When a fee earner leaves, what leaves with them? 

Francesca Yardley, chief operating officer at Threads and practising solicitor, outlines the value of creating a bank of recorded client communications for handovers and service delivery 

Client relationships in SME law firms are built through years of conversations. When the person who held them leaves, much of what was said leaves too.  

Every practice manager knows the moment. A partner announces their retirement, or a senior associate hands in their notice. The firm agrees a handover period, the departing fee earner writes a note on each live matter, and the files are reallocated. 

The handover note might run to two pages. The client relationship it summarises may have run to years of calls, emails and conversations, and much of what made that relationship work was never written down. 

For smaller firms, this is one of the quieter operational risks, affecting client retention, workload and resilience every time someone moves on. 

What actually leaves with them

The matter file usually holds the formal record: instructions, correspondence, key documents and whatever attendance notes were written. What it rarely holds is the context around them. 

That context includes what the client is really worried about, which may not be what they first instructed on. It includes informal commitments. It includes preferences: who in a family or business should be copied in, who prefers a call to an email, and which subjects need to be handled with care. And it includes the reasoning behind decisions, often discussed on the phone and barely noted. 

Email at least stays with the firm. Phone calls are different. Unless someone wrote a note afterwards, a conversation leaves no trace beyond the memories of the people on the line. When one of those people leaves, half of that memory goes with them. 

Why it matters commercially

Clients are often loyal to a person as much as to a firm, so a departure is a moment when they reconsider the relationship. 

If a new fee earner calls and has to ask the client to explain their situation again, the client notices. Being asked to repeat difficult or personal details, in a divorce, a bereavement or a dispute, can feel like starting over. It undermines confidence in the firm at exactly the point it needs to be strongest. 

There is an internal cost too. Colleagues spend unrecorded time reconstructing history from emails, the departing fee earner and support staff, and that time falls on people who are already busy. 

It isn’t only about departures

The same gap opens whenever someone is unavailable, not only when they leave. Long-term sickness, parental leave, sabbaticals and even a fortnight’s holiday all create moments when a colleague has to step into a matter they don’t know. 

An urgent client call can’t wait for someone to come back. The colleague covering the call needs to know what was last said, and needs to find it quickly. In many firms the honest answer is that they can’t, because it was said on the phone and lives in someone else’s head. 

Knowledge retention is a day-to-day test of resilience, not just succession planning. 

What practice managers can do now

None of this needs a major project. Most of it starts with asking where client knowledge sits today. 

• Find the single-person relationships. List your most important clients and ask how many people at the firm could take a call from each of them tomorrow and know the history. Where the answer is one, that is the risk. 

• Test what a successor could find. Pick a live matter and ask a colleague who doesn’t work on it to establish what was last agreed with the client. Note how long it takes and where they had to look. 

• Make handover about access, not summaries. A note written from memory during a busy notice period will always be partial; a successor who can see the full call and email history is far better placed. 

• Treat client communications as firm records. Client conversations belong on the matter, not in a personal inbox or notebook. Systems that capture communications automatically help more than policies, because they don’t depend on memory. 

• Don’t wait for a resignation. By the time notice is given, the window to capture context is short and the person’s attention is already elsewhere. 

Where technology can help

When calls made through the office phone system are recorded, transcribed and summarised automatically, a conversation becomes a record the firm can search, much like an email. 

Platforms such as Threads bring those transcripts together with email in one searchable place, so a client’s calls and emails can be seen side by side. A colleague taking over a matter can search for what was agreed, and use an AI-generated summary to review a long conversation in a few minutes rather than listening back to the whole call. Access controls keep that history available to the people who need it, without opening it to everyone. 

Calls on personal mobiles or video platforms sit outside the office phone system, so firms still need clear expectations about where client conversations happen. But for calls that go through the firm’s own system, the context no longer has to leave with the person. 

Knowledge that belongs to the firm

People will always move on. The question for practice managers isn’t how to stop it, but how much of each client relationship stays behind when they go. 

Firms that treat client conversations as shared records rather than individual memory make every handover smoother and every absence less disruptive. Above all, clients feel known, whoever picks up the phone. 

www.threads.cloud