Latest / AI Legal Case Management: ten minutes on running a law firm with AI / The fee earner who leaves with what the file never held: fee earner resignation and file handover

Transcript

The fee earner who leaves with what the file never held: fee earner resignation and file handover · AI Legal Case Management: ten minutes on running a law firm with AI

• 0:09
  The letter is on your desk at nine on Monday morning. Your senior associate in private client is resigning, with three months' notice, to join a firm across the city.
• 0:19
  She runs ninety live matters. You open the first file on her list, a probate for a family she has acted for since she qualified, and the last attendance note is dated June.
• 0:30
  Her diary shows a meeting with the executors next Thursday that appears nowhere in the firm's diary, and the last email on the file mentions a call in which she told them the estate account would be ready before Christmas.
• 0:43
  Welcome to AI Legal Case Management, ten minutes on running a law firm with AI, from Bracton.
• 0:50
  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.
• 1:06
  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.
• 1:19
  This week, the fee earner who leaves with what the file never held.
• 1:23
  Take a figure, and hear it as an illustration, not a finding.
• 1:28
  Suppose one matter in ten on a departing fee earner's list carries something that exists only in her head or her inbox.
• 1:36
  On ninety matters, that is nine files where whoever takes over starts work without the fact that matters most, and does not know it is missing.
• 1:46
  What goes missing falls into a few kinds. Promises made by telephone, a date for a draft or a figure for the costs, never reached an attendance note.
• 1:56
  Some dates live in a private diary or a notebook, a hearing remembered rather than entered, a meeting arranged by text.
• 2:04
  Undertakings are their own case. Episode four dealt with the one left open on a closed file, and the point here is narrower, because a solicitor who gave an undertaking in the course of the firm's practice stays personally bound by it after she leaves, and the firm stays bound as well, whoever now holds the papers.
• 2:24
  Then come the matters she meant to close, each with a cheque to return or a final letter unsent, and the clients she expects to take with her.
• 2:33
  On that last point, keep two things apart. Clients choose their solicitor, and no contract of employment overrides that choice.
• 2:42
  What a contract can do is restrain the departing employee from soliciting the firm's clients for a period after she leaves, and the courts enforce such a term only where it protects a legitimate interest of the firm and goes no further than is reasonably necessary to protect it.
• 2:59
  Garden leave, where her contract allows it, keeps her employed and bound by her duties to the firm while it keeps her away from clients.
• 3:08
  It also keeps her away from the colleague who needs her answers.
• 3:12
  The SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors requires you to act in each client's best interests, to give clients the information they need to make informed decisions about how their matter will be handled, and to supervise work done for clients.
• 3:27
  The Code for Firms requires effective systems and controls, including one for supervising clients' matters.
• 3:35
  Neither code names the letter, but a client who learns of the change from the departing solicitor, or from silence, has had no chance to decide anything, and the firm has failed that client.
• 3:47
  From the bench, I heard more than once that a step was missed because the solicitor dealing had left.
• 3:54
  It carries little weight. Your client instructed the firm, and the court deals with the firm on the record, whoever sits at the desk.
• 4:03
  What helps is a file that shows the position on the day the matter changed hands.
• 4:08
  Here is what a well run firm does, and none of it needs software.
• 4:12
  One. On the day notice arrives, take the fee earner's list and book an hour with her on each group of matters, asking for every promise, date and arrangement that the file does not show.
• 4:25
  Write the answers onto the file as she gives them, not into a handover note.
• 4:29
  Two. Move every date she holds outside the firm's diary into it that week, and have someone other than her check the diary against the files.
• 4:39
  Three. Draw up a list of every undertaking she has given that is not yet performed, and name the person who will see each one discharged.
• 4:49
  Four. Write to every client from the firm, naming the person who will now act and saying when the change takes effect.
• 4:57
  Send it before the departing fee earner says anything. Five.
• 5:01
  Decide garden leave matter by matter on what the files need, and where you choose it, keep her available by telephone to the successor.
• 5:10
  Six. Read the restrictive covenants in her contract this week, so that the firm knows what they say before a client asks to move.
• 5:18
  Points two and three turn on somebody reading every one of the leaver's files, and that is the work Bracton takes on.
• 5:25
  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.
• 5:34
  Overnight it reads every live file it can reach, and the next morning it raises what needs attention, an undertaking still open, a limitation date approaching with no proceedings issued, a client gone quiet.
• 5:47
  The successor can ask Henry a question about any of the ninety matters, and the answer comes from the papers on that file, naming the paper and the page for the successor to check.
• 5:58
  Henry also drafts the letter to each client from your firm's own precedents.
• 6:03
  Every draft waits for a qualified fee earner to read and approve.
• 6:08
  Nothing leaves the firm in the assistant's name, and each answer is recorded on the file.
• 6:14
  Now the honest limit. Henry reads the file, and the subject of this episode is what the file never held.
• 6:22
  A promise made on the telephone with no attendance note, a date in a private notebook, a meeting arranged by text, an email sent from a personal account, none of these reach the overnight read, which is why the first point on my list stays with a partner and the leaver in a room.
• 6:40
  And where the assistant runs inside another vendor's system, it sees what that system's interface exposes.
• 6:47
  The platform is one hundred and eighty five pounds for each person a month on a standard seat.
• 6:52
  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.
• 7:03
  Choose one desk, the fee earner whose resignation would hurt you most.
• 7:08
  Take five of their live matters and, from the file alone, write down for each the next step, the next date and the last thing promised to the client.
• 7:17
  Then sit with the fee earner for twenty minutes and go through your five answers.
• 7:22
  Every correction they make is something that would have left on their last day, so put each one on the file before you stand up.
• 7:30
  That is AI Legal Case Management for this week. The transcript, with a timestamp on every line, sits with the episode at bracton dot tech, and if you would like to see how much of your own files would survive a resignation, the free hour on your own files is on the same site.
• 7:46
  Same time next Thursday. Thank you for listening.