AI in chambers — what the tool may draft, and what the advocate must own

Chambers already use software to paginate, to search and to dictate. Newer tools draft prose. The professional rule did not move with the tool. The advocate whose name is on the vakalatnama is responsible for what is filed. If a generated citation is false, the court will not be interested in which product produced it.

A usable division of work

• Fit to be assisted: turning a chronology into a clean list of dates, grouping annexures, proposing headings, putting a dictated note into grammatical English, checking that a defined term is used consistently.
• Not fit to be trusted unread: that a case exists, its year, its court, its paragraph, its holding, a section number, a rule amended last month, a quotation.
• Never delegated: the signature, the identity of the deponent, the statement that facts are true, the decision to include or to leave out a document.

No rule of the Bar Council transfers that responsibility to a vendor. An advocate is not entitled to mislead the court. A fabricated authority misleads the court whether a junior typed it or a model did.

Confidentiality is a professional fact

Pleadings, witness statements, bank records and medical papers are the client’s. Pasting them into a public tool, or into a product whose terms allow the text to be reused, is a confidentiality problem before it is a technology problem. Know where the text goes. Take the matter name off. Do not upload a paper book to save twenty minutes.

An educational note is not a brief

A page such as this one can explain a habit. It cannot run a matter. The useful sequence is short. The tool proposes. The advocate opens the Act or the judgment. Only then does the sentence enter a draft. Advertising rules do not relax because the medium is a website. Educational reading is one thing. A promise of result is another. This desk does not make that promise.