Should lawyers use AI?

For drafting, summarising long documents and first-pass research, yes, with a lawyer verifying everything before it goes anywhere. Not for anything where a confident invention could reach a client or a court unchecked, and not by pasting client material into public consumer tools.

The value is real and worth being specific about, because vague enthusiasm produces vague policies. Summarising a long brief or a bundle of correspondence. Producing a first draft of a routine letter that a lawyer then makes correct. Explaining an unfamiliar area at an orientation level before proper research. Turning notes into a structured file note. All of these are ordinary tasks where a fast, imperfect first version genuinely saves time.

The risk is equally specific: these tools generate fluent text and will occasionally assert things that are not true, including case citations that do not exist. That has embarrassed lawyers in several jurisdictions and it will keep happening, because the output looks exactly as authoritative when it is wrong as when it is right. The mitigation is not clever prompting; it is that a lawyer verifies before anything is relied upon, and that the firm treats output as a draft rather than as work.

The governance side is where firms should start rather than finish. Give people a sanctioned tool operating under business terms inside your own environment, so the useful thing has an approved home and client material is not leaving your control. Write three sentences on what may never be pasted anywhere. And tidy your document permissions before deploying anything that answers from your own files, because a tool that surfaces whatever a user can already open will find whatever your access control has quietly allowed. If you want it set up with the guardrails first, call 1800 456 567.