A fee earner takes instructions in a client's front room on a Tuesday evening, opens the file the next morning and starts work that week. The client care letter goes out with no cancellation notice attached, and two months later the client goes elsewhere and disputes the bill, leaving the firm no enforceable claim to an illustrative £4,800 of recorded time.
The reason sits in the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, which most firms know exist and few treat as a live operational risk. Drafted with doorstep selling and online shopping in mind, they catch a good deal of ordinary private practice.
Which retainers are caught
Two conditions do the work. The client has to be a consumer, acting outside a trade or profession, and the contract has to be made away from the firm's premises or at a distance with no face to face contact at all. A retainer agreed in a client's home is an off premises contract. So is one taken at a hospital bedside. A retainer settled wholly by telephone and email, where solicitor and client never meet, is a distance contract. Private client, conveyancing, family and personal injury work throw these up week after week.
The client then has fourteen days to cancel. For a services contract that period runs from the day the contract is made, not from the first invoice or the first substantive piece of work. Before the contract is made the firm has to give prescribed information, which includes notice of the right to cancel and a model cancellation form. Where that information does not go out, the cancellation period extends by up to a year, so a matter that closed months ago remains open to cancellation.
Work inside the fourteen days needs the client's express request, and for an off premises contract that request has to arrive on paper or in another durable form, which rules out an attendance note of a conversation. Where the client asks for early performance and then cancels, the firm can charge a proportionate amount for what it did, but only where the required information was given first. Where it was not, the client pays nothing for anything supplied in that period, whatever time stands recorded against the matter.
Separately from the Regulations, the SRA expects a client to be told clearly at the outset what the firm will do and what it will cost. The two sets of obligations point the same way, and a firm that treats engagement as an administrative afterthought fails both at once.
The record that decides it
The failure is almost never a missing form in the client care pack. Most firms hold the wording in a precedent bank, drafted by someone competent years ago. What goes wrong is that nothing on the file records which category the contract fell into, when it was made, when the fourteen days expire, whether the notice went out and whether the express request came back signed. A dispute two months on turns on those points, and by then nobody remembers where the meeting took place.
A firm should be able to produce, on any given morning, a list of every matter currently inside a cancellation period, with the date the period expires and whether time has been recorded against it. Most of that list will be routine. The exception worth reading is the matter carrying recorded time inside the window with no express request on file, because the work has been done and the entitlement to charge for it does not exist. Picking that up on day three costs a telephone call. Picking it up on day sixty costs the bill.
Finding that pattern is what the Bracton AI Assistant does, because it reads across the whole caseload rather than one open file. It connects to LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another system through the API those systems already expose, so nothing has to move. The assistant derives the cancellation expiry from the matter opening record rather than waiting for someone to diary it, then puts the exception in front of a qualified fee earner for sign off. Nothing leaves the firm without that sign off. Firms wanting the same discipline built into the system itself run Bracton, the case and client management platform.
A client account review reads an export of the client ledgers, cash book and bank statements against the SRA Accounts Rules, so it does not open correspondence and it will not tell a firm whether its cancellation notices went out. What it does show is how a firm's own records stand up when somebody reads them properly, which is the question a cancellation dispute asks in another form. Partners who want that first written exercise on their own records can book a client account review.