At ten to six the tray on a partner’s desk holds twenty two letters, three attendance notes and a reply to the other side’s solicitors, each drafted by someone else during the day and each waiting for a signature before the post goes. Allow two minutes a document, an illustrative and generous figure, and the pile needs fifty minutes the partner does not have. It gets twenty instead, and most letters receive a glance at the opening paragraph and the name at the top.
Nobody in that firm decided to stop supervising. The signature still goes on every letter, and the file will show that a partner approved each one. What the file cannot show is whether the partner knew what the letter was answering, whether the figure in the third paragraph matched the completion statement, or whether the firm can keep the date it promised the client. When one of those letters goes wrong, the signature becomes evidence against the firm rather than for it, because it records approval without recording that anything was checked.
The SRA Standards and Regulations put the expectation plainly in principle. You stay accountable for work carried out through others, and a firm must supervise the work done for its clients effectively. A signature on a letter nobody read meets neither expectation, and a regulator or an insurer looking at a complaint will ask what the review consisted of, not whether a name appears at the foot of the page.
Why the pile defeats the reader
The cause is rarely a lack of care. A draft reaches the reviewer stripped of its context. The letter says the client accepts the offer, and the reviewer has to recall what the offer was, whether the client accepted it in writing and whether the time for acceptance has passed. Each answer sits somewhere in the file, in an email, an attendance note or a diary entry, and finding them takes longer than reading the letter. Faced with twenty drafts and no context, a conscientious partner reads the first three closely and trusts the rest.
The second cause is quieter. The reviewer cannot see what the drafter was unsure about. A trainee who guessed at a date writes it with the same confidence as a colleague who checked it against the order, and nothing on the page tells the partner which is which. The doubt existed at four o’clock, in the head of the person who typed the letter, and it never travelled with the draft.
Put the source beside the draft
The remedy costs nothing in software. Ask whoever prepares a draft for signature to attach a short note naming the paper it answers, the facts it relies on and where each sits on the file, and any point they were unsure of. A letter accepting an offer then arrives with the offer letter, the client’s written instruction and the date the offer was made. The reviewer checks the draft against its sources in the time a glance used to take, and the drafter’s doubts land on the desk of the one person able to resolve them.
Two further habits make the review count. Spread signing through the day, so the tray at six holds only what arrived after four. Then record what was checked, even in a few words on the file, so that the file shows what the review covered. Some firms add a rule that any letter carrying a date, a sum or advice on the merits goes back to the drafter if its source is missing. Within a few weeks the drafts start arriving with their papers attached, because a returned letter costs the drafter more time than attaching the source would have.
None of this asks partners to read more slowly. It asks the firm to stop sending them drafts that cannot be checked in the time available, and to keep a note of the checking when it happens.
The Bracton AI Assistant works to the same discipline. It connects to the case management or client system your firm already runs, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another, and reads every live matter overnight. Each reply, chaser or client update it drafts comes from your own precedents, is checked against the file before it reaches anyone, and then waits on the matter for a qualified fee earner to read and approve. When the fee earner asks what a point rests on, the answer names the paper and the page it came from, so the source opens in one step rather than after a search. Nothing leaves the firm in the assistant’s name, and the record shows what was proposed, who approved it and when. A letter approved without being read is still the firm’s letter, and the software does not pretend otherwise. What changes is how long a proper reading takes.
If you want to see the drafts for your own matters arrive with their sources beside them, the first step is to book a client account review.