In this month’s regular confession from Peter Ambrose, he learns some valuable lessons about the impact of AI on client relationships and says it’s time to take action against the growing threat of AI-generated arguments. Check back on 13th March for the next instalment.
In 2025, an awful lot of lawyers spent an awful lot of time talking about artificial intelligence (AI) in the future tense and what it was going to mean for the profession. There were lots of conferences where panel members did their level best to pour oil over troubled waters, agreeing amongst themselves that AI was not going to replace lawyers, but just those lawyers who didn’t use it.
We took respite in the reports of hallucinations, inaccuracies and the inability of the technology to share the same breadth of experience as lawyers who’d been doing conveyancing for years. The message was that we should not be intimidated by the technology; the risk was theoretical and the technology more suited to creating LinkedIn memes than for handling conveyancing matters.
However, what no-one wanted to talk about was the impact AI was going to have on the relationship between lawyers and their clients. When I suggested that the use of AI by clients was going to be one of our major challenges in the very near future, I was met with a combination of scepticism and dismissiveness.
So… did this change happen?
We’ll look back on 2025 as the year when the AI chickens started coming home to roost. Lawyers had been enduring the ‘Google lawyer’ for years, with clients using the search engine to question their opinion. However, that technology is poodle-like when compared to the Rottweiler that is the new ‘ChatGPT lawyer’.
When the client experience with lawyers, previously isolated comments that clients might be using AI are now commonplace – they are definitely using it. We already had clients using AI in their messages through our client portal; we knew this because they had become longer and more verbose but frighteningly accurate in their references to our previous messages.
As expected, we then started to see an increase in the use of AI in complaint letters, the numbers of which have increased since the pandemic. Like the messages, the letters that were previously a page or so have increased, up to three and four pages, replete with spurious case references from US courts. We had been using AI to fact-check such letters for the past year, so we were able to deal efficiently with them, but we found the speed of increase in their use disconcerting.
We recognised that dealing with these increasingly sophisticated complaints – a frustrating, non revenue-generating activity – is set to be a major part of our professional working life. But just as we were adjusting to this new world, we started seeing an increasing number of Subject Access Requests, with clients demanding copies of our files, typically after they had raised a complaint. They are now using our own data to support their claims of where we went wrong with our allegedly tardy responses and their arbitrary deadlines missed.
What happened next?
Whilst we were quite pleased with ourselves with our ability to handle complaints, SARs and ever-more verbose messaging, things have recently stepped up another gear. Despite having dealt with nearly 40,000 transactions, we had only one instance many years ago when someone unsuccessfully attempted to take court action against us.
Therefore, we were quite surprised to receive a letter before action written by a client using AI, and naturally sent it straight to our insurers. They pointed out that whilst the foundation of the letter is questionable, the arguments made by the AI are compelling and we need to take it seriously.
The key lesson we learned was that without AI, our client would not have attempted such a claim.
What does this mean for lawyers going forward?
Whilst just last year we could feel protected by the short-comings of AI to understand and interpret property issues, we are in the middle of a massive change in how we must deal with conveyancing matters. With our clients using AI to analyse the same information we have received and compare it to our opinions and expertise, we must take action to protect our businesses against this threat.
We cannot wait for a future time where the only threat will be AI replacing conveyancers in extracting information from documents and identifying anomalies. We must get comfortable with using AI so that we can pre-empt issues and deal efficiently with the increasing questions, issues and indeed claims that our clients are producing with AI today.
About the author
Peter Ambrose is the managing director of The Partnership, a company modernising the conveyancing process. With a legal background and strong technology expertise, he founded the firm to transform traditional residential transactions. Over the past decade, he has built the company into a respected brand with offices in London and Guildford, a team of over 80 employees, and more than 3,000 cases each year.
2 responses
I appreciate the honest take on how conveyancers feel about AI right now. There’s this mix of curiosity, caution, and genuine optimism. The article doesn’t paint AI as a perfect solution or a threat, it shows it as a tool, one that’s already shaping how work gets done. For clients and professionals alike, that’s a useful reminder: technology is changing the how of legal work, but not the why we still need clarity, communication, and ethical oversight at every step.
Having just returned from three months in the US it was interesting to see how they are reporting the tech industry as being keen to pushback on the uses of AI. Rather than go full steam ahead to have AI take over virtually every aspect of human life as we seem intent on doing on this country, there sems to be an element of getting to know what AI really consists of and can do, before trying to push ahead into different aspects of its use. Makes a change for them to b so sensible in the US, but surprisingly that seems to be their way forward at present.
Food for thought for those in this country who think technology is the be-all, end-all in terms of conveyancing and everything else not working totheir satisfaction.
Be careful what you wish for, we have all seen Terminator.