Where the hour really goes on a claimant file, the five changes that reduce it, and how to prove the saving to a finance director without weakening the evidence.
Fee earner drafting time is the time between opening the file and having a document a supervisor will sign. On a contested claimant file, only a minority of it is spent producing sentences. The majority is spent reading: locating dates in call notes, tracing a hire period through an engineer report, working out which bank transactions are committed outgoings, or finding the notice that starts the landlord’s repair clock.
That distinction decides which changes work. Anything that speeds up typing saves minutes. Anything that removes the reading and re-keying saves hours, and the saving compounds because the same facts feed the schedule, the chronology and the letter of claim.
Under fixed recoverable costs the saving is not a nice-to-have. A longer file is not a better paid file, so time per document is the department’s margin.
Read the file once into structured facts with a source recorded against each one, then let the statement, the chronology and the letter of claim draw on the same set instead of three separate reads.
Statement of truth wording, declarations, exhibit numbering and preparation-method disclosure are mechanical. Checking them by hand on every draft is an avoidable pass.
A library organised by practice area, with the principle stated, removes both the search and the verification. It also removes the risk of a citation that does not exist.
Most editing time on a good draft is style, not substance. Set section coverage, numbering, length and signature blocks at firm level and stop relitigating them per file.
A draft that flags the missing V5C or the undated notice at the start saves the round trip that otherwise happens after the supervisor reads it.
Do not chase speed by dropping the checks. A statement criticised at trial, or a disrepair claim that fails on an unproved notice date, costs more than every hour it saved.
Do not paste unredacted client documents into a consumer AI tool. The Upper Tribunal has treated that as placing client information in the public domain, and it is not a saving your COLP will accept.
Do not roll out to everyone at once. Two or three fee earners on real files for a fortnight tells you more than a firm-wide launch, and costs less to reverse.
LegalDocs Assist is built for the courts of England and Wales, with Scottish and Northern Irish variants where the procedure differs. Every authority in the library is a UK authority.
We will run one of your closed files, time the review, and give you both numbers.