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.
Why this matters
This is the most substantive guidance the Law Society has issued on AI in legal practice, covering professional responsibility, billing ethics, client transparency, and junior lawyer development in a single document. The skills-gap warning is commercially significant: if firms use AI to absorb work traditionally done by trainees and junior associates, the pipeline of senior lawyers who understand how to do that work will thin over time. The billing point has immediate commercial bite, requiring firms to reconsider how they price matters where AI compresses time. Although the guidance is voluntary, it sets a de facto standard against which the Solicitors Regulation Authority may later measure conduct, making it a reference point for any future enforcement action.
On the Ground
The guidance activates AI governance work across every practice group: firms need to review and update AI use policies, data processing agreements with AI vendors, and client engagement letters to address disclosure obligations. Regulatory and professional responsibility practices will be advising on compliance frameworks built around this note. For trainees, the immediate task is reviewing vendor due diligence questionnaires and drafting or marking up AI governance policy documents, assessing how existing tools measure up against the Law Society's safety and confidentiality criteria, and preparing compliance gap analysis memos for supervising partners.
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