Can a small law firm use AI safely?
Yes, for lower-risk work that is easy to check, such as drafting a polite email, and with clear limits. Never put confidential client information into a public chatbot, check every output yourself, and keep the legal judgement yours. Australian legal regulators set out exactly these expectations in a joint statement.
The Law Society of New South Wales, the Legal Practice Board of Western Australia and the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner set out what they expect in a joint statement on AI in legal practice. Two lines matter most for a small firm. Lawyers cannot safely enter confidential, sensitive or privileged client information into public AI chatbots such as ChatGPT. And AI tools cannot reason, understand or advise, so the lawyer must exercise their own judgement and check what any tool produces.
The statement also draws the line for you. It suggests keeping AI to lower-risk tasks that are easy to verify, such as drafting a polite email or suggesting how to structure an argument, and keeping it off higher-risk work such as translating advice into another language, analysing an unfamiliar legal concept or making executive decisions in the practice.
A lot of the admin in a small practice needs no AI at all. The client care letter you retype for every new matter can be built from the precedents and merge fields in the practice software you already pay for, so the only part left is reading it, and no client detail leaves the practice software.
Where a chatbot does help, it works on material with nothing confidential in it: a first sort of job applications against criteria you wrote, with names and contact details removed, or a plain English draft of an explanation you give every client. It drafts and sorts, and you make the call.
Write the line down. The statement recommends a clear policy setting out which AI tools the practice uses, who can use them, for what and with what information, and how AI output is checked before anything is settled. Once it is written, it answers the question for every junior who asks after it.
A Three Fixes report looks at where the hours go in your practice and writes the first steps for the jobs you describe, each one naming the tool it needs.
Sourced: Statement on the use of artificial intelligence in Australian legal practice, the Law Society of New South Wales, the Legal Practice Board of Western Australia and the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner (https://lsbc.vic.gov.au/news-updates/news/statement-use-artificial-intelligence-australian-legal-practice)
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