WEBVTT 1 00:00:09.060 --> 00:00:17.300 An order arrives by email on a Monday morning. Unless the claimant serves its list of documents by four o'clock on Friday, the claim will be struck out. 2 00:00:18.240 --> 00:00:21.540 The fee earner opens the file to find out how it came to this. 3 00:00:22.200 --> 00:00:28.760 The last entry is seven weeks old, a letter to the other side proposing new dates for disclosure, never answered. 4 00:00:29.480 --> 00:00:35.700 The client was last told anything in August. Nobody chased the reply, because nobody noticed it had not come. 5 00:00:36.440 --> 00:00:40.360 The other side had noticed, and their next communication was the application. 6 00:00:41.479 --> 00:00:47.180 Welcome to AI Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton. 7 00:00:48.120 --> 00:01:02.940 I am Saqib Khan. I owned a law firm for fourteen years, sat as a fee-paid county court judge for four, and I now build Bracton, a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the start. 8 00:01:03.900 --> 00:01:15.680 Every Thursday I take one problem that every firm owner recognises, set out what a well run firm does about it whether or not it buys anything, and then tell you plainly where Bracton fits. 9 00:01:16.660 --> 00:01:19.900 This week, the file nobody has opened for a month. 10 00:01:21.300 --> 00:01:25.700 Here is a figure, and it is an illustration, not a survey result. 11 00:01:26.600 --> 00:01:30.860 Take a firm of ten fee earners, each carrying sixty live matters. 12 00:01:31.380 --> 00:01:38.940 That is six hundred files. Suppose one file in twenty goes a month without a step that moves it forward. 13 00:01:39.680 --> 00:01:45.420 On any given morning, thirty files are drifting, and the firm has no list of which thirty they are. 14 00:01:45.600 --> 00:01:52.400 The first reason is that activity looks like progress. A file can show entries every week and still go nowhere. 15 00:01:53.140 --> 00:02:01.660 An automated acknowledgement, a time entry for reading an email, a document saved to the file, all of these make a matter look attended to. 16 00:02:02.460 --> 00:02:10.200 What none of them does is take the next step. Ask when a file last moved and most firms will answer when it was last touched. 17 00:02:11.180 --> 00:02:24.160 Waiting on the other side is the second. When the last letter went out from your office, the file feels as though it is someone else's turn, and a fee earner with a full desk turns to the matters with a deadline this week. 18 00:02:25.300 --> 00:02:29.420 Silence from the other side is rarely neutral. Sometimes they are slow. 19 00:02:30.180 --> 00:02:36.140 Sometimes they are preparing an application, or letting a deadline run that suits their client better than yours. 20 00:02:37.100 --> 00:02:43.900 Then there is the file nobody wants to open, where the client is difficult or the next step is a hard telephone call. 21 00:02:44.740 --> 00:02:50.220 There is always something easier to do first. From the bench, the drifting file arrives in a familiar form. 22 00:02:50.920 --> 00:02:55.900 A party has missed a step, a sanction has followed, and the application asks for relief from it. 23 00:02:56.720 --> 00:03:07.360 On an application for relief under rule three point nine of the Civil Procedure Rules, the court asks how serious the failure was, why it happened, and all the circumstances of the case. 24 00:03:08.520 --> 00:03:16.980 An explanation that the file was overlooked, or that the fee earner was busy, carries little weight, because pressure of work will rarely count as a good reason. 25 00:03:17.660 --> 00:03:20.900 And an unless order is different from an ordinary direction. 26 00:03:21.500 --> 00:03:30.780 If the party does not comply, the sanction takes effect without anyone returning to court, and the burden of putting it right falls on the party in default. 27 00:03:31.700 --> 00:03:37.780 By the time the file reaches a judge, the month nobody opened it is what the application has to explain. 28 00:03:38.980 --> 00:03:42.980 Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software. 29 00:03:44.120 --> 00:03:55.040 One. Define substantive activity in writing. A letter of substance sent, a document served, advice given to the client, a step taken in proceedings. 30 00:03:55.620 --> 00:04:00.260 A filing note, a time entry or an automated reply does not count. 31 00:04:01.520 --> 00:04:08.160 Two. Give every live file a next action and a date. The field is never blank. 32 00:04:08.840 --> 00:04:13.180 When the action is done, the fee earner writes the next one before closing the file. 33 00:04:13.300 --> 00:04:22.640 Three. Treat the other side's silence as a date in itself. When a letter goes out that needs a reply, diarise the chase at the same moment. 34 00:04:23.340 --> 00:04:34.880 If there is no answer after fourteen days, chase. If there is still nothing after a further fortnight, the fee earner decides, with the supervisor, whether to propose a timetable or go to the court. 35 00:04:35.800 --> 00:04:44.760 Where a deadline needs moving, the rules allow the parties to agree an extension of up to twenty eight days in writing, provided it does not put a hearing date at risk. 36 00:04:46.520 --> 00:04:59.140 Four. Run a dormancy list once a month. Every file with no substantive activity in thirty days goes on it, oldest first, and a supervisor reads each entry, not the count. 37 00:05:00.020 --> 00:05:05.260 A file that is waiting on a fixed date for a sound reason comes off with a note saying so. 38 00:05:06.260 --> 00:05:14.460 Every other file leaves with an action and a name. Five. Fix the client update interval when the file opens. 39 00:05:15.280 --> 00:05:23.940 Put it in the client care letter, monthly or whatever suits the matter, and keep to it even when the only news is that nothing has changed and why. 40 00:05:24.900 --> 00:05:29.860 A client told that the file is waiting on the other side does not need to complain to find out. 41 00:05:31.320 --> 00:05:38.520 Each of those points depends on someone reading every file on a regular cycle, and that is the work Bracton takes on. 42 00:05:38.680 --> 00:05:45.940 The assistant, built into the Bracton platform and also sold on its own, reads every live matter it can reach overnight. 43 00:05:46.740 --> 00:05:52.160 By the morning each fee earner has a list of the files needing attention, with the next action drafted. 44 00:05:52.940 --> 00:06:00.240 A matter with no substantive activity for a month is one of the things that list is built to flag, and so is a client who has gone quiet. 45 00:06:01.060 --> 00:06:07.280 It drafts the chaser for the unanswered letter and the update for the client, both from your firm's own precedents. 46 00:06:08.460 --> 00:06:16.020 Nothing leaves the firm unsigned. A qualified fee earner signs off every output, and every action sits in an audit trail. 47 00:06:16.780 --> 00:06:22.100 The sweep runs every working day, never on a Saturday, a Sunday or a bank holiday. 48 00:06:23.180 --> 00:06:27.480 Now the honest limit. The assistant reads what the file holds. 49 00:06:28.120 --> 00:06:33.560 A telephone call with the other side that nobody noted leaves the file looking dormant when it is not. 50 00:06:34.500 --> 00:06:40.280 Where the assistant runs inside another vendor's system, it sees what that system's interface exposes. 51 00:06:41.140 --> 00:06:46.340 And the decision whether to apply to the court stays with your fee earner and your supervisor. 52 00:06:47.400 --> 00:06:50.420 The platform is one hundred and eighty five pounds a fee earner a month. 53 00:06:51.100 --> 00:06:58.100 The assistant, running inside the case management system you already have, is one hundred and fifteen pounds a fee earner a month. 54 00:06:58.960 --> 00:07:04.540 One published price each, the same for any size of firm, and both are on the website. 55 00:07:04.820 --> 00:07:17.240 Choose one desk. Take that fee earner's live matters and, for each one, write down the date of the last substantive step, using the definition from point one rather than the date of the last entry. 56 00:07:18.000 --> 00:07:26.980 Then sort the list, oldest first. Read the top five files yourself, and for each one ask what happens next and who is doing it. 57 00:07:27.940 --> 00:07:33.660 If the answer to either question is nobody knows, you have found your first drifting file. 58 00:07:34.760 --> 00:07:54.300 That is AI Case Management for this week. The transcript, with a timestamp on every line, sits with the episode at bracton legal dot co dot uk, and if you would like to see what an overnight read of a caseload looks like on your own matters, the free hour on your own files is on the same site. 59 00:07:55.400 --> 00:07:57.980 Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.