TL;DR

The Solicitors Regulation Authority has received 42 reports of possible AI misuse in the past year and has several investigations running. Its warning notice singles out two failures: fabricated material reaching the courts, and client information typed into tools with no confidentiality safeguards. Supervisors are explicitly on the hook.

Where the reports came from

The routes into the regulator tell you how the problem is surfacing. Senior judges have reported suspected rule breaches traced to hallucinated content. Separately, solicitors have self-reported after relying on tools that produced inaccurate or misleading output — firms finding their own errors, in other words, as well as courts finding them.

The regulator’s line is that the technology changes nothing about who is answerable. Using AI “does not diminish or transfer your professional responsibilities”, and solicitors remain accountable for all work and advice reaching a client whether or not a tool was involved.

The confidentiality point is the sharper one

Hallucinated citations get the attention; the SRA appears more worried about data. Both paid and free tools may lack the contractual and technical protections that client confidentiality requires, and putting client material into a public system risks a breach of both confidentiality and data protection law. The regulator notes what makes this irreversible: privilege, once waived that way, is waived permanently.

In-house solicitors get a specific warning. A tool built by the business for its own purposes was probably not designed for legal work, and should not be treated as though it were.

Supervision is now in scope

Anyone supervising junior or unadmitted colleagues can face action if false citations reach a court without adequate review — the failure at the centre of the Pinsent Masons matter back in May. The regulator’s executive director for strategy and policy, Aileen Armstrong, paired the warning with an acknowledgement that firms are using AI well. The Law Society’s vice-president, Brett Dixon, welcomed the notice and asked for guidance to keep pace.

Looking forward

Forty-two reports is a small number against the size of the profession, but it is a floor rather than a measure — it counts what was noticed and passed on. For UK firms outside the law, the transferable point is the supervision one: the regulator is treating unchecked output as a management failure, not an individual lapse.