Regular file audits are a crucial aspect of effective practice management, ensuring compliance with key procedures. By conducting audits, the firm can proactively identify and mitigate risks, improve processes, and maintain consistently high-quality work across all client matters. These audits not only highlight unmanaged risks but also reveal opportunities to enhance practices and procedures.
This Client File Audit Tool is a risk management checklist designed for legal practitioners to assess and monitor whether their practice is at risk of negligence claims arising from poor management of the retainer or the matter.
The tool does not aim to evaluate the technical quality of legal work but focuses on how the work is managed in key areas such as retainer management, client communication, supervision, file management, cost disclosure, and record-keeping.
Audits using this tool provide a valuable starting point to inform and raise awareness of potential problem areas, assess the effectiveness of current practices, and identify the steps necessary to reduce the risk of a claim and improve the overall quality of the firm’s work.
The audit tool checklist questions are grouped in the following categories:
- Work intake including setting up and managing the client retainer.
- Delegation and supervision of work.
- Communications and record keeping.
- File and Time management.
- Compliance with firm policies, procedures and expectations.
Downloads
The tool files provided here for download can be used as is (pdf and MS Word version), or edited (MS Word version) to suit practice needs.
