Can a UK law firm use AI for legal research?

Yes. A UK law firm can use an AI assistant for legal research, and many already do. What the question really turns on is not whether the work can be delegated but how it is checked, and who answers for it. Nothing about the professional obligations has changed. The duty of competence, the duty to the court and the duty to the client sit exactly where they sat before, with the person who signs.

So the useful question is a narrower one: what does an assistant have to do before its research is worth a fee earner's time?

What good research looks like when a machine does it

Legal research is not a search for a plausible sentence. It is a search for authority: the provision, the guidance or the decision that supports a proposition, at the place in the text where it says so. An assistant that produces confident prose without a source has not done the research; it has described what research might have found.

Three things separate an assistant that helps from one that creates work.

• It reads the source, not a summary of it. Legislation section by section, official guidance as published, decisions in full. Answers built from a memory of the law are answers built from an average of everything ever written about it, which is not the same thing as the law today.
• Every point names where it came from. Down to the section, the paragraph or the page, and the source opens in one click so the fee earner can read the passage rather than take the assistant's word for it.
• It says when it cannot find support. A point the assistant could not stand up should arrive as a gap, clearly marked, not as a guess dressed as an answer.

If an assistant does those three things, research becomes a fast first pass that a qualified person then verifies. If it does not, the fee earner is left checking prose against the law from scratch, which is slower than doing the research unaided.

Where the risk actually sits

The well-known failure is the invented citation: a case name that sounds right, a neutral citation in the right format, and no such judgment anywhere. The courts in England and Wales have already dealt publicly with filings that cited cases which did not exist, and the responsibility landed where it always lands, on the lawyer who put the document before the court.

The quieter failures matter as much. A real provision applied to the wrong facts. Guidance that was withdrawn last year. A decision from another jurisdiction presented as if it were binding here. A limitation period stated confidently with no working shown. None of these are caught by asking the assistant whether it is sure. They are caught by opening the source and reading it, which is why an assistant that makes the source one click away is not a convenience but the whole safeguard.

What to check before you rely on an answer

A short routine covers most of it.

1. Open the source. Does the cited section, paragraph or page say what the answer says it says?
2. Check the jurisdiction and the date. England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are three legal systems, and guidance moves. Coverage of Scotland and Northern Ireland is thinner in most tools, and an honest assistant says so in the answer rather than papering over it.
3. Look for what is missing. If the assistant said it could not find support for a point, that is the point to research yourself before it goes anywhere near a client.
4. Ask for the working on anything counted. Dates and figures should arrive with their steps and the rule that allows each one. Your diary system still governs; the assistant is a second pair of eyes, not a replacement for one.
5. Record what you checked. A short note on the file, in the same way you would record any other research, so the supervision and the audit trail are what they always were.

None of this is new. It is what a careful fee earner does with a trainee's research note. The difference is speed: the note arrives in seconds, and the checking has to keep up.

What the regulator expects

The Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Law Society have both published material on the use of AI in practice, and neither prohibits it. The consistent themes are the ones you would expect: understand the tool well enough to supervise its output, keep client information confidential, be competent in the work you rely on it for, and remain responsible for what leaves the firm. A firm that can show it chose a tool for its sources, checked its answers and recorded that it did so is a firm meeting those expectations, whatever the tool.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis is built for exactly this pattern of use. Ask a question of the law and it goes to the source: legislation section by section, official guidance, and Financial Ombudsman decisions read in full. Every point in the answer names the source it came from, official sources open in one click, and when it cannot find support for a point it says what is missing rather than guessing. For a bigger question it sets out the steps first and waits for your go-ahead. It assists qualified professionals and does not replace them; every answer is made easy to check because a qualified person is going to check it.