Can AI help us draft a client care letter?

Yes, AI can produce a usable first draft of a client care letter, provided it starts from your own approved precedent and the papers for that matter rather than from a blank page. What it cannot do is decide the scope of the retainer, settle your costs information or take responsibility for the regulatory content. That remains with the fee earner who signs the letter.

What the letter has to do

A client care letter is not a formality. It is the document a client will point to if there is a dispute about what you agreed to do, what it would cost and who was responsible for it. The Solicitors Regulation Authority expects clients to receive clear information about the service, the cost and how to complain, in a form they can understand, and the Legal Ombudsman will look at what the client was actually told.

That means the risk in this document sits in a few specific places:

• the scope of work, and what is expressly outside it
• the basis of charging and any estimate or cap
• who is doing the work and who supervises them
• the complaints route and the time limits attached to it
• how the client's information will be held and used

None of those are drafting problems. They are decisions. AI can carry a decision into clear prose; it cannot make the decision for you.

Where AI genuinely helps

The useful work is the mechanical part that eats half an hour per matter and still ends up with the wrong address at the top.

• Tailoring the precedent to the matter: parties, property, the other side, the instruction date, the work described in the client's own email.
• Checking the described scope against what the client actually asked for. Give it the enquiry email and the draft letter and ask whether the scope paragraph covers everything the client raised, and what it leaves out.
• Turning a fee structure into plain sentences a client will follow, including the point at which you would come back for further instructions.
• Producing a shorter or simpler version for a client who will not read eight pages, without losing the required content.
• Comparing your current precedent against a revised one so you can see exactly what changed before you adopt it.

Used this way, the AI is doing assembly and comprehension work, not deciding the terms of your retainer.

What you should not hand over

Four things should never come out of a generated draft unchecked.

Costs figures. An estimate is a professional judgement about a particular matter. If a figure appears in the draft that you did not put there, delete it and write your own.

Regulatory wording. Do not ask an AI tool to recall from memory what a client care letter is required to contain. General purpose tools can produce confident text that reflects another jurisdiction's conventions or rules that do not apply to your firm. Keep required content in your approved precedent and have the AI work within it.

Exclusions and liability wording. These are tied to your policy and your insurer's requirements. They are a firm decision, reviewed centrally, not something to regenerate per matter.

Scope. If the AI widens or narrows the description of the work because the prose reads better that way, you have changed your retainer by accident. Read the scope paragraph as if you were the client looking for a gap.

A workflow that holds up

1. Start from the approved precedent, held centrally, with the required content already in it.
2. Give the tool the matter papers: the enquiry, any attendance note from the first call, the conflict and identification checks.
3. Ask for a tailored draft and for a list of every change it made and why, so you are reviewing decisions rather than hunting through prose.
4. Check the figures against the estimate you wrote yourself, and the names against the file.
5. Read the whole letter. Not skim. This is the document that defines the job.
6. Note on the file that a draft was prepared with AI assistance and reviewed before sending, consistent with however your firm records AI use generally.

The review step is not optional and it is not a formality. The time saved is in the assembly, not in the checking.

Keep the precedent as the master

The real danger with AI drafting is drift. Each letter is tailored slightly differently, nobody updates the source document, and within a year the firm has twenty versions of its terms of business with no way of knowing which one a given client received.

Set the rule now: AI edits live in the draft for that matter. If a change is good enough to keep, someone with authority puts it into the master precedent, dates it, and tells everyone. Review the precedents on a fixed cycle, and keep a record of which version went to which client. That record matters far more than the drafting time you saved.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis answers questions about a matter from the matter's own papers and names the page each answer came from, so a draft letter can be checked against what the client actually instructed rather than someone's recollection. It prepares drafts for a qualified person to review and sign off, and it does not file, serve or email anything. Where the papers do not say something, it says so instead of guessing. It assists qualified professionals and does not replace them, and it does not provide legal advice.