The application came before me on a Monday morning list, asking for another eight weeks to serve expert medical evidence. The witness statement in support gave one explanation, which was that the claimant’s GP and hospital records had been requested in March, had never arrived, and nobody had written again until September, a fortnight before the deadline.
I read that statement twice. The solicitor had done the first part well. The letter was on the file, correctly addressed, with the client’s signed authority enclosed. What the file lacked was a second letter, a telephone note or a diary entry that would have told someone by the end of April that the reply was overdue. The request had gone out and the matter had moved on without it.
When I sat as a judge I saw the same pattern with every kind of record. Medical notes, police reports, an employer’s personnel file, local authority records, bank statements and a previous firm’s file all go the same way. Each request leaves the office as a letter, and a letter on a file looks like progress. Nothing prompts anyone to ask whether it produced an answer until a disclosure deadline arrives, an expert asks for the notes before accepting instructions, or a witness statement cannot be finalised without them.
Courts expect parties to comply with directions, and they expect a party that cannot comply to ask for more time before the deadline passes. An application made afterwards starts from a weaker position, and the explanation the court hears is often the one I heard that Monday. A third party’s silence accounts for some of the delay. It does not account for six months in which nobody noticed the silence.
Treat every request as an open item
The remedy costs nothing and needs no software. Log every request sent to a third party as an open item, with the date it went, the person or body it went to, and the date by which you expect a reply. Set that date from your experience of the recipient. A subject access request generally carries a response period of one month, which the organisation can extend in some cases, so a request made on that footing gives you a date to hold the recipient to. Other routes have no statutory clock, which makes your own date more important.
Chase on a set rhythm. A firm that writes again a week after the expected reply date, and telephones a week after that, will know within a month whether the records are coming. If they are not, escalate. Depending on who holds the records and why, that might mean a subject access request in the client’s name, consideration of an application to the court for disclosure by a non-party, or a plain letter telling the client that the records are late and what that means for the timetable.
Tie each request to the date that depends on it. A request for hospital notes matters because the expert needs them by a particular date, and the expert’s report matters because the court has fixed a date for exchange. When the request, the reply date and the dependent deadline sit side by side, the fee earner can see how much slack remains, and an extension application, if one is needed, goes in while there is still time to make it properly.
Supervisors can test this in a few minutes. Pick five live files. For each one, list every request sent to a third party and the date the answer arrived. Any request with no answer and no chaser is the problem this article describes, and five files will tell you whether you are looking at one lapse or a habit across the department.
A list that is read every night
The Bracton AI Assistant connects to the case management system your firm already runs, whether that is LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another. Overnight it reads every live matter, finds requests sent to third parties with no reply on file, and sets each one against the dates that depend on it. For each gap it drafts the chaser or the escalation, and a qualified fee earner approves, amends or discards the draft. Nothing goes out without that sign off. A firm that moves to Bracton itself finds the same tracking in the platform.
Run the five file test on your own matters this week and note how many requests have gone unanswered without a chaser. If the number surprises you, and you want to see what the assistant finds across every live file in the firm, book a client account review.