An Open Letter to Clients Who Ask Me to Review Their AI Document
Summary
If you have been sent this article, it is probably because you asked a lawyer to review or clean up a document that an AI generated for you. The Queensland Law Society now provides a standard template letter that law practices can give to clients warning them about the risks of using AI in connection with legal matters. That letter is measured, thorough and diplomatic. This one is not. This letter says the same things, just more directly.
Key Takeaways
- When a lawyer acts for a client, full professional obligations attach immediately under the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules, including duties of care, fiduciary duties, competence and diligence, regardless of how small the client perceives the task to be.
- Rule 17.1 of the ASCR requires solicitors to exercise independent forensic judgment and not act as a mere mouthpiece, and Rule 7.1 requires clear advice enabling informed choices. Simply endorsing an AI document without genuine engagement breaches both.
- AI platforms universally disclaim legal liability in their terms of service. When an AI-generated document fails, nobody is professionally responsible. A lawyer provides professional indemnity insurance, regulatory accountability and an enforceable duty of care.
- If you have used a public AI tool to draft legal documents, you may have already compromised your own position. Pasting privileged communications, legal advice or confidential material into a third-party AI platform can waive legal professional privilege entirely.
- Australian courts have already sanctioned practitioners who relied on AI output without independent verification, including a Victorian solicitor whose practising certificate was varied for submitting AI-generated false case citations.
If you have been sent this article, it is probably because you asked a lawyer to review or clean up a document that an AI generated for you. The Queensland Law Society now provides a standard template letter that law practices can give to clients warning them about the risks of using AI in connection with legal matters. That letter is measured, thorough and diplomatic. This one is not. This letter says the same things, just more directly.
The Marriage Problem
When you ask a lawyer to review an AI document, you are probably thinking: lawyers charge too much, I will do the legwork myself and get a discount on the bill. What you may not realise is that you are asking to treat the relationship as a one-night stand. Your lawyer is legally required to treat it as a marriage.
That is not an exaggeration. When a lawyer acts for a client, even on what appears to be a simple task, a full suite of professional obligations attaches immediately: a duty of care, fiduciary duties, duties of competence and diligence under the Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules, confidentiality obligations and an overriding duty to the court and the administration of justice. These do not attach partially based on how small the client thinks the job is. They attach in full, from the moment the lawyer puts their name to anything.
A client who asks a lawyer to "just review" an AI document is asking for the benefits of professional endorsement without the relationship that makes professional advice meaningful. They want a signature without the conversation, the context, the inquiry and the judgment that should precede it.
The lawyer, meanwhile, is being asked to assume complete professional liability for a document they did not write, in a matter whose full circumstances they have not been asked to understand, based on instructions they were never given. That is not a reduced engagement. It is the full risk for less than the full job.
Why I Cannot Simply Rubber-Stamp It
The Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules require a solicitor to exercise independent forensic judgment and not act as the mere mouthpiece of the client (Rule 17.1). Rule 7.1 requires clear and timely advice that enables a client to understand relevant legal issues and make informed choices. A lawyer who simply endorses whatever a client has already decided fails both rules. These are not aspirational guidelines. Breaching them can result in disciplinary action and findings of professional misconduct.
To provide genuinely independent advice on a document, I need to understand what transaction or relationship it governs, what your actual objectives are, what the other party's position is, whether the document reflects current Australian law and what the document omits. That last point is usually where the real exposure lies. AI does not know what it does not know, and it will not tell you what questions you forgot to ask.
Once I have done that inquiry, I am in a position to advise. Before I have done it, I am not.
You May Have Already Damaged Your Own Position
There is a practical risk that most clients do not consider. If you have pasted privileged communications, legal advice or confidential material into a public or free AI tool, you may have waived legal professional privilege over that material.
Legal professional privilege protects communications between you and your lawyer from being disclosed to the other side. It is one of the most important protections you have in any dispute. But privilege depends on confidentiality. When you paste privileged material into a third-party AI platform, that material may be stored on overseas servers, used to train the provider's models, accessed by the provider's staff or become discoverable by the other side in litigation. The Queensland Law Society has warned practitioners and clients explicitly about this risk.
The consequences are serious. If privilege is waived, the other side can access information you expected to stay private, including your legal strategy, your assessment of weaknesses in your own position and the advice your lawyer gave you. That cannot be undone.
Even paid AI tools are not automatically safe. Some retain what you input, some allow your content to be used in ways the privacy settings do not make obvious and some use third-party services with their own data handling practices. If you have used any AI tool in connection with a legal matter, tell your lawyer. If you have not yet used one, ask before you do.
What Happens When It Goes Wrong
When you rely on an AI-generated legal document and it fails, nobody is professionally responsible. The platform told you so in its terms of service. "This is not legal advice" is not a courtesy disclaimer. It is a liability shield.
A lawyer is responsible. That is the entire difference. There is professional indemnity insurance, a regulator, a complaints process and a duty of care enforceable in court.
Australian courts have already seen what happens when even lawyers over-rely on AI without applying independent judgment. In July 2024, a Victorian solicitor was asked by the court to provide a list of relevant prior cases. He provided one. None of the cases existed. The list had been prepared using AI-powered legal research software and he had not checked it. The Victorian Legal Services Board investigated and in August 2025 varied his practising certificate. He can no longer practise as a principal, cannot handle trust money and must work under supervised employment for two years with quarterly reporting.
In April 2025, in a native title case before the Federal Court, a Melbourne law firm was ordered to pay indemnity costs after a junior solicitor used Google Scholar to compile citations that were either incorrect or did not exist. In August 2025, a King's Counsel in a Victorian Supreme Court murder trial filed submissions containing fabricated citations and fake quotes from a parliamentary speech. The errors caused a twenty-four hour delay in a murder proceeding.
These are lawyers who had every reason and every professional obligation to check the output. They did not. If trained practitioners with regulatory obligations and professional insurance cannot reliably use AI output without verification, the position is not improved when the person doing it has no legal training at all.
What I Am Actually Asking You to Do
Asking a lawyer to review an AI document as a genuine starting point for proper advice is a reasonable approach. Many practitioners are open to it. The document gives us something to work with, and it can reduce the time spent on a first draft.
What does not work is asking a lawyer to provide the appearance of professional endorsement without genuine engagement, proper instructions or independent analysis. That helps no one and it is not something a lawyer acting with integrity can agree to.
The value of engaging a lawyer is not the signature at the end. It is the judgment, the expertise and the accountability that sits behind it. That cannot be outsourced to an AI. And a lawyer who pretends it can is not someone whose signature is worth having.
References
- Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules 2015 (ASCR), rr 7.1, 17.1
- Queensland Law Society, Guidance Statement No. 37: Artificial Intelligence in Legal Practice, May 2024
- Queensland Law Society, Template: Warning to Clients - Client Use of AI and Confidential Information, January 2026
- Joint Statement on the Use of Artificial Intelligence in Australian Legal Practice — Law Society of NSW, Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner, Legal Practice Board of WA, December 2024
- Guidelines for Litigants: Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence in Litigation — Victorian Supreme Court, 2024
- Notice to the Profession re Generative AI — Federal Court of Australia, April 2025
- VLSB+C practising certificate variation arising from AI-generated false citations, August 2025
- Murray on behalf of the Wamba Wemba Native Title Claim Group v State of Victoria [2025] FCA 731
- Director of Public Prosecutions v GR [2025] VSC 490
Written by Jamie Nuich, Legal Practitioner Director of Astris Law
This article is for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. You should seek professional advice tailored to your specific circumstances before acting on any information in this article. Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation.