Latest / AI Legal Case Management: ten minutes on running a law firm with AI / The time your firm never billed: unrecorded time and lost billing

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The time your firm never billed: unrecorded time and lost billing · AI Legal Case Management: ten minutes on running a law firm with AI

• 0:09
  Every fee earner in your firm did something chargeable this morning that nobody will ever bill.
• 0:15
  A four minute call taken between two meetings. An email answered on the train.
• 0:20
  A quick look at a file for a colleague who asked. Small things, forgotten by lunch.
• 0:26
  Add them up across a year and you are looking at the salary of a solicitor you never hired.
• 0:32
  Welcome to AI Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton.
• 0:38
  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.
• 0:54
  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.
• 1:07
  This week, the time your firm never billed.
• 1:10
  Start with a number, and I stress that it is an illustration rather than a survey figure.
• 1:15
  Take a fee earner charging two hundred and fifty pounds an hour.
• 1:18
  Suppose they lose twenty minutes a day to work that was done and never recorded.
• 1:23
  Not idle time. Chargeable work. Over two hundred and thirty working days that comes to seventy six hours, and at their rate it is about nineteen thousand pounds a year.
• 1:34
  For a firm of ten fee earners, that is the best part of two hundred thousand pounds of work carried out, paid for in salary, and never invoiced.
• 1:44
  In my experience twenty minutes a day is a cautious figure. Why does it happen?
• 1:49
  Three reasons, and none of them is laziness. The first is that recording time is a separate act from doing the work.
• 1:58
  The work happens at ten past nine. The entry happens at half past five, from memory, if it happens at all.
• 2:04
  By then the day has filled, and the entries that survive are the big ones.
• 2:09
  The hour on the witness statement gets recorded. The six minutes on the phone to the other side does not.
• 2:15
  The second is the quiet write off. A fee earner looks at a four minute email and decides, at their own desk, that it is not worth troubling the client with.
• 2:24
  So it never reaches the ledger. Nobody in the firm sees that decision, nobody approves it, and it happens twenty times a day across the building.
• 2:33
  The third is the system. A timer nobody starts. An entry form with six fields.
• 2:39
  A telephone call that lives on the phone system and never reaches the file.
• 2:44
  Every one of those is a small tax on the act of recording, and small taxes change behaviour.
• 2:51
  I will add one thing from the bench. When a bill was disputed, whether between solicitor and client or between the parties on an assessment of costs, the record made at the time carried the weight.
• 3:03
  A file showing that work was done, with no entry made when it was done, was the file that struggled.
• 3:10
  The firm with contemporaneous records was the firm the court found easier to believe.
• 3:15
  Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software.
• 3:20
  One. Record at the point of the work, not at the end of the day.
• 3:24
  Make the entry the last step of the act. No email goes without its entry, no call ends without its entry.
• 3:31
  It feels slower for a fortnight and then it is simply how the firm works.
• 3:37
  Two. Capture the small units. The six minute unit exists for a reason.
• 3:43
  A firm that records only the hour long tasks recovers only the hour long tasks.
• 3:49
  Three. Reconcile the file against the ledger. Once a week, put the activity on the file beside the time recorded on it.
• 3:57
  The file knows what was done, the letters sent, the documents drafted, the calls on the log.
• 4:03
  The ledger should agree with it. Where it does not, ask why.
• 4:07
  This is a supervision point as much as a billing one, because the same comparison shows you the file nobody has touched for a month.
• 4:15
  Four. Move the write off into the open. Record everything, then decide at billing what to reduce, with a partner's eyes on it.
• 4:24
  A write off decided by a junior at six in the evening is invisible and unmanaged.
• 4:29
  The same write off made at billing is a decision the firm can see, question and learn from.
• 4:36
  Five. Measure the gap. Count what was done and not recorded, in hours and in pounds, and put the figure in front of the fee earners.
• 4:45
  People manage what is counted.
• 4:48
  The reconciliation in point three is the piece firms rarely do, because it takes hours that nobody has.
• 4:55
  It is the piece Bracton does overnight. On every working day the assistant reads every live matter in the firm, and among the things it brings to the morning list is chargeable work that carries no time entry.
• 5:09
  The letter on the file with nothing recorded beside it. The attendance note with no units.
• 5:15
  The document drafted and never charged. It drafts the entry, with a narrative, and puts it in front of the fee earner to accept, amend or reject.
• 5:26
  Nothing is charged until a person accepts it. That is the rule for everything Bracton produces.
• 5:33
  A person signs off every output, and time is no exception. One thing I say plainly.
• 5:40
  Recovered time depends on what the file holds. Software cannot find a call that was never noted anywhere.
• 5:48
  It finds the work your record shows and your ledger forgot, and in most firms that is more than enough to matter.
• 5:56
  The assistant runs inside the case management system you already have, or as part of the Bracton platform.
• 6:03
  There is one published price for each, the same for a firm of three as for a firm of fifty, and it is on the website.
• 6:11
  Pick one fee earner. Take five files they worked on last week.
• 6:15
  Set the activity on each file against the time ledger and count what was done and not recorded.
• 6:21
  Multiply it by their rate. That number, from one desk in one week, tells you what the firm is leaving behind.
• 6:29
  If it is nothing, you run a tighter ship than most and you should be pleased.
• 6:34
  If it is not, you know where to start.
• 6:37
  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 client account review is on the same site.
• 6:56
  Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.