Solicitors face emerging professional indemnity risks from adopting generative AI—and potentially from failing to adopt it, according to a recent UKJT Statement on Liability for AI Harms. The report suggests that solicitors may in future be held negligent for failing to use generative AI (genAI) tools. While some firms enthusiastically adopt the technology, others view it as an overhyped white elephant, yet both groups face significant risks regarding adoption.
Solicitors will likely notice complaint correspondence, pleadings, and other court documents that appear to have been prepared using genAI. The hallmarks of AI-generated content include unnecessary detail, grandiose terminology, and obvious giveaways. These include “meta” text, such as “That’s a great question! Here’s a paste-ready complaint to your solicitor…” or links ending with “?utm_source=chatgpt.com”, indicating the user located the source using ChatGPT. While it’s often impossible to be certain that a document is AI-generated, the best way to prepare is to experiment with these tools yourself. This practice also equips firms for decisions about how to use genAI in their own practice, though even this is not ethically straightforward because of its environmental impact.
Risks for Law Firms
There is no reason in principle why a Litigant in Person (LiP) should not use genAI to help draft complaints and claims. However, the key challenges for law firms are twofold. First, the widespread availability of free genAI tools drastically reduces the time commitment from claimants, which increases the risk of complaints or claims. Second, genAI-drafted complaints may demand more time from the solicitor because of the need to investigate a legally coherent claim or to parse an unnecessarily long complaint.
First-tier complaints (FTCs) arguably impose the greatest burden as firms are expected to investigate and respond to these themselves, and there are no formal rules governing the form or length of a complaint. Firms can make clear that it will take longer to respond to a lengthy and detailed complaint and, if they have their own secure genAI tools, deploy them in responding to the FTC. Formal letters of claim must be “detailed” under the Professional Negligence Pre-Action Protocol. However, more prescriptive rules apply once proceedings are issued with Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) 16.2 and 16.4 requiring that the claim form and particulars contain “a concise statement” of the nature of the claim and facts. This could form the basis of an application for strike out or an order that the claimant amend their particulars.
Law firms facing the burden of drafting a secure database must ensure all client communications are protected against emerging data exposure risks.
