What should a law firm never let AI do?

Two constraints govern this and both come from professional obligation rather than from risk appetite. The first is confidentiality: a lawyer must keep confidential all information relating to the representation of a client, whatever its source, unless the client gives informed consent. Guidance on generative tools has been explicit that this means understanding how a tool uses data and obtaining informed consent before putting information relating to a representation into it, including within a firm's own closed system. Informed consent in this context means the client is told the material risks and the reasonably available alternatives.

That has a practical consequence firms often reach late: the decision about which tools may be used is not an IT decision. It is a decision about what has been disclosed to clients and agreed with them, which means engagement terms, not a policy circulated internally. Firms that address it as procurement end up with an approved tool and an unaddressed obligation.

The second constraint is verification. Every citation, quotation and proposition in anything filed or sent is the lawyer's assertion, and a generated citation is a claim that a document exists and says something. The only check that means anything is opening the source and reading the passage, because a fabricated citation is formatted identically to a real one and reads more plausibly than most real ones. This is not a matter of the tool improving; it is a matter of what is being asserted and by whom.

Beyond those two, the useful work is substantial and it sits in the same place as everywhere else: retrieval and drafting under review. Finding the relevant material in the firm's own documents. Producing a first draft of something routine. Summarising a long document for someone about to read it properly. Extracting dates and obligations from an agreement into a schedule. Each of these has a lawyer between the output and the client, which is where the obligation puts them anyway.

Billing deserves specific mention because it is where firms create a problem for themselves. Time saved by a tool is time not spent, and charging for it as though it were is a separate professional issue from anything about the technology. Firms that decide this deliberately — how the efficiency is reflected in what the client pays — avoid a conversation that goes badly when a client asks.

Finally, supervision. Work produced with these tools is still the work of the lawyer responsible for it, and the delegation logic that applies to a junior applies here without modification: the person responsible reads it, understands it, and answers for it. A firm that would not file a junior's brief unread should not file this one either, and the reason is the same one.