AI for Law Firms
Without the Hallucinations
Two-thirds of UK lawyers already use AI. A handful have been referred to the SRA for citing cases that don't exist. We help firms get the productivity without the disciplinary letter.
61%
OF UK LAWYERS NOW USE GENERATIVE AI (LEXISNEXIS 2025)
18
FABRICATED CITATIONS IN AL-HAROUN, 2025
75%
REVIEW TIME CUT IN ONE THOMSON REUTERS CASE STUDY
Your fee earners are already using AI. Just not the AI you'd want them using.
Lexis put UK lawyer adoption at 61% in late 2025. The Law Society's guidance is clear: client-sensitive material shouldn't go into public generative AI. It does anyway, daily, because the public tools are the ones already open in another tab.
In June 2025, Dame Victoria Sharp told the High Court that tools like ChatGPT "are not capable of conducting reliable legal research". One solicitor's witness statement relied on 45 authorities, 18 of which didn't exist. The barrister in the parallel case was referred to the Bar Standards Board, the solicitor to the SRA.
If you don't give the firm a private stack, the firm builds its own. Usually badly.
PUBLIC CHATGPT, ON THEIR PHONE
- Client material trained into someone else's model
- Fabricated authorities filed under your firm's name
- No audit log of what was asked or sent
- Confidentiality breach you only find out about later
- COLP can't answer the SRA when asked
PRIVATE STACK, RUN BY YOU
- No-training contracts with the underlying providers
- Citations verified against a real case database before they reach a brief
- Every prompt, file and answer logged, per matter
- Matter-level access controls and conflict checks
- A policy your COLP can hand to the regulator on Monday
Five jobs AI does well in a law firm.
Not the courtroom and not the strategy. The grind. Document review, drafting, intake, internal search, and the parts of legal research a junior would have to do twice.
Disclosure and review
Tag, cluster and summarise the bundle. The professional-grade review tools are now in use across most of the Am Law 100, and a six-week first pass on a six-figure document set is the kind of job that compresses into days.
First-draft contracts and letters
Engagement letters, NDAs, leases, employment contracts off your own precedents. Thomson Reuters report customers cutting review and drafting time by upwards of 60% on this kind of work. A senior still signs it off.
Intake and triage
Conflict screen, jurisdiction check, eligibility, fee bracket. Done before a fee earner has read the email. You get a triaged inbox, not a backlog.
Internal knowledge search
Find the clause from the 2022 matter that mirrors the one open now. Plain English in, the actual paragraph out, with the file reference attached.
Verified research
Research over a real authorities database, not an open-web guess. Every citation is checked against a live source before it can be quoted. If it can't be found, it doesn't appear.
Where we come in.
Four phases. Confidentiality first, productivity second, regulator-ready evidence running underneath both. Fixed-scope, priced up front, no eighteen-month transformation programme.
We work alongside your COLP and IT lead. You keep the code, the prompts, the logs and the data.
BOOK A SCOPING CALLConfidentiality and risk audit
What are people pasting into ChatGPT today, and which clients would object first. We map current shadow use, the data flows, the contracts you'd need with any provider, and the gap against Law Society and SRA guidance. One page, not a 60-slide deck.
Build the private stack
An internal interface your fee earners actually use, sitting on top of models contracted not to train on your inputs. Matter-scoped access, logging per prompt, verification against a real case database before any citation leaves the building.
Wire it into the work
Disclosure review, first-draft contract generation, intake triage, precedent search. Plugged into what you already use: SharePoint, iManage, NetDocuments, Clio, ActionStep, your PMS. No "log into yet another portal".
Policy, training, evidence
A written AI policy your COLP can stand behind. Training for fee earners and support staff on what's safe to put in, what's not, and how the verification gate works. A logged trail that answers the SRA before they ask.
It's already happening, in UK courts.
Three reported cases, one US and two English. Same pattern every time: a lawyer leans on a public chatbot, the chatbot invents authorities, the bench notices.
Ayinde v Haringey
A pupil barrister cited five non-existent cases in submissions for Haringey Law Centre, denied using AI, and could not later locate the sources. The Divisional Court referred her to the Bar Standards Board and the Law Centre's solicitor to the SRA.
Al-Haroun
A solicitor's witness statement, in a £89m claim against Qatar National Bank, leaned on 45 authorities. Eighteen of them did not exist. The court referred the solicitor to the SRA in the same judgment.
Mata v Avianca
The first one. Two New York attorneys filed a brief with ChatGPT-fabricated cases, fictional airlines and all. Judge Castel found subjective bad faith, dismissed the claim and fined them $5,000. Damien Charlotin's tracker has logged more than 700 similar judgments worldwide since.
Sources: Royal Courts of Justice judgment (Bailii [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin)), Law Gazette, Legal Futures, LexisNexis Generative AI report, SDNY Mata v Avianca order, AI Hallucination Cases database (damiencharlotin.com).
The ones partners ask first.
Doesn't AI in a law firm just blow up confidentiality?
It does, if your only option is the free version of ChatGPT. Our stack runs on enterprise contracts with explicit no-training clauses, in regions you can name on a DPIA. Client material stays inside controls you set. The Law Society's own line is that confidential information must not be shared with public generative AI, and we build to that.
What if it hallucinates a case?
We never let it free-recall authorities. Research runs over a real case database, every citation is checked against a live source before it ever lands in a draft, and anything the model "remembers" without a verifiable hit gets stripped. The fee earner still reads what they sign. Belt and braces, because the regulator already told us this is on us.
Will it kill our billable hours?
It might shift them. Most firms we work with use the time savings to take on more matters, or to move toward fixed fees on work clients increasingly want priced that way. Thomson Reuters' Future of Professionals work and the ACC chief legal officer surveys both point the same way: buyers are starting to use AI as the reason to ask for fixed pricing on commodity work. Better to set that conversation up than to have it set for you.
Does our COLP have to do anything new?
Yes, and we make their job easier rather than harder. The SRA's line is that the COLP carries the can when new technology is introduced. We hand them the policy, the audit log, the supplier list and the training records, in a form they can show the regulator. Their evidence pack is built as we go, not back-filled later.
We're a small firm. Is this realistic for us?
Especially for you. The SRA's Risk Outlook on AI put sole-practitioner and small-firm adoption at around 14%, against roughly three-quarters of the largest firms already using it. That gap's a competitive one now. A focused stack for a 5 to 50 fee-earner firm doesn't need an in-house engineering team.
Can we use Harvey, Lexis+ AI or Thomson Reuters CoCounsel instead?
Sometimes that's the right answer and we'll tell you when. The big vendor tools are strong on research and contract review out of the box. They're weaker on the things specific to your firm: your precedents, your matter management, your intake forms, your billing system. We often run a small private stack alongside a vendor product, with each doing what it's good at.
How long does it take?
A short audit, then the first production use case live in days. We pick the use case that pays its rent inside the first quarter, so the rest of the rollout funds itself. Not twelve-month change programmes.
Who owns it at the end?
You do. The code, the prompts, the precedent index, the logs. We can host and maintain it, or hand it to your IT team. No lock-in, no per-seat upcharge on your own data.
Give your fee earners AI you'd be happy to defend.
Thirty-minute call. Tell us what your fee earners are doing with AI today and what they shouldn't be. You'll get a clear answer on what to build first and how the SRA piece holds together. No slides, no procurement theatre.