An Open Letter to Clients Who Ask Me to Review Their AI Document

If you have been sent this article, it is probably because you asked a lawyer to simply review or clean up a document that an AI generated for you. This letter explains, plainly and publicly, why that request is more complicated than it sounds, and why a lawyer who cares about doing the job properly cannot simply say yes.

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 by doing this you are asking to treat your relationship with your lawyer as a one-night stand. Your lawyer, meanwhile, is legally required to treat it as a marriage. The fact that you have already made other arrangements does not change this.

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. Some do not realise those things come attached. Others understand perfectly and are hoping to get the full benefits of the marriage at the price of a one-night stand.

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. No responsible lawyer will accept that. And if one does, their willingness to do so is not reassuring. It is a warning.

Why I Cannot Simply Rubber-Stamp It

Lawyers are not the mouthpiece of their clients and they are not a notarial stamp for documents a client has already decided on. 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). That rule is technically confined to litigation, but the principle extends to all legal work through Rule 7.1, which requires a solicitor to provide 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, complaints to the Legal Services Commissioner and findings of professional misconduct.

To provide genuinely independent advice on a document, I need to understand:

• What transaction or relationship the document is meant to govern
• What your actual objectives are, not just what you typed into an AI prompt
• What the other party's position is and what has been agreed between you
• Whether the document reflects current Australian law, not US law, not English law, not a prior version of the relevant rules and not invented law
• What risks the document creates that you have not noticed and the AI was not prompted to consider
• What the document omits, which is often where the real exposure lies

Once I have done that inquiry, I am in a position to advise. Before I have done it, I am not. A lawyer who skips that step and endorses the document anyway is not providing independent advice. They are providing a rubber stamp with a law degree on top of it, and hoping nothing goes wrong.

The Real Problem Is Not AI. It Is Accountability.

Let me be clear about something. AI is a remarkable tool. I use it. Many good lawyers use it. It is genuinely useful for research, for brainstorming, for stress-testing an argument and for getting a first draft moving. This letter is not an attack on AI.

The problem is not whether AI is capable. The problem is what happens when something goes wrong. And on that question the answer is unambiguous: when you rely on an AI-generated legal document and it fails you, nobody is professionally responsible. The platform told you so. It is in the terms of service. "This is not legal advice" is not a courtesy disclaimer. It is a liability shield. The platform's creators have made very sure they are not on the hook for your outcome.

A lawyer is. That is the entire difference.

If you have something significant at stake, a contract worth real money, an employment matter, a dispute with consequences, the question you need to ask is not whether AI is good enough on average. It is what happens in your specific case if it gets it wrong. With a lawyer there is professional indemnity insurance, a regulator, a complaints process and a duty of care enforceable in court. With an AI platform there is a terms of service that already told you not to rely on it.

Australian courts have already seen what happens when lawyers themselves over-rely on AI output without applying independent judgment. In July 2024, a Victorian solicitor was asked by the court to provide a list of relevant prior cases in a family dispute. 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 in an Australian first. He can no longer practise as a principal, cannot handle trust money and must work under supervised employment for two years with quarterly reporting to the Board.

That is not an isolated incident. It is one of more than twenty similar matters reported in Australian courts. 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. He apologised. The errors caused a twenty-four hour delay in a murder proceeding.

The lesson from these cases is not that AI is bad. It is that someone still has to be responsible. In each of those cases it was the lawyer. When there is no lawyer, that accountability simply does not exist.

If you have a lot on the line, do you really want to put it in the hands of a tool whose creators have already told you, in writing, that they accept no responsibility for the outcome?

There is a caveat worth noting. Whether the "this is not legal advice" disclaimer actually holds up is not a settled question. There are credible legal arguments that if an AI platform is providing advice tailored to a user's specific circumstances in exchange for money, it may in substance be engaging in legal practice regardless of what the disclaimer says. In the United States, the AI platform DoNotPay was sued for practising law without a licence and ultimately settled with the Federal Trade Commission, which found it had misled consumers about the quality of its legal services. Under Australian law, the Victorian Legal Services Board has stated explicitly that disclaimers do not change the character of the conduct. Whether Australian regulators will eventually pursue AI platforms on this basis is an open question. What is not open is the position you are in right now: the platform says it is not legal advice, which means if it goes wrong, you are on your own until a court says otherwise.

What Engaging a Lawyer Actually Costs

The relevant cost comparison is not AI fee versus lawyer fee. It is the cost of getting the document right versus the cost of a dispute arising from getting it wrong. A contract with unenforceable clauses, an agreement that does not accurately reflect what was negotiated, a document that inadvertently creates obligations that were never intended: these are predictable outcomes when a tool is used that does not know the parties, has not verified the applicable law and is not liable for the result.

Legal advice properly scoped to a document or transaction is often less expensive than clients assume. Asking a lawyer to review an AI document as a genuine starting point for proper advice is a legitimate and reasonable approach and many practitioners are open to that when the engagement is genuine.

What does not work is asking a lawyer to provide the appearance of legal advice without the substance of it. That helps no one.

What This Is Really About

This letter is not an argument that AI has no place in legal practice. It does, and responsible use of AI tools with proper supervision and verification is already part of modern legal work. Australian regulators have said clearly that its use is not only permissible but in some contexts expected of competent practitioners.

The objection is to a particular transaction: the client who generates a document unilaterally and then asks a lawyer to lend their professional standing to it without genuine engagement, proper instructions or independent analysis.

A lawyer who agrees to do that is not offering a cost-effective alternative. They are offering the illusion of professional oversight while assuming all the liability for it. That is not good for the client. 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.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: if AI can access all the same knowledge, write the same documents and answer the same questions, what exactly is a lawyer for? The answer is more interesting than you might expect. I have written about it here.

References

• Australian Solicitors' Conduct Rules 2015 (ASCR), rr 7.1, 17.1
• 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 — reported in Victorian lawyer sanctioned for AI-generated false citations
• Murray on behalf of the Wamba Wemba Native Title Claim Group v State of Victoria [2025] FCA 731 — indemnity costs ordered against law firm for AI-hallucinated citations
• Director of Public Prosecutions v GR [2025] VSC 490 — AI-generated false citations in murder trial, King's Counsel apologises to court

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.