From Hours to Minutes: The Old Approach v the New Approach to Medical Record Pagination

In our previous blog, we considered the emerging role of artificial intelligence in litigation support and, in particular, the potential costs implications of using AI to organise medical records, prepare chronologies and create searchable electronic bundles.

The conclusion was relatively straightforward: the fact that technology is involved does not, of itself, change the established principles of costs recovery.

But there is another question which is perhaps even more interesting.

What happens when technology does not simply change how the work is done, but dramatically reduces the amount of human time required to do it?

That is the real distinction between the traditional approach and the new one.

The old approach

Take a typical clinical negligence claim involving several thousand pages of medical records.

Historically, those records might arrive in multiple batches and different formats. Someone needs to review the material, identify individual documents, put them into chronological order, remove duplicates, organise the records into sections, apply pagination and prepare them for substantive review.

Depending upon the volume, this can be a significant exercise.

The work might be undertaken by a fee earner, paralegal, litigation assistant or specialist external provider. Where undertaken internally, the time will ultimately form part of the firm's profit costs.

The important point is that the process is time intensive.

If a fee earner spends ten hours undertaking this work, ten hours of time may be claimed. That does not, however, necessarily mean that all ten hours would be accepted as reasonable on assessment.

The traditional model nevertheless creates a relatively simple relationship between the work undertaken and the time spent doing it.

The new approach

AI-assisted litigation support changes that relationship.

Technology can assist with identifying documents, categorising them, detecting duplicates, arranging material chronologically and creating a structured, searchable record set.

The fee earner's role does not disappear.

It changes.

The solicitor still needs to understand the records, identify relevant issues, consider the clinical evidence and exercise professional judgment. But the amount of manual processing time can potentially be reduced significantly.

For example, if ten hours of manual work can be reduced to 90 minutes of fee-earner review, the technology has eliminated 8.5 hours of manual work. What remains is the human review and verification required to ensure that the output is accurate and fit for use.

Under the new approach, there may be considerably less fee-earner time, but a separate technology cost.

The issue is therefore not simply whether the technology is recoverable.

It is whether the availability of technology changes what constitutes a reasonable amount of fee-earner time to spend on the underlying task.

Efficiency and the costs consequences

The attraction of technology is obvious: it can significantly reduce the manual processing involved in dealing with large volumes of medical records.

But that creates an interesting consequence for costs.

Under the traditional approach, the firm's costs may increase with the amount of time required to complete the task. If the task takes longer, more fee-earner time is potentially recorded and claimed, subject of course to the usual scrutiny on assessment.

Technology potentially breaks that link.

The more effective the technology is, the less human time required to perform the same task.

That is a significant shift.

Technology is therefore not simply another way of performing existing work. It can change the amount of work which needs to be undertaken by people at all.

For the paying party, that raises an obvious question: if technology was reasonably available and could have avoided a significant amount of manual work, should the traditional level of fee-earner time still be regarded as reasonable?

For the receiving party, there is an equally important question: if technology has reduced the amount of professional time required, how should the cost of that technology be viewed?

Neither question has an automatic answer.

The fact that technology was available does not necessarily mean that its use was mandatory. Equally, the fact that a task was historically undertaken manually does not necessarily mean that the resulting time remains reasonable indefinitely.

The assessment may therefore increasingly require consideration of the method by which the work was undertaken, as well as the work itself.

But cheaper is not always better

That does not mean that every technological solution should automatically be recoverable.

A firm cannot simply substitute an expensive technological product for a relatively inexpensive manual task and assume that the resulting expenditure is reasonable.

Proportionality remains central.

If a £5,000 technology charge replaces two hours of straightforward administrative work, there may be an obvious answer as to whether that expenditure was reasonable and proportionate.

If a £500 service eliminates twenty hours of manual work in a case involving extensive medical records, the analysis may look very different.

The question is therefore not whether technology is cheaper or more expensive in isolation. It is whether the overall approach represents a reasonable and proportionate way of conducting the litigation. This may also require firms to think differently about how they record and explain technology-related expenditure. A vague entry such as “AI charge” tells a paying party very little. What function did the technology perform? Why was it required? What work did it replace? How was the output reviewed? How was the charge calculated?

Those questions may become increasingly relevant when the costs are challenged and the previous blog refers.

The human input remains critical

There is also a danger in describing the new approach as an entirely automated process.

Technology may identify dates, documents and categories. It may produce a chronology or searchable database. It does not replace the solicitor's assessment of what those documents mean in the context of the claim.

Technology can eliminate administrative work without eliminating professional responsibility.

The fee earner remains responsible for reviewing the output, identifying errors or omissions and applying legal judgment.

That distinction is important when considering both the conduct of the litigation and the costs claimed.

The technology may have removed much of the manual processing, but it has not removed the need for professional oversight.

Will the question change at assessment?

Perhaps the most interesting consequence is that technology may eventually change the question asked on detailed assessment.

Historically, the discussion might have focused on:

“How long did it reasonably take to undertake this work?”

Increasingly, the question may become:

“How much time is it reasonable to spend on this work, given the methods now reasonably available?”

That is a subtle but important distinction.

Historically, the time spent undertaking the work has been an important part of assessing the costs claimed for it. But technology changes the amount of time required to undertake that work.

If a technology-assisted process can deal with thousands of documents in a fraction of the time it would take to do so manually, the fact that the work previously took ten hours does not, by itself, establish that ten hours remains reasonable.

Conversely, the fact that the new process is faster does not, by itself, establish that the technology cost is reasonable.

Both approaches still need to be considered through the familiar principles of reasonableness and proportionality.

But the availability of technology may increasingly form part of the context in which the reasonableness of the time claimed is assessed.

Old approach v new approach

The difference can perhaps be summarised simply.

Old approach:

Receive records → manually organise → paginate → review → identify relevant material → prepare chronology/bundle.

New approach:

Receive records → technology-assisted organisation → review and verify → analyse → advise → prepare the case.

The second process does not eliminate professional work.

It eliminates much as a paying party would argue, “administrative” work, allowing professional time to be directed towards substantive legal work.

That is arguably where the real value of litigation technology lies.

A new question for costs lawyers

The emergence of AI-assisted litigation support therefore presents an interesting challenge.

The established costs principles do not change simply because technology is being used.

What may change is the factual context in which those principles are applied.

As technology becomes capable of eliminating tasks which would previously have required significant amounts of human time, consideration is required as to what constitutes a reasonable amount of time to undertake the remaining work.

As technology becomes increasingly accessible, the assessment of what constitutes a reasonable way of conducting document-intensive litigation may inevitably evolve.

The irony is that the successful use of technology may result in less fee-earner time being claimed, rather than more.

That should be welcomed.

The objective of technology in litigation should not be to find another way of charging for the same work.

It should be to make the work faster and more valuable.

The technology may be new.

The costs principles remain familiar.

Perhaps the real question for the future is not whether time spent remains the measure of reasonable costs. It is whether technology will change the benchmark against which reasonable time is assessed.

This article is general information, not legal or costs advice. Recoverability turns on the facts of the individual case, and nothing here should be relied on in place of advice on your own matter. For costs advice, drafting or budgeting, speak to Peak Costs at .

Written By Samantha Rowles, Senior Costs Consultant, Peak Costs

Samantha is a highly experienced costs lawyer with 19 years' experience in costs litigation. She specialises in complex, high-value personal injury, clinical negligence and commercial disputes, managing matters from inception through to detailed assessment. Samantha has extensive experience acting for both receiving and paying parties, giving her a well-rounded, strategic and commercially focused approach to costs litigation.