A boundary dispute came before me on an ordinary Tuesday, two neighbours in a terraced street arguing over a strip of land a little more than a metre wide, and the answer sat in a conveyance from 1953 and the plan attached to it. The claimant's solicitors had held the pre registration deeds in safe custody for the family since the house last changed hands, and when I asked for the original the firm was unable to tell me where in its building the packet sat, or whether it sat in the building at all.
What the court had instead was a photocopy of a photocopy, on which the boundary line had thickened into something wide enough to cover the whole of the disputed strip. Nobody in that courtroom had behaved dishonestly. The firm had taken the deeds in years earlier, had written to the client to say so, and had since moved premises once and changed its filing arrangements twice. What followed was an adjournment, a further hearing and expert evidence on a question the original plan would have settled in minutes. Figures vary from case to case and I give these as illustration, but costs of several thousand pounds a side, over a strip of garden worth a fraction of that, is the shape of it.
The letter is not a record
Consider how an original reaches you. A client brings in a will on the day they sign it, a lender returns a share certificate, a set of pre registration deeds arrives from another firm in the middle of a transfer, or a power of attorney comes back from the donor bearing the original signatures. Somebody takes it, puts it somewhere sensible, and writes to the client confirming the firm holds it in safe custody. That letter goes on the correspondence file, the file closes, and four years later the fee earner who wrote it has moved to another practice. The only account of where the document sits is one sentence inside one letter inside a closed file nobody now has reason to open.
The failure is one of form rather than of care. Safe custody is a physical fact about an object in a building, and your firm has kept it as a piece of prose. Prose cannot be sorted by client, counted, or checked against a shelf. The item is likely still where it was put, and nobody in the firm can show that it is. Ask your practice this afternoon how many original wills it holds and for whom, and you will be given an estimate rather than an answer.
One item, one entry
The remedy starts with a register rather than software. One entry for each item, recording what the item is, whose property it is, where in the building it physically sits, the date it came in, the matter it came in on, and whether it has since gone back out. Then test it in both directions. Take twenty entries at random and find the items on the shelf, then take twenty items off the shelf and find their entries. Most registers pass the first test and fail the second, because a firm records what it remembers and misses what it never noticed.
An original arriving on a matter goes on the register that day, entered by whoever receives it, rather than at closure when memories of who handed over what have thinned. The proof is the telephone call. A daughter rings to say her mother has died and asks whether you hold the will, or a purchaser's solicitor wants the pre registration deeds because the title carries a defect the register does not cure. You should answer either of them the same day, with the location and the date of receipt, rather than in a fortnight after somebody has searched the basement. The SRA expects you to safeguard money and assets entrusted to you by clients and others, and to run effective systems and controls for meeting your obligations. A register nobody has tested is not an effective control.
The Bracton AI Assistant plugs into the case management or CRM system your firm already runs, LEAP or Clio or Proclaim among others, through its API, and reads the correspondence and attendance notes across the caseload overnight. It surfaces every place where a file records an original document coming in, so your register is built from what your files say rather than typed from memory, and it flags the matters where an original arrives and nothing records it going back. A qualified fee earner reviews each entry and signs it off before it becomes the firm's record. The assistant is built into Bracton, the case and client management platform that holds the matters, the diary and the ledgers in one system.
One night's reading of your own files will tell you more than any account of somebody else's. To see what your matters say about the originals you hold, book a client account review.