TL;DR

A Shropshire firm has warned the public off using AI to obtain legal advice, and the sharpest point it makes is not about invented case law. Putting a solicitor’s advice letter into an open chatbot may amount to publishing it, which can force the document into the hands of the opposing side.

The disclosure trap

Brian Evans, managing partner at Lanyon Bowdler, describes the mechanism plainly. Somebody in litigation pastes a barrister’s opinion — the document that candidly sets out where their own case is weak — into a public service to get a summary of it. That act can put the material into the public domain, stripping away the protection that had kept it from an opponent, after which disclosure obligations may bite. Very few people doing this realise it, and the firm’s position is that advice should be taken before any case material goes near an open model.

The more familiar failures

The rest of the warning covers territory the courts have been mapping themselves. Repealed legislation gets cited, recent amendments get missed, and precedent is sometimes simply fabricated. Jurisdiction is a further trap: a system trained on material from everywhere will readily blend procedure from other countries into an answer about English law, producing something with no bearing on the reader’s situation.

Evans points to an employment tribunal matter written up in the Law Society Gazette. A claimant applying for reconsideration submitted AI-produced material including a 47-page overview. The judge found the documents repetitive and hard to follow, and observed that a litigant’s own words serve a tribunal better.

Looking forward

This arrives in a run of comparable UK cases. One solicitor was struck off over fabricated citations and then again over an apology that turned out to be AI-written; the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce has published a statement arguing English law already settles who pays when AI causes harm; and survey work puts adoption across the profession near-universal while anxiety about errors keeps climbing. What Lanyon Bowdler adds is the consumer end of that picture. The person with no solicitor, reaching for a free chatbot precisely because representation is expensive, is the least equipped to spot an invented authority and the most likely to hand their own protected papers to the other side.