Last word | Death by spreadsheet

You would have thought I would be used to it by now, having notched up over 14 years of post-qualification experience in this profession. However, financial year end manages to take me by surprise every time, creeping up out of nowhere until I am suddenly immersed in a frenzy of billing and aged debtor list reviews whilst simultaneously managing the caseload.

Last month proved no different. My firm's new paperless billing system was up and running in time to assist with the process, and I am sure that the UK's forests breathed a sigh of relief as drafting bills used to be a very paper heavy exercise. It now consists simply of fee earners clicking buttons on their desktop. Instead of having to handwrite amendments on hard copy drafts for return to finance, we can edit them ourselves online, which means that final bills are produced and sent out much earlier, which must make brilliant business sense.

One part of the new system of which I'm not such a fan, however, is the use of a 'traffic light' which turns drafts from green to red once they have been sitting in a fee earner's review box for longer than 48 hours without being actioned. Apparently our response times are being monitored, which feels rather Big Brotheresque to me.

At the same time as bringing our year end to a close, my team agreed to assist in presenting a series of seminars around the UK aimed at fellow solicitors. I delivered talks in Manchester and Newcastle on the ever topical subject matter of trends in negligence claims against our profession. It contained nuggets of information such as the fact that 40 per cent of all claims against solicitors relate to residential conveyancing, with those of us handling personal injury cases and trust and probate being next on claimants' hit lists. I have personal experience of defending claims against fellow professionals in all three of these areas over the years, and indeed they are all represented in my current caseload.

I am in fact working on a couple of cases where I wonder if there may be a negligence claim in the offing against our opposition. One residential conveyancing claim which was stated to have a value over 250,000 saw the claimant's solicitors ask some months ago for an extension of time to serve proceedings. The date in question came and went with no contact from them, but I didn't get over excited because they had not asked whether we would accept service of proceedings, meaning that they could have served on our client direct.

When I spoke with the client, however, I discovered that they had not received anything either. I therefore contacted the claimant's solicitors who confirmed, after some delay, that proceedings had not been served. When I enquired as to why that was the case, they said simply that their client had taken a commercial decision not to pursue the claim.

Call me cynical, but I would be very surprised if any building society claimant in the current financial climate which had already paid a court fee to issue proceedings would not be prepared to chance their arm at serving those proceedings to see whether that might precipitate a financial settlement. It may be that they discovered some information which sounds a death knell for their case, but the professional negligence lawyer in me cannot help wondering whether this is another example of an overlooked deadline which could in the future result in a negligence claim against the claimant's own solicitors. Unfortunately, we wouldn't be able to offer our services due to something of a conflict of interest.

My largest case in terms of sheer numbers of files at the moment is a piece of right to buy litigation, of which there is plenty around, which trend has arisen from our profession having been seen to take advantage of those individuals who became entitled to purchase their council homes in the 1980s by charging excessive fees. My particular case has a notional 125 claimants. I use the word notional quite deliberately, as the number changes on a literally weekly basis, with new claims regularly being notified. Equally, and probably in no small part due to the voluminous paperwork involved, the claimants' solicitors are regularly missing limitation deadlines themselves.

It is a challenging but enjoyable case with a range of issues queuing to present themselves for consideration. This week's conundrum was the review of 68 simultaneously served notices of funding from one claimant firm, telling of insurance policies which were entered into the day before the 1 April 2013 Jackson Reforms deadline. (They do also really like to leave things to the last minute.) On reviewing the cases in question, we responded with a letter stating that we consider precisely half of them to be outside of the primary limitation period, and inviting the claimants' solicitors to enlighten us in the event that there is a secondary date of knowledge limitation argument, or alternatively to confirm that those clients will now refrain from pursuing their claims. Do I sense another potentially massive swathe of negligence claims in the offing?

My nickname for this particular case is 'Death by spreadsheet'. I usually find them fiddly, technical and pretty tedious but in this case they are a necessary evil, albeit one which I sense the claimants' solicitors may not be employing.

Copyright & permissions