A partner opens the work in progress report in August and finds a matter where the last recorded entry is dated the fourth of March. The work was done, the time was recorded to the minute, and nobody has rendered a bill in the five months since.
Put an illustrative figure on it. Take a firm of ten fee earners with forty matters carrying recorded time that has sat unbilled for more than ninety days, at an average of around £9,000 a matter. That is £360,000 the firm has earned and has not asked for, sitting on the system while the overdraft covers the gap and the bank charges you interest on money your clients already owe you.
None of this is a time recording failure. What went wrong sits in the space between recording and rendering, which belongs to nobody. Disbursements leave the office account in April and come back in October, if they come back. At month end the partners bill what they can bring to mind under pressure, so the matters touched last week go out and the ones finished in the spring stay where they are. When a bill finally lands on work done half a year earlier, the client treats it as a surprise rather than a settlement, telephones to query it, and negotiates. You write part of it off, because arguing about a matter the client thought had ended long ago costs more in goodwill than the sum in dispute.
What the age of your work in progress tells you
Run an age report on work in progress by matter and by fee earner, and read it every month rather than as part of the year end exercise. Read monthly, it tells you what to do next, because you can deal with a matter unbilled at sixty days while the file is warm, and the same matter at two hundred days becomes a negotiation.
Set billing milestones at the outset and record them in the client care letter. Exchange, issue of proceedings, completion of disclosure, the end of a defined stage, whichever points fit the matter type. A milestone bill requires nobody to remember anything, because the trigger is an event on the file rather than a partner's recollection. It also puts the cost in front of the client in the same month they saw the work, which is when they are most willing to pay for it.
Recoverability falls with age for reasons unconnected to the quality of the work. Memory fades on both sides. Your fee earner no longer recalls why the attendance in the second week of March ran to two hours, and the client no longer recalls asking for it. A scope change or an unexpected disbursement is a short conversation while the client still recognises the work, and an argument once the file has gone cold. Bill monthly and you are lending your clients nothing. Bill at nine months and you have been their creditor without agreeing terms and without charging interest.
There is a regulatory dimension. The SRA Standards and Regulations expect you to give clients the best possible information about the likely overall cost of their matter at the outset, and to keep that information current as the matter develops. A bill that arrives after months of silence, on work the client had stopped thinking about, sits badly against that expectation. It is a client care problem before it is a cash problem.
The report nobody has to remember to run
The Bracton AI Assistant reads every live matter overnight through the interface your existing case management system already exposes, whether that is LEAP, Clio, Proclaim or another. Nothing is migrated and nothing is replaced. Because it works across the whole caseload rather than the one file someone has open, it flags every matter where recorded time has aged past the billing point, drafts the bill narrative from the file's own record of what was done, and prepares the covering letter in your house style. Every output goes to a qualified fee earner for sign off before it leaves the firm. One limit is worth stating plainly. Working through another vendor's interface, the assistant sees what that interface exposes, and some systems expose the ledger thinly or not at all, so the accounts side stays out of reach until a firm moves. Inside Bracton, the case and client management platform, there is no interface in the way and the assistant reads and writes the same record as the ledger.
Pull the age report, work out how much of the total predates the last quarter, and set that number beside your overdraft balance. If the two look similar, the work has been done and the asking has not. Watch the demonstration work an invented firm in your browser, then start in writing on the money you hold for clients: book a client account review.