Law Society Warns AI Must Not Replace Junior Lawyers as It Issues Practice Note on Professional Responsibility and Skills Gap Risk

The Law Society of England and Wales published a practice note this week setting out voluntary guidelines for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practice, with a clear central message: AI is not a legal entity and professional responsibility cannot be transferred to any AI system. The guidance states that solicitors must retain the ability to carry out and scrutinise legal work without AI assistance, and warns that overreliance on AI tools could produce what Law Society president Brett Dixon described as a 'catastrophic gap of future legal skills and knowledge'. The note addresses several practical areas. On client transparency, it says solicitors should provide clients with appropriate information about how AI is being used in their matters, and that firms can also ask clients to disclose when they have used AI to prepare materials. On billing, a separate signal from the guidance indicates that solicitors charging on a time basis should not bill for the time a task would have taken had AI not been used. On data security, the guidance warns that no AI tool is automatically safe, with free services often lacking sufficient protections around client confidentiality, and that even paid-for systems should be carefully checked before use. The guidance explicitly states that AI-generated documents, legal submissions, and references must be subject to appropriate human oversight and verification, citing risks of inaccurate information and fabricated case citations. The Law Society is a representative body rather than an official regulator and its practice notes carry voluntary rather than statutory authority, but they carry significant practical weight for firms shaping their AI governance policies.

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