Take a matter where the client paid £2,500 on account in March, and an interim bill in May absorbed the whole of it. By September the time recorded since that bill comes to £6,500, nobody has asked the client for another penny, and the first they hear of the position is a bill for the balance. The work was properly done and the time was properly recorded. What failed is that nobody set the ledger and the unbilled time beside each other while there was still something to be done about them.
Money paid on account of costs is client money. It is held for that client on that matter, it stays the client's until the firm has earned it and delivered a bill properly, and only then does the sum move across to office account. The SRA Accounts Rules are built on that separation. A matter running on exhausted funds is not carrying a small overdraft. The firm is doing unbilled work at its own expense, holding no security for it, for a client who has no idea the position has changed.
Firms rarely lose that money outright. What they lose is the chance to have the conversation early. A request for a further payment made in month four, while the client is content with how the matter is going, lands differently from the same request made in month nine beside a bill for £6,500. In the first case the client funds work they can see in front of them. In the second they pay for work already finished at a level they never agreed to.
The moment the funds run out is a costs conversation
The SRA Standards and Regulations expect a solicitor to give the client the best information available about how the matter will be priced and what it is likely to cost overall, at the point of engagement and again as the matter develops. That second part carries the weight here. An estimate given in March describes the matter as it was understood in March. Once the work has consumed the money held and carries on past it, the client's picture has gone out of date, and the firm knows that while the client does not. Saying so at the time discharges a duty the firm already owes rather than adding an awkward step to the file.
It also protects the bill. A client told in month four that the money on account had gone, given a revised figure and asked for a further £2,500, has little to complain about when the final bill arrives. One who hears nothing until that bill lands has a straightforward complaint about service, and complaints of that shape reach the Legal Ombudsman readily.
Read the ledger against the work in progress every month
The test is plain to state and awkward to run. Once a month, for every matter holding money on account, put the client ledger balance next to the unbilled time recorded on the same matter. Where unbilled time reaches something like seventy per cent of the sum held, the matter goes on a list for the fee earner and the supervisor. The choice from there is to ask for a further payment, to revise the estimate in writing, or to bill the work done so far while the client is still comfortable with it.
Most firms reach for those two numbers only at billing time, by which point the decision has been taken by default. The figures also live apart. Time recording sits in one part of the case management system, the ledger sits with the accounts team, and nobody owns the join. A report can usually bring the two together, but somebody has to run it every month and act on what it shows, and that step slips first when the week gets busy.
This is where the Bracton AI Assistant sits. It plugs into the case management system a firm already runs, reads every live matter overnight, and puts each output in front of a qualified fee earner for sign off. Working through another vendor's interface it sees what that interface exposes, and some systems expose the ledger thinly or not at all, so this work stays out of reach until a firm moves across. Inside Bracton there is no interface in the way. The assistant reads the client ledger and the time record on a matter as one thing, and raises it with the fee earner in the week the funds run low rather than the month after the bill went out.
Run the exercise on your own files first. Take the twenty matters holding the largest sums on account, set the unbilled time against what remains of each, and count how many have passed the line without anyone noticing. If you would rather work through it with us, book a client account review.