Consumers asking AI to recommend a trusted solicitor are being directed to firms that have been fined or shut down by the Solicitors Regulations Authority (SRA), according to a new study from an access to justice charity.
Blind Justice UK’s AI’s Blind Spot report highlights how AI tools could be steering people unknowingly towards using solicitors’ firms the regulator has intervened in, or closed down.
The research, conducted in September of this year, directed questions clients would typically ask about solicitors to three leading AI assistants, ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. The study found when asked thirty times for the best conveyancing solicitors in Doncaster, all three chatbots listed first a firm the SRA had recently fined.
ChatGPT and Claude chose a firm fined £23,549 in 2025; Gemini chose one fined £30,540 in 2020. None of the AI tools flagged this information to the user.
When asked ten times for the best conveyancing solicitors in Maidenhead, Claude named the same firm among the best every time, despite the SRA having shut that firm down nearly seven months prior.
The report said, “in every direct check we ran, ChatGPT found the fine” however when asking the client questions, the assistants turned to Google listings and review sites which showed the regulator’s badge on its profiles but featured none of its decisions.
The research also found the SRA removes most decisions from its website after three years; in the charity’s sample, every fine older than that period had disappeared meanwhile each firms reviews and ratings remained online.
In its conclusion, the report suggested the SRA should publish every sanction as “open, machine-readable data” and “require the sites under its code to show them beside its badge”, while also urging the SRA not to remove decisions while firms are still trading and advised that review sites should also show all SRA sanctions.
