The problem
SEP Professional Services are RICS-qualified surveyors handling housing disrepair expert witness instructions under Part 35. Solicitor instructions arrived by email with no structured intake. Each instruction had to be manually read, filed and entered into a tracking system.
Cases were tracked manually across the firm. Expert witness reports were generated one at a time with no template consistency — each surveyor was producing output in their own format. Invoicing was handled separately from case management, meaning payment status was invisible from within the case record.
There was no audit trail for compliance purposes. Part 35 expert witness work carries specific requirements around documentation and record retention — none of this was systematically enforced. No visibility across the active caseload meant it was impossible to see, at any given moment, how many instructions were in flight, which were approaching SLA breach, or which invoices were outstanding.
What we built
A full lifecycle CRM built around the specific requirements of Part 35 expert witness work — structured intake, automated reporting, compliance documentation and integrated invoicing.
Full lifecycle CRM from solicitor instruction to invoice and payment
Structured API intake for solicitor instructions — no more email triage
Case dashboard tracking every instruction through inspection, report, submission, invoice and payment
Automated expert witness report generation from a centralised template system — SEP-branded output
SLA enforcement with automated communications at each case stage
WhatsApp automation for surveyor field updates
Invoice generation and payment tracking within the case record
Immutable audit trail with 7-year retention for Part 35 compliance
White-label branding layer — every document output carries client identity
On report generation
Expert witness reports under Part 35 must meet specific formatting and content requirements. The template system encodes those requirements centrally — surveyors complete structured inputs, the system generates the report. Every output carries SEP branding, meets Part 35 formatting standards, and is stored against the case record. Template updates propagate to all future reports automatically.
What changed
The full case lifecycle is now automated from solicitor instruction to invoice. Instructions arrive through the structured API intake — no manual email triage. The case dashboard shows every active instruction, its stage, SLA status and outstanding payment in one view.
Expert witness reports are generated consistently from the central template. Fee earner time spent on report formatting is removed. Every document output carries SEP branding.
The 7-year immutable audit trail means compliance documentation is built into the workflow, not added retrospectively. For a firm doing Part 35 expert witness work, that is not optional — it is the standard.