What changes
Most firms already use AI, whether the partners know it or not. A trainee checks a clause in a free chatbot. A client emails over a contract an AI wrote for them. A competitor’s website answers questions at midnight. Taking stock means replacing guesswork with a clear picture: where AI is used today, which of your services it will reprice first, and which parts of your work rest on things AI can’t offer, such as regulated advice, professional indemnity cover and reserved legal activities.
The output is a short document for the partners, two or three pages at most. Service by service, it should show how much of the work is drafting and research, how much is judgement and client contact, and whether the work is reserved or open to anyone, including unregulated providers and clients with an AI assistant.
Why it matters now
Clients are already testing AI on their own legal questions before they call a solicitor, and some arrive with a draft in hand. The SRA expects firms to keep client information confidential and to supervise work done in their name, and that applies to AI tools as much as to people. A firm that doesn’t know how AI is being used can’t meet either duty with confidence. Two weeks of honest review is a small cost against that, and it gives every later move a clear starting point.
Checklist
- Survey everyone, including support staff, on which AI tools they use, for which tasks, and whether any client information has gone into them. Make it anonymous so you get honest answers.
- List your top ten services by fee income. For each one, estimate the share of time spent on drafting and research, and note whether it’s a reserved legal activity.
- Ask fee earners how many clients in the last three months arrived with a document they or an AI had already drafted, and what the firm did with it.
- Check what your professional indemnity insurer and your main software suppliers say about AI use, and note any conditions or exclusions you need to meet.
- Write a two-page summary for the partners that names three services to rethink first and one document type to pilot as a fixed-fee check and stand-behind service.
Illustrative example
A four-partner high-street firm does residential conveyancing, wills and probate, family work and some small business contracts. Its survey finds that eight of its 22 staff use a free chatbot at least weekly, and two of them have put client names into prompts. The fee review shows that wills and simple commercial contracts are mostly drafting time, and neither is a reserved activity, so both are exposed to clients who draft their own. Conveyancing and preparing probate papers are reserved, so the firm’s authorisation protects who can do them, but the drafting inside them can still be done much faster. The partners stop client data going into free tools that week, agree to pilot a fixed-fee check for wills and small business contracts, and start Move 2.
Common mistakes
- Treating it as an IT project. The questions are about services, fees and professional duties, so the partners need to own the review and its conclusions.
- Banning AI outright. Staff tend to keep using it on their own phones, and the firm loses sight of where client information is going.
- Assuming reserved work is safe from change. The reservation protects who can carry out the activity, not the price clients will accept for the drafting behind it.