Can AI help us prepare instructions to counsel?

Yes, and it is one of the more useful things to point an AI assistant at. Instructions to counsel are largely a job of assembly: pulling the story out of the file, listing what is enclosed, summarising what has happened and setting out what you want answered. An AI assistant can do the assembly and produce a first draft; the questions you ask, the view you take of the case and the decision about what counsel needs to see are yours.

What actually takes the time

Most of the effort in a set of instructions is not writing prose. It is:

• reconstructing the sequence of events from correspondence, attendance notes and documents that arrived in no particular order
• working out which documents counsel needs and giving them a sensible order and numbering
• summarising the procedural history and where the matter now stands
• checking the key dates and figures you are about to assert
• making sure nothing important has been left out of the enclosures

Those are the tasks where an assistant that has read the whole file can save real hours. A fee earner who already knows the matter can spend an afternoon just finding the letter they half remember. An assistant that has read every page and can point at the page it came from removes most of that searching.

Where AI helps, and where it does not

It helps with:

• The chronology. Dates, events and who said what, drawn from the papers, with the page for each entry so you can check anything that looks wrong.
• The background narrative. A first draft of the factual history in plain order, which you then cut, correct and shape.
• The document schedule. A list of what is on the file, which you turn into the list of what is enclosed.
• Gaps. A good assistant will tell you the papers do not say something rather than filling the space. That is exactly what you need before you send a brief out: if the file does not show when the contract was signed, better to know now than to have counsel ask.
• Dates and figures. Any limitation position or deadline you state should be checked, with the calculation visible, and against your own diary system rather than in place of it.

It does not help with, and should not be asked to decide:

• What you are asking counsel. The questions are the point of the brief. They come from your assessment of where the case is weak, what you need to advise the client, and what you cannot resolve yourself.
• Tone and emphasis. A brief that presents the case fairly to counsel, including the parts you do not like, is a professional judgement.
• Privilege and scope. What goes in and what stays out, and how the material is described, is for the fee earner.
• Anything on the substance of the law. An assistant can find you a section of legislation or a piece of official guidance and show you where it sits; it cannot form the view you are instructing counsel to test.

A workable process

1. Ask for a chronology from the papers first, with page references. Read it. Correct it. This is usually the fastest way to spot that a document is missing or misfiled.
2. Ask what the papers do not say on the two or three points that matter most. Chase those before drafting.
3. Ask for a draft background section of a stated length, based on the chronology.
4. Write the questions to counsel yourself. Do not delegate this and do not lift a suggested list without thinking about it.
5. Check every date, figure and document reference in the draft against the source page.
6. Have the person who will sign the instructions read the whole thing as a document, not as a series of checked assertions. Briefs fail on omission more often than on error.

Confidentiality, and what to tell the client

Instructions to counsel often contain the most sensitive material on a file: the client's account, your candid view, the settlement position. Before putting any of that near an AI tool, satisfy yourself where the data goes, who can see it, whether it is kept separate from other firms' work and whether it is used to train anything. A general consumer tool is not the place for a brief.

If your client care information already explains that you use AI tools to assist with document review and drafting under solicitor supervision, instructions to counsel need no special treatment. If it does not, deal with that at the policy level rather than matter by matter.

One practical point: counsel and their clerks are not parties to your arrangements. What you send out is your document, signed off by you, and it should read as though a person wrote it, because a person is responsible for it.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis answers questions about a matter from the matter's own papers and names the page each answer came from; if the papers do not say, it says so. Documents are read page by page, so citations point at pages, and any page it could not read is flagged rather than skipped. It prepares drafts for a qualified person to review and sign off, and it does not file, serve or email anything. It assists qualified professionals and does not replace them, and it does not provide legal advice.