What it means for a UK law firm
Legal AI covers two broad kinds of tool used in law firms in England and Wales: general-purpose assistants such as ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot applied to legal tasks, and tools built for legal work, which add features such as citations to source documents, review steps and matter-level access controls.
Legal AI does not change a solicitor's professional obligations. The SRA's warning notice on the misuse of AI says that AI has no separate legal personality, and that solicitors who use AI in delivering legal services remain accountable for their work and outputs, however that work was prepared. The SRA Code of Conduct for Solicitors, RELs and RFLs applies in full, including the duties of competence, supervision and confidentiality.
Law firms choosing legal AI usually look at three things: how the provider handles client data, whether each output can be checked against its sources, and how review and supervision are recorded.
Example
Illustrative scenario
A commercial property team uses a legal AI tool to summarise the key terms of a lease before a client call. The solicitor checks each summarised term against the clause it cites before relying on the summary, because the summary becomes the solicitor's own advice once it reaches the client.
How Chancery handles it
Chancery AI is legal AI for law firms and solicitors in England and Wales. Firms use Chancery to turn their review standards into plain-English playbooks, run document analysis workflows, draft from their own precedents and ask cited questions across their matters. Every workflow output passes through Chancery Verify before it can be relied on. See all features.
Related terms
- Generative AI
- Large language model (LLM)
- AI hallucination
- Supervision of AI-assisted work
- Client confidentiality