Latest / AI Legal Case Management: ten minutes on running a law firm with AI / The client who went quiet and then complained: client complaints and the files that go quiet

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The client who went quiet and then complained: client complaints and the files that go quiet · AI Legal Case Management: ten minutes on running a law firm with AI

• 0:09
  The third email in seven weeks arrives on a Monday morning from the executor of her father's estate, whose probate your firm has handled since February.
• 0:19
  For the last fourteen weeks the matter has waited on a pension provider that will not release a valuation until a former employer returns a form.
• 0:28
  The fee earner chased in July and again in September, and noted each chase on the file, none of which the executor saw.
• 0:36
  Her first email asked what happens next and got two lines back.
• 0:40
  Her second copied in her brother. This one numbers its questions, reminds you that at the first meeting she was told the estate would be wound up by the summer, and closes by asking for a copy of your complaints procedure.
• 0:55
  Welcome to AI Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton.
• 1:02
  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.
• 1:18
  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.
• 1:31
  This week, the client who went quiet and then complained.
• 1:35
  Start with a figure, and treat it as an illustration rather than a survey result.
• 1:40
  Picture a firm of ten fee earners carrying three hundred open files between them.
• 1:45
  On an ordinary morning, forty of those files have had no outbound contact with the client in six weeks.
• 1:52
  Most are waiting on somebody else, and a handful have drifted because a chase was missed or a diary entry lost.
• 1:58
  On the case list the two kinds look identical. Now put a cost on one complaint that reaches the Legal Ombudsman.
• 2:06
  A supervisor spends twenty hours on the file, the response and the correspondence that follows, and the firm writes off a fee of fifteen hundred pounds to bring it to an end.
• 2:17
  Those numbers are illustrative too. One figure here is real.
• 2:22
  In its complaints data for the year to March twenty twenty five, the Legal Ombudsman recorded poor communication as the most common reason for a complaint, at twenty four per cent, with delay and failure to progress close behind at twenty three per cent.
• 2:38
  Read those two categories together and they describe one problem.
• 2:43
  Clients complain about the silence rather than the delay. The executor would have waited fourteen weeks without complaint had someone written each month to say the pension provider still held the valuation.
• 2:57
  The file can be in perfect order, with every chase noted, and still produce a complaint, because the client sees none of the work that the file records.
• 3:07
  Unhappy clients also change how they write before they say they are unhappy.
• 3:12
  Someone who wrote in loose paragraphs starts numbering questions.
• 3:16
  A spouse or an adult child appears in copy. The client stops asking what happens next and asks what the position is, which is the question people put when they suspect nothing has happened.
• 3:30
  They quote the first meeting back at you, or raise cost when no bill is due.
• 3:35
  Most grievances are lost in the reply. The ninety second answer that says the matter is progressing and the client will be updated in due course reports activity where the client asked for a position, offers no date, and reads as impatience.
• 3:53
  The SRA Standards and Regulations expect a firm to keep clients informed about the progress of their matter, to tell clients how to complain, and to deal with complaints promptly and fairly.
• 4:07
  From the bench, when a dispute between a firm and its client reaches court, the judge reads the correspondence in date order, and the gap where the client wrote twice and the firm did not answer is the first thing on the page.
• 4:22
  Whatever account the firm gives afterwards, that the matter was in hand and the client knew it, gets weighed against what the file shows was said at the time.
• 4:33
  An explanation offered a year later does not replace a letter the file shows nobody wrote.
• 4:39
  Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software.
• 4:44
  One. Set a fixed contact interval on every live matter, monthly for most work, and send the holding update when it falls due.
• 4:53
  Where nothing has changed, the update says so and explains why, naming whoever the matter is waiting on.
• 4:59
  Two. Give correspondence that carries the markers to a reader other than the fee earner running the file.
• 5:06
  Three. Write the reply that answers the question the client asked, in the terms they asked it.
• 5:13
  Acknowledge plainly that they had to ask twice, without defending why, and give one next step with a date on it that the firm then keeps.
• 5:22
  Four. Have a senior person decide whether a message is a complaint under the firm's procedure.
• 5:28
  The fee earner being complained about has the least appetite for logging it.
• 5:33
  Five. Each month, produce a list of every matter with no outbound client contact in a set period, and have a partner read it.
• 5:42
  Points one, two and five depend on somebody reading every file and every inbound email, and that is the work Bracton takes on.
• 5:50
  The assistant, which we call Henry, is built into the Bracton platform and also sold on its own to run inside the system your firm already has.
• 6:00
  Overnight it reads every live file it can reach and finds the matters where no contact has gone out to the client for a period your firm sets.
• 6:09
  It separates the files waiting on a known next step from the ones that have drifted.
• 6:14
  It reads inbound correspondence for the markers I described, raises the matter to a supervisor with the wording that triggered it, and drafts the holding update or the reply from your firm's own precedents.
• 6:27
  It drafts and flags. It does not send, and it does not decide that a message is a complaint, because that judgement belongs to a qualified fee earner, who signs off every output before anything goes anywhere.
• 6:40
  Nothing leaves the firm in the assistant's name, and every action sits on the record.
• 6:46
  Now the honest limit. The assistant reads what the file holds.
• 6:50
  A conversation on the telephone that nobody wrote down is invisible to it.
• 6:55
  And where the assistant runs inside another vendor's system, it sees what that system's interface exposes.
• 7:02
  The platform is one hundred and eighty five pounds for each person a month on a standard seat.
• 7:08
  The assistant on its own is one hundred and fifteen pounds. Both are plus VAT, there are heavier seats for document heavy work, and every price is published on the website.
• 7:19
  Choose one desk. Take one fee earner's twenty oldest open matters and find the date of the last outbound contact with the client on each.
• 7:27
  Wherever that date is more than six weeks ago, open the client's last two emails and read them for the markers, the numbered questions, the new name in copy, the question asked twice.
• 7:39
  Where you find them, have someone other than the fee earner write the reply this week.
• 7:45
  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 which of your own files have gone quiet, the free hour on your own files is on the same site.
• 8:02
  Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.