A clear-eyed view of adoption, performance, opportunity, and risk
AI is now a practical tool inside UK solicitor firms rather than an experimental curiosity. Adoption has accelerated sharply over the last 18 months, driven by pressure on margins, client expectations around speed and cost, and the growing maturity of legal-specific AI tools. However, most firms remain early in organisational maturity. Individual solicitors and teams are using AI day to day, but relatively few firms have embedded AI into repeatable, governed workflows.
A growing and under-discussed dynamic is the externalisation of AI use by clients. Solicitors increasingly receive AI-generated analyses from clients that are lengthy, poorly reasoned, or legally incoherent. These submissions often arrive with the expectation of rapid validation and low cost. In practice, firms report that this increases workload rather than reducing it, as solicitors must now deconstruct and correct flawed reasoning before providing advice. Several solicitors noted that, in many cases, it would be faster and safer to start from a blank page.
Large firms are moving faster and more visibly. They are piloting AI at scale, formalising use cases, and measuring outcomes such as turnaround time, capacity, and write-offs. Smaller firms are adopting more cautiously, focusing on immediate productivity gains in drafting, research, and administration, often without the same level of formal governance.
Key findings:
Across firms of all sizes, AI adoption typically begins in areas where outputs are easy to review and the consequences of error are limited. These "safe-start" use cases include:
These uses allow solicitors to build confidence while maintaining human control over final outputs. Importantly, firms reporting positive outcomes emphasise that AI outputs are treated as inputs to thinking, not answers.
A frequently cited platform is Harvey, which has been designed and developed in collaboration with A&O Shearman. Feedback is mixed. Some solicitors value its research acceleration and structured outputs, while others remain unconvinced about its ability to handle nuance or complex client context. This divergence reflects a broader truth: perceived value is highly dependent on the type of work, quality of internal precedents, and clarity of review processes.
Solicitors consistently identify AI's strongest capabilities as:
AI's ability to filter and structure large bodies of information, which can then be peer-reviewed, is widely seen as a genuine time saver. In this role, AI acts as a force multiplier rather than a decision-maker.
In addition to previously identified issues, firms report a growing challenge created by client use of generative AI:
This shifts work from advisory to remedial review, increasing cognitive load and professional risk. Firms that fail to address this explicitly risk margin erosion and client dissatisfaction.
Internally, disappointment also arises where AI outputs are mistaken for "near-final" work rather than junior-level drafts, solicitors lack clear guidance on how much verification is required, and junior solicitors are unclear how AI fits into their development path.
Several senior solicitors raised concerns about the impact of AI on junior development. If AI routinely performs tasks historically used for training, firms risk weakening the pipeline of future senior solicitors.
Leading firms are beginning to respond by:
Handled well, AI can accelerate learning. Handled poorly, it can hollow out core skills.
The core opportunities remain, but with clearer boundaries.
AI is most effective when used to:
Its value lies in coverage and speed, not judgment.
AI performs well at:
Final positioning, tone, and risk assessment remain human responsibilities.
Most AI discussion remains focused on fee-earning work, but many of the lowest-risk, highest-return opportunities sit in business services.
There is strong potential in:
These approaches reward firms that invest in structured data and disciplined document management.
Some firms operate primarily with on-premises storage and express concern about AI accessibility. This is not a blocker. With modern open-source models and private deployment options, firms can host AI tooling on-prem or in isolated environments. The constraint is cost and access to skills rather than feasibility, driven largely by model size, bringing in AI expertise and usage patterns.
Firms increasingly need to manage not just AI risk, but AI-inflated client confidence. Practical responses include:
AI is already changing how UK solicitor firms operate, but its most profound effects are organisational rather than technical. In practice, today's tools function like junior solicitors: helpful, fast, and occasionally wrong. The firms seeing sustained benefit are those that recognise this and design workflows, training, and client communication accordingly.
Over the next two years, the gap will widen between firms that embed AI into disciplined operating models and those that allow it to emerge ad hoc, whether internally or via clients. The difference will not be model quality, but professional maturity.