AI for UK law firms, built the way the SRA now expects.

On 17 August 2026 the Solicitors Regulation Authority issued a warning notice on the misuse of AI. Its two concerns are the ones every partner already worries about: fabricated citations reaching a court, and confidential client information typed into tools that keep it. Its position is blunt. "AI has no separate legal personality; solicitors and regulated individuals who use AI in the course of delivering legal services remain accountable for their work and outputs." Reliance on an AI output, it adds, "would not be a suitable defence". The Law Society Gazette reported that the SRA had received 42 reports of AI-related wrongdoing in the year to July 2026.

The courts got there first. In Ayinde and Al-Haroun, handed down in June 2025, the Divisional Court found that in one case eighteen of forty-five citations put before it did not exist, referred two solicitors to the SRA, and set the duty in plain words: those who use AI for legal research "have a professional duty therefore to check the accuracy of such research by reference to authoritative sources". The Upper Tribunal went further in November 2025: uploading confidential documents into an open tool such as ChatGPT "is to place this information on the internet in the public domain, and thus to breach client confidentiality and waive legal privilege". The judiciary’s own guidance says anything typed into a public chatbot "should be seen as being published to all the world".

None of this is a reason not to build. In May 2025 the same regulator authorised the first purely AI-based law firm, on the condition that named solicitors remain accountable for every output and that hallucination monitoring, confidentiality and conflict controls are in place. That is the design brief. The table sets each rule against what it requires of a system, and every agent on this page is built to it.

The headline numbers say adoption is nearly universal; the detail says it is shallow. LexisNexis found 61% of UK lawyers using generative AI for work by August 2025, up from 46% in January, but only 11% using it heavily, and 67% describing their firm’s AI culture as slow or non-existent. Clio’s survey of 500 UK solicitors found 96% of firms integrating AI in some form and 53% with no AI policy, or unaware of one. In other words, most firms have staff using tools, few firms have a system they control, and fewer still have written down what is allowed.

What the tools are used for is telling. Document drafting leads at 36%, contract review 29%, general non-legal tools 24%, e-discovery 20% and legal research 17%. The tasks that actually consume a small firm’s non-chargeable hours, onboarding, chasing, status updates and compliance file work, barely feature, because a chat window cannot do them. They need an agent connected to the practice management system, which is the work this page describes.

The best-evidenced leak in a UK law firm is the first contact. A mystery-shopping exercise across 100 personal injury and wills practices found that one in five wills enquiries by phone got no callback at all, and 16% of web enquiries received nothing. An earlier exercise found only 23% of firms made any follow-up call. Moneypenny’s overflow data put one in ten calls to a law firm as a brand new enquiry. Meanwhile the Legal Services Consumer Panel finds 44% of consumers now shopping around before instructing, comparing on price first (56%) and reputation second (48%).

Put those together and the arithmetic is uncomfortable: a firm that lets a fifth of enquiries go unanswered is handing them to whichever competitor replied. The second leak is the "where are we" call, which in conveyancing and family work interrupts fee earning to deliver information the firm already holds. The third is the compliance file: the SRA reviewed 5,873 files in 2024-25 and rated almost a third of firms not compliant, with a missing source-of-funds check the second most common failure. All three are process problems, and processes are what agents fix.

Each of these is a single agent connected to the practice management system the firm already runs, built in two to four weeks at a fixed price, with a person in the loop wherever a client, a court or the regulator could be affected. They are listed in the order most firms should build them, which is the order of the money leaking.

A first agent, one of the six above, integrated with your PMS and in production, is £4,000 to £15,000. A system of several agents sharing data, for example intake feeding onboarding feeding conflict screening, is £8,000 to £25,000. An AI adoption audit, if the firm does not yet know which leak is largest, is £2,500 to £6,000, credited in full against any build. Every price is fixed against a written scope with the exclusions listed, and the monthly running cost is stated before go-live. We do not sell day rates.

For context, the specialist market prices in three ways. Microsoft-partner consultancies sell a discovery phase and then a retainer: FiveForward publishes a £1,500 fixed first step and an "embed" retainer from £750 a month with a three-month minimum. Legal IT providers quote ranges rather than prices: Quiss puts agent implementations at £10,000 to £100,000 depending on firm size. The legal-tech vendors, OneAdvanced’s compliance agents, Lexis+ AI, CoCounsel and Clio’s add-ons, publish no UK prices at all. Khiliad Legal, Nexian and BCN offer assessments and pilots without published figures.

Competitor figures read on their pages in September 2026; prices exclude VAT where stated.

Confidentiality is the question every partner asks first, and it deserves an engineering answer rather than a reassurance. This is the position on every legal build, written into the scope before any client data moves.

Non-chargeable hours per fee earner per week is the number partners care about and it is almost always estimated. Measure it for a fortnight before anything is built. Then time from enquiry to engagement letter, which is where instructions are lost quietly, and the share of enquiries that receive a same-day response. For onboarding, days from instruction to a completed risk assessment. For conveyancing, the firm’s own requisition rate, which HM Land Registry publishes by customer. For any document work, the error rate on a sample checked by hand; an automation with no measured error rate is a liability in a regulated practice, and we will not put one live.