A caller rings on a Tuesday about selling a freehold house, and she opens with a number she read on your own website, say £850 plus VAT and disbursements. Your conveyancer knows the quote going out will sit nearer £1,250, because the firm lifted its fees eighteen months ago and nobody went back to the page. The call now carries two subjects, the sale itself and the gap between the two figures, and the second takes up most of it.
Firms doing certain kinds of work for members of the public have to publish price and service information on their websites. That material has to set out the basis of the charges, what happens with VAT and disbursements, who will carry out the work and what qualifications and experience they hold, and how long a matter of that type usually takes. What you publish then has to stay accurate as the firm changes around it. Work commonly caught includes residential conveyancing, uncontested probate, employment claims for unfair or wrongful dismissal, debt recovery, motoring offences, immigration applications and licensing applications for business premises.
Almost every price page I have read was written once, when the site was built, often by a marketing agency working from a note sent over on a Friday. It was accurate that week. Since then the firm has put its rates up, lost a senior fee earner and given the work to a paralegal under supervision, and started turning freehold sales round in a different number of weeks. The page carries none of it.
Three harms from one stale page
The first harm is regulatory, and it does not wait for a complaint. The requirement is not that you published something once, it is that what you publish stays accurate and current. A page describing charges the firm abandoned two years ago fails that on the day it goes stale, whether or not a client noticed, and whether or not your compliance officer has looked at the website since it launched.
The second harm is commercial and it runs in both directions. Where the published range sits below what you now charge, the fee earner spends the opening minutes of every enquiry explaining a difference the client did not expect, and often gives something away to settle it, so the page discounts the work without anyone deciding to. Where the published range sits above what you would now take, say a probate page still showing a percentage basis the firm abandoned, the enquiry never reaches the telephone and you never learn that it existed.
The third harm reaches client care. A client who read one figure on Monday and received a different one in the client care letter on Thursday begins the retainer already doubting the costs information, and that doubt attaches to everything after it, the estimate, the interim bill and the final account. Complaints of that shape are hard to answer, because the document the client relies on is your own, and you wrote it.
Test the claim against your files
This is not a drafting exercise. A published price is a claim about your own matters, so test it against your own matters. Take the last twenty completed files in each work type you publish and pull four things from each, the costs the firm recorded and billed, the disbursements that went out, the grade of the person who did the work, and the elapsed time from instruction to completion. Put those twenty beside the website and read them together. Most firms have never run that comparison, and the reason is structural rather than idle. The data sits in the case management system and the claim sits on the website, and nobody in the firm owns both.
That part of the problem suits software reading the system of record. The Bracton AI Assistant plugs into the case management system your firm already runs, whether that is LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another, and it reads the completed matters rather than a sample of them. It sets your recorded cost, your disbursements, the fee earner grade and the elapsed time for each published work type against what the website says, so the comparison arrives every month as an output instead of staying a project nobody starts. The same assistant is built into Bracton, the case and client management platform, for a firm free to change system, and a qualified fee earner signs off everything it produces either way.
If you want to see how that reading works on your own records, the first written exercise we run is on the client account. It reads your client ledgers, your cash book and your bank statements against the SRA Accounts Rules, and nothing else, and it returns what it finds in writing with every entry identified. That is short work on records you already hold, and it shows the standard we apply to everything else. If that is the order you would rather take it in, book a client account review.