On a Monday morning the case management system does not load. Your supplier says at ten that it is investigating and the same at noon at greater length, and the question everybody in the building wants answered sits inside the thing that has stopped, which is what falls due this fortnight and on whose file.
Take an illustrative firm of thirty fee earners carrying nine hundred live matters. Assume one matter in six has something dated attached to it in any ten working day window, a hearing, a filing deadline, a limitation date, a completion, an undertaking with a date on it. That gives a hundred and fifty obligations moving through ten days, and every one belongs to a client with no interest in your supplier's status page. The ratio is illustrative and yours will differ. The number is large, it falls unevenly across the week, and for as long as the system is down nobody in your firm can see it.
Continuity is written as an IT plan and tested as a legal one
Most firms write business continuity as a technology document. It records backup frequency, failover arrangements, a recovery time objective of four hours and a recovery point objective of fifteen minutes, and it is signed off because those numbers look responsible. They are the wrong numbers. A four hour restore tells you when the software comes back. It tells you nothing about the hearing listed for half past ten that morning, the undertaking given to a lender last Thursday, or the client who has heard nothing for a week and has started drafting a complaint.
The test that matters is whether your firm can name its obligations to clients and to the court for the next fortnight while the system is unavailable, and whether anybody holds that answer somewhere other than inside the software. Work back from that. You need a standing extract of key dates, hearings, undertakings and completions that lives outside the case management system, refreshes on a schedule and opens on a phone. You need to have settled in advance who speaks to clients and to the court about a delay, because a partner improvising on a Monday afternoon will say something the firm regrets. You need a position on who applies to extend time and on what evidence, since a court receives an application made on day one with a clear account far better than one made on day nine with an apology.
Rehearse the plan rather than filing it, because the first run of it should not be the morning it is needed. Treat a supplier outage as you would treat a fire or a flood in your own building, since from where the client sits the effect is the same, work that has stopped without warning and without a date for resuming. Where the incident touches personal data, and outages often do, reporting duties of your own attach and run to their own timetable rather than your supplier's. The SRA Standards and Regulations expect a firm to run effective systems and controls and to keep client matters moving, and that expectation does not lift because the software stopped.
The list you needed before you needed it
This is where a connected assistant earns its place, and the claim is a narrow one. The Bracton AI Assistant is built into Bracton, the case and client management platform, and a firm contracted to another system runs the assistant against what it already has, LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another system with an interface. Overnight it reads every live matter and produces a derived record of what is coming, the dates, the undertakings, the outstanding items and the files that have stopped moving. That record sits outside the system it was read from, which follows from the way the work is done rather than from any design for a bad morning. Every output goes to a qualified fee earner for sign off before it reaches a client or a court.
Be clear about what this is not. It is not a backup. It restores nothing and does not stand in for the arrangements your supplier owes you under contract. What it holds is the answer to the question an outage asks, being what falls due, when, and on which matter, prepared on an ordinary Tuesday when nobody needed it.
To test the principle on your own records rather than on the argument, start with the part that stands on its own. A client account review reads an export of your client ledgers, the cash book and bank statements against the SRA Accounts Rules and nothing else. It does not open your diary or your matter files, and it will not tell you what falls due next fortnight. What it will tell you is whether one set of your records survives an independent read by somebody who did not keep them, which is the same discipline applied to a smaller question. If that is where you want to start, book a client account review.