TL;DR: SRA AI guidance makes solicitors personally responsible for anything AI produces, including research and court submissions. Two firms have already been referred to the SRA this year after AI-generated citations turned out to be fake. Verification, staff training, documented use and client disclosure are what the SRA expects firms to have in place.

What does the SRA’s AI guidance actually say?

The SRA has not written a rulebook for AI. Its compliance tips, last updated in February 2026, restate the Code of Conduct and apply it to AI tools directly.

You stay responsible for your work, whoever/whatever produced the first draft. Client confidentiality applies regardless of the platform. And you must understand a tool well enough to spot when it has got something wrong.

Who is responsible for AI compliance in your firm?

The SRA expects your Compliance Officer for Legal Practice (COLP) to take ownership of AI governance across the firm.

That means someone specific is accountable for how AI tools are used and checked, with the authority to enforce it.

Why are solicitors being referred to the SRA over AI use?

Pinsent Masons referred itself to the SRA after a junior solicitor used AI to research a point of insolvency law. The tool invented a statutory provision that did not exist, and it made it into a letter to the court. Two senior solicitors had signed that letter off without catching the error. (Source – Law Gazette)

In a separate case, Rodney v Gee’z Micro Bar & Pitstop, His Honour Judge Grimshaw referred two solicitors at AML Legal after a skeleton argument cited authorities that turned out to be fabricated. One document even included the line “your client was a litigant in person,” language the judge noted read like something generated rather than written by a lawyer. (Source – Law Gazette)

Judge Grimshaw called for a “robust approach” from the courts, describing fake AI citations as a growing threat to the justice system. Neither case involved a rogue actor trying to deceive the court. Both involved firms that skipped the verification step.

See what Matt has to say

What should your law firm have in place to meet SRA AI guidance?

Governance does not need to be complicated. It needs to exist and be followed.

Verify every citation before it leaves the building

Any citation or quotation an AI tool produces gets checked against the primary source before it reaches a client or a court. No exceptions for time pressure.

Train staff on what AI can and cannot do

Staff need to understand that a confident, well-formatted answer from an AI tool can still be entirely wrong, these are known as AI hallucinations.

Keep client data out of AI tools

AI tools can store and reuse whatever is typed into them, so confidential client information should never go near one. The confidentiality duty always applies, no matter which tool is involved. What matters most is knowing where shadow AI might be creeping into your firm, and training staff to use only the tools you have approved.

Record AI use in the matter file

If AI contributed to research or drafting, note it. This protects the fee earner and gives the firm a clear audit trail if something is later questioned.

Tell clients when AI is part of the process

The SRA’s guidance is explicit on this point. Clients should be told when AI is involved as a normal part of client care.

How Labyrinth Technology can help

We work with law firms across the UK to put the practical structures behind compliance guidance like this. That means secure systems for how AI tools connect to your data, and IT support that understands why a law firm’s obligations are different from a typical small business.

If you are reviewing how AI is used across your firm, we can help you build the policies and secure systems that sit behind it.

Two firms have already been referred to the SRA this year over uncaught AI citations. The next one is being decided right now, one verification step at a time.

We are pleased to announce that Labyrinth Technology is now a NetDocuments partner. We have been working with law firms running NetDocuments for years, and this partnership formalises that relationship.

What is NetDocuments?

NetDocuments is a cloud-based document management system built specifically for law firms. It is the system your firm’s documents and matter files are built around. A large number of UK firms have made it the foundation of how they manage their practice, and adoption has been growing steadily.

If your firm is already on NetDocuments, you will know how much of your day-to-day operation depends on it working reliably. A failed migration or a platform issue has an immediate knock-on effect across the whole practice. Having an IT partner who knows NetDocuments properly means you are far less likely to find yourself in that position.

Why this partnership matters for your firm

As a NetDocuments partner, Labyrinth Technology now has a direct relationship with the platform and its support infrastructure. For you, that means faster resolutions and better-informed guidance when your firm is planning anything significant on the platform.

We have dedicated in-house NetDocuments product owners who work with the platform day to day, which means the support your firm gets is grounded in real working knowledge of it. That knowledge is what makes the difference when something needs to move quickly.

This is not a new area of work for us. We have been supporting firms through NetDocuments implementations and migrations for a number of years. The partnership reflects experience we already had.

What Matt Dunn, CTO and COO at Labyrinth Technology, had to say

“As a specialist IT partner for law firms, we’ve spent a decade helping firms that put NetDocuments at the heart of their practice. Managing matters, documents, and client data with confidence.

NetDocuments is strategically important to our clients, so it’s strategically important to us.

With dedicated in-house NetDocuments product owners, we bring deep platform expertise that will translate directly into faster rollouts, smoother migrations, and ongoing support your team can rely on. We’re proud to formalise that commitment through this partnership.”

How can Labyrinth Technology support you

This partnership sits alongside everything else Labyrinth Technology does for law firms. We support firms across Microsoft 365, network security, backup and disaster recovery, and cloud migrations.

NetDocuments also integrates directly with Microsoft 365, so if we already support your firm’s Microsoft environment, the two areas of support connect naturally.

If you would like to talk through what this means for your firm, get in touch with the team.

Every law firm I talk to is asking about Claude Legal at the moment.

Claude, Copilot, Lexis+ AI, Harvey, Thomson Reuters, Clio. The list goes on.

How do you stay ahead without ending up with 5 different AI subscriptions per person that most people are not using?

Here are some of my recommendations from experience.

1. Dedicated research team

It’s a good idea to have a test group of ‘power users’ from different roles across the business to be trying out new AI tools and features and seeing which ones deliver the most value. There needs to be some guard rails and governance here though.

You don’t want to be rolling out new tools every week, or you’ll end up needing an expensive digital transformation project in a year to unpick and consolidate it all!

You also need to do your cyber security due diligence and make sure anything you are testing is set up properly, securely and the data it leverages is ready (accurate, access controlled correctly etc.)

2. Lead with the requirements

Many other law firms are using or experimenting with these tools. So it can be easy to jump to leading with the solution and trying to make it fit.

Take the time to understand how fee earners work, sales, marketing, HR, accounts. Understand their pain points and where AI could save them the most time. Then you can look at matching a solution to those requirements.

3. Measure ROI

The reality is that most law firms will benefit from a combination of these tools to suit different requirements and business functions. Lexis+ for example only uses data from trusted legal sources. Copilot and Claude can leverage Microsoft 365 data and meet you where you work.

But can you clearly demonstrate and measure the ROI from each of these tools? Do that per department and consider whether each one is actually needed by everyone in the business.

4. Governance

You need to define how each of these tools will be used, and consider the appropriate quality, ethical, legal and data privacy implications.

Document it, but make it clear, concise and don’t hide behind policies. Train your team. Regularly. They will forget, trust me.

Look at technical controls to enforce your AI policies.