Take an illustrative purchase of a terraced house for £240,000 on a fixed fee of £1,350 plus VAT. Two weeks in, the buyer asks whether the rear fence belongs to the property, and the fee earner checks the title plan and answers by email that afternoon.
A month later the same buyer asks how to deal with a gift from a parent towards the deposit, and then whether to make a will before moving in. Each answer goes out the same day, because the client is pleasant and each question looks small. By completion the file holds advice on a boundary, on a beneficial interest and on a will, and the client care letter still describes the purchase of a freehold house. Nobody agreed a fee for the extra work, nobody told the client who would handle it, and if the fence answer was wrong the claim lands on a file whose paperwork says the firm did a conveyance.
How a retainer widens without anyone deciding
Scope seldom changes through one request. It changes through a run of small ones, answered in good faith, often by telephone, and often by the person who knows the client best rather than the person who practises in that area. The fee earner sees good service. A complaint handler or an insurer reading the file a year later sees a solicitor who took on work outside the retainer without saying what it would cost or who would supervise it.
Two consequences follow. The first is cost. Time spent outside the agreed scope either goes unbilled, or it arrives on a bill the client never expected, and unexpected costs and poor costs information sit among the complaint themes the Legal Ombudsman reports year after year. The second is liability. A solicitor who answers a question takes responsibility for the answer, whatever the letter of engagement says, and a quick reply on an unfamiliar point carries the exposure of formal advice without the care that formal advice receives.
Keeping the letter level with the work
The discipline is easy to state and harder to keep. When a client asks for something the client care letter does not cover, the fee earner stops before answering and decides whether the request falls inside the agreed work. If it does not, tell the client so in writing, name the person in the firm who deals with that kind of matter, and give the fee or an estimate before anyone starts. A short email confirming the extension is enough, provided it sits on the file beside the original letter.
Where the firm declines the extra work, record that too. Some points fall outside the retainer and still call for a warning, such as a limitation date the client has mentioned in passing or a survey nobody commissioned, and a line telling the client to take advice on it protects the client and the firm alike.
Supervisors can test this in ten minutes a file. Read the client care letter, then the last three months of correspondence and attendance notes, and list every piece of advice the letter does not describe. The SRA Standards and Regulations expect clients to receive the best possible information about how their matter will be handled and what it will cost, both at the outset and as the matter moves on. A letter that stopped matching the file months ago falls short of that expectation, no matter how carefully someone drafted it on day one.
The Bracton AI Assistant connects to the case management system your firm already runs and reads every live matter overnight. It sets the emails, attendance notes and time entries on each file against the scope recorded at the start, and flags the matters where the advice has moved past it. For each one it drafts the email extending the retainer, with the fee earner’s rate or the firm’s fixed fee for the new work, and leaves it for a qualified fee earner to approve, amend or discard. Nothing goes to the client without that sign off. A firm that moves to Bracton itself finds the same comparison built into the platform. Either way, the supervisor sees a list of files where the letter and the work have parted company, rather than meeting them for the first time in a complaint.
Your own files make the best test. Pick five matters that have run for more than six months and set each client care letter beside the last ten letters out. If the two describe different pieces of work, and you want the same comparison run across every live matter in your system, book a client account review.