Can AI help us prepare a costs budget?

Yes, for the groundwork. An AI assistant can pull together the history of the matter, the directions timetable, the issues in dispute and the work already done, with each point tied back to the page it came from. What it cannot do is decide how many hours your team will need, set the assumptions or take responsibility for the figures, and those are the parts that determine whether a budget survives scrutiny.

The part of budgeting that is really document work

A costs budget is an estimate, but it sits on a factual base. Before anyone can estimate, someone has to establish what is actually going on in the matter. That is reading, and reading is slow.

The factual base usually includes:

• the procedural history and what stage the claim has reached
• the directions already made and the dates they impose
• the number and type of witnesses in contemplation
• the expert disciplines involved and whether reports are joint or separate
• the likely extent of disclosure, judged from what is already on the file
• work already incurred, and where the line falls between incurred and estimated

An AI assistant that reads the matter papers can assemble this quickly and tell you which page each answer came from. On a matter you inherited, or one that has run for two years through three fee earners, that alone saves an afternoon.

It can also produce the narrative material: a short account of the issues, a list of what has been done since the letter of claim, and a note of anything in the file that suggests the case is heavier or lighter than it looks. You then read that, correct it and use it.

What AI cannot do for a budget

Estimating is judgement, and it is judgement about your firm, not about the case in the abstract.

An AI assistant does not know how your disclosure review actually runs, which fee earner will do the work, how your grades map to the phases, or how long your firm genuinely takes to prepare a witness statement from a difficult client. It does not know what your costs draftsman usually advises, what your opponent is like, or what the judge in your local court tends to allow. It has no view on proportionality, and proportionality is the question the court is really asking.

It cannot set the assumptions either. Assumptions are a statement of what you have priced for and what you have not, and they are drafted defensively by someone who has thought about what might go wrong. That is a human task, done with the case strategy in mind.

And it cannot sign. A budget is served by a person who takes responsibility for its contents, and the Civil Procedure Rules approach costs management on the footing that a responsible individual stands behind the figures. No tool changes that.

A sensible order of work

1. Ask the assistant to set out the procedural history and the current directions, with the dates and the page references.
2. Ask it to summarise the issues and identify the documents that show the likely scale of disclosure and expert evidence.
3. Ask what the file does not say: whether the number of witnesses is settled, whether expert permission has been given, whether a trial window exists.
4. Check that output against your own reading of the file. If a page reference does not support the point, treat the point as unproven.
5. Then do the estimating yourself, or with your costs draftsman, phase by phase.
6. Draft the assumptions by hand. Do not let a generic set of assumptions attach themselves to your budget.
7. Have the person who will sign read the whole thing, including the incurred figures, before it goes anywhere.

The pattern is the same as everywhere else in practice: the assistant does the gathering, the fee earner does the deciding.

Dates, figures and the risk of a tidy wrong answer

Budgets carry dates as well as money: the date for filing and exchange, the date of the costs management hearing, the dates in the directions that the phases are priced against. A tool that counts dates should show you how it counted, step by step, so you can see whether it has used the right trigger and the right period. If it simply produces a date with no working, you cannot check it, and an unchecked date on a costs document is a hostage.

The same applies to the incurred figures. Anything drawn from a time ledger or a schedule needs to be reconciled against your accounts, not accepted because it looks plausible. A neat total is not a correct total.

Finally, keep a note on the file of what the assistant produced, what you changed and why. If the budget is challenged later, or if the client queries the estimate, you want to be able to show the reasoning rather than reconstruct it.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis answers questions about a matter from that matter's own papers and names the page each answer came from, so the factual base for a budget can be checked rather than trusted. It counts key dates with the working shown, each step carrying the rule that allows it, and it says the firm's diary system still governs. It prepares drafts for a qualified person to review and sign off, and it does not file, serve or email anything. Where it cannot find support for a point in the papers, it says what is missing instead of guessing.