Commercial law firm embeds a verification step before AI work leaves the firm

Challenge

A UK commercial law firm with 20 to 50 fee-earners reached the point that three different AI tools were in active use across the partnership without a firm-wide position on any of them. One practice group was pasting draft witness statements into a consumer chatbot. A second was running an enterprise copilot with default tenancy settings nobody had reviewed. A third had quietly abandoned a vendor trial after the COLP raised a confidentiality question the sales team could not answer.

The Managing Partner wanted one defensible position across the firm before the next piece of AI-assisted work left the building. The trigger was not a regulator letter. It was the Law Society's 2025 guidance, the SRA's repeated notices on fee-earner responsibility for AI-generated filings, and two recent English court decisions in which fabricated citations had been identified by the bench rather than by the solicitor who signed the submission.

Approach

Learn AI delivered the Secure AI for Fee-Earners half-day workshop on site to a group of eighteen, including the Managing Partner, both practice heads, the COLP, the COFA, and the Head of Legal Operations. The session mapped the firm's existing AI tool estate against confidentiality, UK GDPR, and SRA competence obligations. It produced a plain-English rule set for which tool belonged on which matter type, and a named verification step that any AI-drafted output had to pass before it left the firm.

A follow-up thirty-minute call four weeks later checked that the guidance note had been circulated and that the verification step had held in live matters.

Outcome

• The firm issued a one-page written guidance note to all fee-earners naming the sanctioned tools, the prohibited tools, and the verification step. The Managing Partner signed it. The COLP owns renewal.
• Consumer-grade AI use on client matters was brought to zero inside six weeks of the workshop, evidenced by the firm's DLP logs. The enterprise tenancy was reconfigured to restrict cross-tenant sharing and training-on-tenant content before any further rollout.
• A named verification step was added to the matter-opening template. Every AI-drafted output routed to a client or a court now records the supervising fee-earner, the tool used, and the fact of review. The partnership treats this as the SRA competence paper trail.
• The firm declined two vendor pilots in the two months following the workshop on the basis that the confidentiality posture could not be evidenced in writing. Both decisions sat with the COLP rather than the sales process.
• A follow-on Executive AI Briefing for the full partnership was booked at the four-week check-in. The partnership used the Briefing to set the 12-month AI adoption posture for the firm.

Quote

Three different practice groups had three different positions on AI. We walked out with one position, a written rule that fee-earners actually read, and a verification step the COLP signs off. That was worth the fee on its own.

Managing Partner, UK commercial law firm (20 to 50 fee-earners)

Next step for a similar firm

The starting point for a UK law firm sitting in the same position is the AI Readiness Assessment. It produces a personalised report covering current tool posture, SRA competence exposure, and the first governance step to take. Firms that want the partnership in the room for a half day go directly to the Executive AI Briefing. The fee-earner-level workshop sits on the Legal sector page.