Can you use AI to get legal advice?

Yes, with care. Real care, the sort where you treat AI like a keen friend who has read a lot and never sat an exam.

AI is good at getting you oriented. It can explain a confusing term in a letter, help you learn the vocabulary, tidy up a messy story and help you work out what to ask. It is not a solicitor. It can invent law and cases, and you are the one who carries the consequences of whatever you put before a court. This page covers England and Wales; Scotland and Northern Ireland have different routes to legal help.

How to do it well

Use AI to get your head straight before you talk to a person, and keep the answers you rely on for a person.

The good uses are fairly ordinary. Paste in a paragraph of a contract or a letter from the other side and ask for it in plain English. Ask what a term means (words like “without prejudice” or “indemnity”, the ones that make your eyes slide off the page), then ask it to explain again, more simply, until it lands.

Another good use is turning a muddle into a dated timeline. Most of us tell our story in the order we are angry about it, which is rarely the order it happened. AI is handy at putting events back in sequence and showing you the gaps, like the date you cannot remember or the email you forgot you sent.

It is also useful for listing questions to ask a solicitor. That matters, because Citizens Advice says some solicitors give 30 minutes’ advice free or for a fixed fee, and suggests preparing notes and documents beforehand. Half an hour goes fast, and you want to spend it on the right things.

You can have it draft a first version of a letter, as long as you then check it line by line against your own facts. Here is a prompt that does the timeline and the questions in one go:

Below are my notes about a legal problem. Please do two things.
1. Turn them into a timeline in date order. Where a date is
missing or unclear, say so and list it as something I need to find out.
2. Write a list of questions I could ask a solicitor about this situation.

Do not give a view on who is likely to win or what the outcome will be.
Do not tell me what the law says or quote any cases or legislation.
Only organise what I have written.

My notes:
[paste notes here, with names and personal details removed]

That prompt organises your facts and asks the AI to decide nothing.

The bad uses are the mirror image. Do not use it to decide whether you have a case, to work out deadlines, or to find case law to cite. Those are the jobs where a confident wrong answer does the most damage.

Human help is often the better first step, and there is more of it than people think. Citizens Advice says you might get legal aid for a serious problem, free, reduced-cost or fixed-fee advice, help through a trade union, or legal cover through an insurance policy. GOV.UK has a free legal aid eligibility checker, and the Civil Legal Advice helpline is 0345 345 4345; if you qualify, a legal adviser applies for legal aid for you. Law centres, LawWorks free advice clinics and Advocate, which can find a volunteer barrister for a court or tribunal case, are there too.

Rules and risks

The big one: never cite a case or a law that came from an AI without finding it in an official source. The court holds you responsible.

The judiciary’s AI guidance for judges (October 2025) says AI tools may “hallucinate”: make up fictitious cases, citations or quotes, refer to legislation or legal texts that do not exist, give incorrect or misleading information about the law or how it applies, and make factual errors. Even when an answer claims to represent the law of England and Wales, it may not. The guidance notes that unrepresented litigants now use AI chatbots, that these may be the only advice some people receive, and that litigants rarely have the skills to check what the chatbot says. Judges may ask whether AI was used and what checks were done, and remind the litigant that they are responsible for what they put to the court.

The High Court made the same point in Ayinde v Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin), on 6 June 2025. It said freely available generative AI tools are not capable of conducting reliable legal research: they can give coherent, plausible answers that are entirely incorrect, cite sources that do not exist and quote passages that are not in the real source. In Al-Haroun, 45 citations went before the court, and in 18 the case did not exist. Many of the rest did not contain the quotations attributed to them or did not support the point. The client accepted that the citations came from publicly available AI tools, legal search engines and online sources; his solicitor had relied on that research without checking it, and reported himself to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA). If a solicitor can be caught out, so can you.

Next, privacy. Do not paste confidential details into public AI tools. The same judicial guidance tells judges to treat public AI tools as capable of making public anything entered into them. Strip out names, addresses and anything sensitive before you paste.

Then there is the question of when to stop typing and ring someone. Get human help for anything with a deadline, money at stake, a court case, your home or your job.

When you do look for a person, check who they are. The SRA says only people it approves can call themselves solicitors. Some work, called reserved activities, needs an authorised person: buying or selling property, administering wills and representing you in court. For other advice there are options such as mediators, paralegals and will writers, and your protection (insurance, complaints, compensation) differs by type of provider. The SRA’s Solicitors Register lets you check whether someone is a solicitor and whether a firm is regulated, and the SRA publishes scam alerts. The Law Society’s free Find a Solicitor service lets you search SRA-regulated solicitors by legal issue and location, though the Law Society itself does not give legal advice.

Citizens Advice notes that solicitors have to publish prices for some services, such as probate, residential conveyancing and some employment tribunal cases. If you end up in court without a lawyer, you are a “litigant in person”. Support Through Court volunteers can help with practical matters but not legal advice, and you can bring a supporter known as a McKenzie Friend.

Use AI to get oriented, then let a person do the relying.

This is general information, not legal advice.