Jessica Phillips

Legal research that used to take days now takes hours

Family law solicitor. I want to be careful about how I describe this because there are real risks with AI in legal practice that I don't want to minimise. AI hallucinates cases. Never, ever rely on an AI-cited case without verifying it in a primary source. I cannot stress this enough. With that caveat very clearly stated: here's where AI has genuinely helped my practice. Understanding novel areas quickly. When a case involves an area I'm less familiar with, I use Perplexity to get a landscape overview — key principles, important cases to look for, relevant legislation. This helps me know what to look for in the actual research. I verify everything in primary sources. Drafting letters and correspondence. The actual legal reasoning is mine. But having AI draft a formal letter from my bullet points and then me refining it saves significant time. Summarising long documents for clients. Lengthy court orders, lengthy financial disclosure documents. I use AI to create a plain-English summary for the client that I then review for accuracy. They understand their matter better. The legal work is still entirely mine. AI makes some of the surrounding tasks faster.