watch the demonstration to see what a file that answers for itself looks like, then start the written exercise on your own records: book a client account review.