The worst calls a fee-earner takes are the ones where the client knows something they should have known first. A deadline that slipped. A limitation date that passed while the file sat. Nobody was careless, exactly — the date lived in a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet lived on someone's desktop, and the matter moved on without it.

We built the risk register to close that gap by making the register part of the matter itself.

What you see when you open a matter

The risk register is the first card. On it: the limitation period for every cause of action, the days remaining to the next deadline, and a composite risk score across three axes.

Litigation exposure — the merits, the likely quantum, the risk of a costs order. Regulatory exposure — where the matter touches the SRA Code, ICO duties, sector-specific notification obligations. Evidential exposure — the gaps in your evidence, the dependencies on third-party disclosure, the availability of witnesses.

It is not a colour-coded headline you nod at and close. Every line back-references the document or the point in the structured case it was scored from. You can drill into any axis and read the underlying findings — see why the score is what it is, not just that it is amber.

Why it stays live

Here is the part that makes it worth having rather than being one more thing to maintain. The register is built from the same structured case the rest of the product writes to — the claims, the evidence, the dates, the authorities. When you accept a fact, log a piece of evidence, or record a date on the matter, the register already knows. The limitation calendar and the risk score move because the matter moved, not because someone remembered to open a tracker on a Friday afternoon.

That is only possible because the matter is genuinely structured underneath — a typed case, not a folder of documents with an AI reading over them. A general-purpose legal tool does not hold that structure, so it cannot offer a live register at all. The best it can do is answer questions about documents you point it at. It has no running picture of the matter, because there is no matter inside it — only files.

Honest about what is live

The register refreshes when you click prepare on the matter today. That already gives you the limitation calendar, the three-axis score, and full traceability down to source. Live updates — re-scoring the register automatically on every change to the case, the moment a new date or piece of evidence lands — arrive with our agent runtime. We would rather ship the click-to-refresh version that is solid than promise continuous re-scoring before it holds under real load.

Built by people who have missed a date

You do not design a limitation calendar as the first card on the matter unless you have felt what it is to nearly miss one. This is not a risk-management module that a product team specced from a compliance checklist. It is the tool solicitors would build for themselves — the running answer to "what could hurt this matter, and when", kept honest by being wired into the matter rather than bolted on beside it.

The risks are always there. The register just makes sure you are looking at them before the client is.

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