Cutting the cost of records review in PI claims

For fee-earners, costs lawyers and practice managers · ~5 min read

Where the hours actually go

Ask where records review time is spent and most people picture the analysis. In reality, a large share goes on work that is essential but not especially skilled:

• Wrangling the files — opening every PDF, spotting duplicates, working out which provider each set came from.
• Ordering and paginating — putting hundreds of pages into a sensible sequence and numbering them.
• Building the chronology — reading every page to pull out each dated entry.
• Indexing — producing the front index that lets everyone else navigate the bundle.

Only after all of that does the genuinely legal work — assessing causation, condition and prognosis — begin. The first four are exactly the tasks that scale badly with page count and hurt most on the files that can least afford them.

Why it bites hardest on lower-value files

A serious claim can absorb a day of records work because the damages justify it. A fast-track or portal claim cannot. The record set is often just as thick — a claimant’s GP history does not shrink because the claim is modest — but the recoverable costs are fixed and tight. The reading is the same; the budget is not.

The maths of pay-as-you-go

Two things change the economics. The first is speed: automating the reading and assembly turns a day into minutes, so a fee-earner reviews rather than transcribes. The second is the pricing model. Traditional software wants a monthly or annual subscription, which only makes sense at volume and is dead weight in a quiet month. Per-document pricing flips that: you pay for a summary or a bundle only when you produce one, so the cost attaches to the file that benefits from it and nothing sits idle.

For a firm handling a mix of values, that means the tooling pays for itself on the very files where the margin is thinnest — and costs nothing on the months you do not use it.

Keeping it recoverable and defensible

Cost only helps if the work stands up. A cited, paginated, indexed output is easier to justify on assessment than an unsourced narrative, because every line can be traced to the record. Doing the work faster should not mean doing it more loosely — the aim is the same quality, produced in a fraction of the time, at a cost that fits the file.

General information for legal professionals, not legal or costs advice.