UKJT has said lawyers and other professionals may face negligence claims if they fail to use artificial intelligence where a reasonable practitioner of comparable rank or specialism would have done so.
The UK Jurisdiction Taskforce’s Legal Statement on Liability for AI Harms under the private law of England and Wales moves the professional risk debate beyond hallucinated documents and confidentiality breaches.
Its central message is that English law already has the tools to analyse most non-deliberate AI harms through familiar principles of contract, negligence, misrepresentation, defamation and professional duty, without waiting for a separate AI liability regime.
The practical warning for solicitors is clear. The statement uses the example of a solicitor in the Business and Property Courts who fails to advise a client to consider AI-assisted tools when reviewing large volumes of documents.
AI is not being treated as compulsory in every matter. The risk is narrower, but important: firms may need to show why AI was used, rejected or limited in disclosure, due diligence, document review and other data-heavy work.
The UKJT also identifies risk where professionals use AI without reasonable care and skill. Law firms adopting generative AI will need to test tools before client work, understand enough about how systems operate to explain their use in broad terms, protect confidential and privileged information, and supervise outputs for errors or bias.
A solicitor placing client material into an insecure AI platform may find the technology point quickly becomes a breach of duty point.
Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls and chair of the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce, framed the statement as an attempt to give legal certainty where few AI liability disputes have yet reached the courts.
Matthew Lavy KC chaired the drafting committee, with the work linked to LawtechUK and the UKJT’s wider programme of legal statements on emerging technologies, including cryptoassets and smart contracts.
The statement also matters for in-house counsel. Businesses deploying chatbots, recruitment tools, decision-support systems or client-facing AI assistants will need clearer audit trails showing who approved the tool, what testing was done, what warnings were given and how human oversight was maintained.
The British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal decision in Moffatt v Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149, already showed how a company can face liability for misleading chatbot statements.
The UKJT statement puts direct pressure on law firm management. AI policies that sit apart from matter supervision, risk registers, insurance notifications and client engagement letters may not be enough once a dispute asks whether the firm acted with reasonable care.
The professional implication is clear: lawyers need evidence-based AI adoption policies that can explain both when AI was used and when it was not.