Could Your Solicitor Be Negligent for Not Using AI?

Most of the debate about AI and the legal profession has focused on one risk: solicitors using it badly. Chatbots inventing case law. Client secrets typed into tools never built to protect them. A new legal statement has now confirmed the opposite risk is just as real. A solicitor, or any other professional, can be negligent for not using AI at all.

On 7 July 2026, the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce (UKJT) published its Legal Statement on Liability for AI Harms, as first reported by Legal Futures. The UKJT is the body whose earlier statements, on cryptoassets and smart contracts, have already been adopted directly by English judges. This one is likely to carry similar weight, and it matters to anyone who instructs a professional adviser, whether that’s a solicitor, an accountant, a financial adviser or a surveyor.

What the legal statement says

The Taskforce’s position is simple: AI is a tool. Whether a professional should have used it, or used it differently, is judged the same way the law has always judged the use of any other tool available to that profession. No new legislation is needed.

The test is whether a reasonably competent professional, in a comparable role and area of practice, would have used AI in the same situation. That depends on what the relevant professional body’s guidance says, and on evidence about what competent practitioners are actually doing. As AI adoption becomes standard across a profession, the argument that it was reasonable to ignore it gets weaker.

The Taskforce’s own example is telling: a solicitor acting in the Business and Property Courts who fails to advise a client that AI could be used to review a large volume of documents. Where that failure adds unnecessary cost, or misses something a proper review would have caught, it could support a professional negligence claim.

Getting AI use wrong is just as risky

The statement gives equal weight to the more familiar concern. A professional is likely to be found negligent for:

The confidentiality point deserves particular attention. Putting privileged material into an insecure or public AI tool doesn’t just risk a negligence claim; it can destroy the privilege itself, which cannot be recovered once lost.

None of this is really new. It’s the same duty of reasonable care and skill that has always applied to professional advice. The Taskforce has simply confirmed it now extends to how, and whether, AI is used.

What About AI Chatbots?

The statement also looked at AI chatbots that deal with customers directly. Its conclusion: a business is likely to be liable for a chatbot’s false statements where it presents that chatbot as speaking on its behalf, or represents its answers as accurate. There’s no English court decision on this point yet, though the Taskforce noted that a Canadian court has already held an airline liable for false information its chatbot gave a customer. Liability doesn’t disappear just because a human wasn’t the one who made the statement.

What this means if you’ve received poor advice

This isn’t only about solicitors. The same reasoning applies to any professional working in a sector where AI use is becoming standard, including accountants, financial advisers and surveyors. If a professional’s failure, whether that’s ignoring a tool a competent adviser would have used, or using one carelessly, caused you a loss, it could support a claim in the usual way: a duty of care, a breach of that duty, and a loss that breach caused.

This is genuinely new territory. No case has yet tested how these principles work in practice, which makes specialist advice more valuable at this early stage, not less.

If you’re concerned that poor advice, whether AI was involved, misused, or ignored altogether, has cost you money, our professional negligence team can assess your case quickly and tell you where you stand.