Professional risk

Time-barred while the enquiry sat in an inbox

A proportion of enquiries arriving at any firm are already close to a limitation deadline, and the person sending them usually does not know that. The risk is not that an assistant gives bad legal advice about limitation - a well-configured one will refuse to - but that a time-critical enquiry is handled with the same unhurried politeness as a general question about fees, and the clock keeps running through a weekend nobody was watching. The useful contribution is recognition and routing, never calculation.

It must never compute a deadline, and this is not negotiable

Limitation periods turn on the cause of action, the date of knowledge, the claimant's capacity, whether anything tolled the period and which jurisdiction governs - facts no intake conversation establishes reliably. An assistant that produces a date has given legal advice on the firm's behalf, and a wrong date that reassures is the most expensive output in this entire field. Require the vendor to show the exact refusal wording, and test it with an enquiry that practically begs for a number.

Recognising time-sensitivity is a different task from assessing it

An assistant can be configured to notice the markers - an accident date, a dismissal date, a letter with a response deadline, the words "I was told I have until" - and to treat the presence of any of them as a routing signal rather than a fact to reason about. That distinction is the whole design. Noticing "there is a date in this enquiry" requires no legal judgement; concluding "therefore you have until March" requires a great deal of it.

Routing has to mean something at two in the morning

Flagging an enquiry as urgent into a queue nobody reads until Monday changes nothing. Decide, before launch, what the out-of-hours path actually is: whose phone, what threshold, and what the assistant tells the enquirer about when to expect contact. If the honest answer is that nobody is available until Monday, the assistant should say so and say what the enquirer can do in the meantime - which is more useful than an unfulfilled promise of a prompt call.

Record what the enquirer said about dates, verbatim

Whatever the enquirer states about dates is evidence about the enquiry, and it should reach the fee-earner in the enquirer's own words rather than paraphrased into a summary. A paraphrase that turns "about two years ago, maybe a bit more" into "two years ago" has destroyed the only part that mattered. Ask any vendor whether the original wording is preserved alongside any summary, because summarisation is the feature that demos well and this is the property that protects the firm.

Frequently asked questions

Can an AI assistant tell someone whether they are out of time?
No, and it must be configured to refuse outright. Limitation turns on the cause of action, the date of knowledge, capacity, tolling and jurisdiction - none of which an intake conversation establishes reliably. A wrong date that reassures is the costliest thing it could produce.
What should it do when an enquiry looks time-critical?
Treat the presence of a date as a routing signal, not a fact to reason about, and escalate down a path that exists outside office hours. Noticing that there is a date requires no legal judgement; drawing a conclusion from it requires a great deal.
Is flagging enough on its own?
Only if the flag reaches a person. An urgent marker in a queue nobody opens until Monday is indistinguishable from no marker at all, so decide whose phone it rings and at what threshold before launch, not after the first missed deadline.
What if there is genuinely nobody available until Monday?
Then the assistant should say exactly that and say what the enquirer can do in the meantime. An honest "nobody can review this before Monday morning, and here is what you can do today" serves the enquirer better than an implied promise of a call that will not come.
How should dates the enquirer mentions be recorded?
Verbatim, alongside any summary rather than inside it. "About two years ago, maybe a bit more" compressed to "two years ago" has destroyed the only part that mattered, and a fee-earner cannot recover it from the summary.

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