TL;DR

Consumers turning to ChatGPT and its rivals for a solicitor can be pointed at firms the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has fined or closed, according to AI’s Blind Spot, a report published on Tuesday 6 October by Blind Justice UK, a charity focused on access to justice. The chatbots leaned on review sites and Google listings, which show the SRA’s badge but not its rulings.

What the tests found

The charity’s founder, Edward Romain, put ordinary consumer questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude in September. When the question was which Doncaster conveyancers were best, all three ranked a firm with an SRA fine first. According to Today’s Wills and Probate, ChatGPT and Claude led with a firm penalised £23,549 in 2025, and Gemini’s choice had a £30,540 penalty from 2020. No assistant mentioned either.

Maidenhead produced a starker result. Asked ten times, Claude recommended one particular firm in all ten answers and ChatGPT in three, legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg reports. The regulator had closed that firm in March because a staff member was suspected of dishonesty. Gemini never named it. A named Norwich firm drew no warning from any assistant either, though the regulator had imposed a £120,885 penalty on solicitors using that trading name over client money taken from the client account and never put back.

The report says the tools can find sanctions: when asked pointedly whether a firm had been disciplined, they cited the regulator’s findings. The problem is that consumers do not ask that question. As the report puts it, they “ask who is best, or whether a firm is any good”, and for that the bots rely on review sites, which repeat the regulator’s name “as a mark of standing”.

Fixes on the table

Blind Justice makes six recommendations. The SRA should release all its sanctions, closures included, as “open, machine-readable data”, and stop removing decisions from public view while a firm is still trading; at present most come down after three years. It also wants review platforms to show sanctions next to the badge, Google to mark firms as closed once the SRA intervenes, and AI companies to consult the regulator’s register before naming a firm.

Looking forward

In our view, the study is less about chatbot accuracy than about where regulatory data lives. If disciplinary records disappear after three years while reviews and ratings stay online, any search tool will inherit the gap. As the Law Society argued this week, AI tools could become the main route by which people look for legal help, and the SRA’s response to the machine-readable data proposal will show whether regulators are adapting their publishing to match.