What do you do when the client is the reason the job is late?

Whose delay is it when the client has not sent the information?

An engagement is agreed in March and delivered in July. Of those four months, perhaps five working weeks were spent waiting: for a bank statement, for a boundary to be confirmed, for someone on the client side to approve a draft, for an answer to a question asked twice and never landed. The firm did its part in the time it said it would. The calendar disagrees.

Then the client asks why it took so long, and the firm cannot answer properly. The chasing happened inside individual inboxes, in calls nobody logged, in a reminder a junior cancelled because they assumed the partner had already asked. There is no record. So the firm absorbs it, apologises for a delay it did not cause, and starts the next engagement under exactly the same arrangement.

What does chasing look like in most firms?

It looks like memory. Someone notices on a Tuesday that the client still has not sent the third item on a list of nine, and drops them a line. The line is polite, slightly apologetic, and vague about what is actually outstanding, because the person writing it has not checked the full list since the kickoff call. The client replies that two of the items went over last month. They did, to a different person, who filed them somewhere the first person does not look.

Three things follow. The client now believes the firm is disorganised, which damages every later request. The fee earner spends unbillable time reconciling what was sent against what was asked. And the item genuinely blocking the job stays blocked, because the exchange was about paperwork rather than about the thing holding everything up. Meanwhile the job sits in work in progress, ageing, which is its own cost. That is the pattern behind the bill nobody can raise.

Why is inconsistent chasing worse than slow chasing?

Because inconsistency teaches the client what to ignore. If a request sometimes arrives three days after the deadline and sometimes three weeks after it, the deadline is not real, and the client learns that quickly. They are not being difficult. They are reading the signal the firm is sending, which is that nothing much happens when they miss a date.

Inconsistency also destroys the firm's position. A chase that happened once, by phone, with no note, did not happen as far as any later discussion is concerned. When the date slips and the client is unhappy, the partner has nothing to put on the table except a general recollection that they did ask, a few times. That conversation ends with the firm taking the hit, because the only party with a record is the one complaining.

What does a structured chase actually involve?

It is not complicated, which is why it is irritating that so few firms have it. The work is in deciding the detail once and then making the system do it every time.

• A defined list at the start. Every engagement opens with the information needed, item by item, with a date against each and a named person on the client side who owns it.
• One place where arrival is recorded. When something comes in, it is marked off against the list, wherever it arrived and whoever received it. Half of all chasing problems are really filing problems.
• Requests that go out on a schedule. Two days before the date, on the date, a week after, escalating in tone and in recipient. The schedule is attached to the item, not to a person's diary.
• Requests that are specific. Naming the document, the format and the reason it is needed. A request that says we still need a few bits gets a reply in the same spirit.
• A visible status. Anyone on the job can see what is outstanding, how long it has been outstanding and what it is blocking.
• A log that writes itself. Every request, reminder and arrival, timestamped, against the file. The record is what makes the later conversation factual.

None of this requires anybody to learn new software. It requires the outstanding items to live in a structure rather than in somebody's head, which is the shift described in how to document a process. The information gathering stage of client onboarding is usually where it is cheapest to fix, and the routing of incoming documents sits alongside it in email triage.

How does the record change the conversation?

Completely, and in both directions. When the client asks why the report is late, the answer is no longer defensive. It is a short, unemotional summary: the draft was ready on the fourteenth, we asked for the final figures on the second, again on the ninth and again on the sixteenth, and they arrived on the twenty-eighth. There is no accusation in it, and no argument available either.

More usefully, the record changes behaviour before the deadline rather than after it. A client who can see a clear, specific list, and who knows the next request lands on Thursday whatever happens, tends to send the thing. The predictability does the work the nagging used to do badly. And when a delay genuinely changes the shape of the job, the firm can say so at the time, which is where most fixed fee overruns could have been caught.

Does this make the firm look pushy?

It is the opposite worry that should bother a managing partner. Firms that chase badly look careless, because their requests contradict each other and ignore what the client already sent. Firms that chase well look like they are running the job, which is what the client is paying for. Promptness without accuracy is not better service, as we argue in faster is not always better service.

Where should a firm start?

Take the last five jobs that ran late and mark up, day by day, who was holding the work. Not who was formally responsible, who actually had the ball. Most firms are surprised at how much elapsed time sits on the client side, and at how little of it is documented anywhere.

Then add up what the chasing itself costs: hours a week across the fee earners doing it, at the firm's own charge-out rate, over forty-six working weeks. The unbillable hours calculator does the arithmetic, and how to calculate unbillable hours explains the method. Add the knock-on effects set out in the cost of a late report.

This bites hardest where work cannot start until a third party supplies something: accountancy practices waiting on records, conveyancers waiting on a search, advisers waiting on a provider. If that describes your week, the audit will tell you whether chasing is the first process worth rebuilding or the second.