Can AI help us respond to a client complaint?

Yes, but only for part of it. AI is useful for the slow, mechanical half of a complaint: reconstructing what happened on the matter, finding the letter or attendance note the client is referring to, and putting a first draft in front of the person who will sign it. The parts that matter most, whether the service fell short, whether the firm should offer something and what to say about it, are judgement calls for a fee earner or the complaints handler, and they cannot be delegated to a tool.

Where AI earns its place

Most complaints are really disputes about a sequence of events. The client says they were never told about a cost increase, or that nobody came back to them for six weeks, or that they did not understand what they were signing. Answering that means reading the file properly, and the file is usually long, disordered and split across correspondence, attendance notes, emails and billing records.

That is the work AI can shorten:

• Building a chronology of contact: what was sent, when, and what it said.
• Finding the specific documents the client is pointing at, including the client care letter and any costs updates.
• Pulling out what the client was told about a particular risk, deadline or fee at the time, rather than what the firm now remembers telling them.
• Checking whether an assertion in the complaint is supported anywhere on the file, and saying plainly if it is not.
• Preparing a first draft of the response once a person has decided what the answer is.

Done by hand, that can take half a day on an older file. Done well by a tool that cites the page each point came from, it can take an hour, with the fee earner spending their time on the parts that need a lawyer.

What you must not hand over

A complaint response is a regulated act of communication with a client, and it carries consequences. Keep these with a person:

1. The assessment. Whether the service was reasonable, whether an error was made, and whether it caused loss are questions of professional judgement. A tool has no standing to reach that view and no basis for it beyond the documents you gave it.
2. The offer. Any apology, fee reduction or payment is a decision for the firm, taken by someone with authority to take it, and often after speaking to your insurer.
3. The tone. Complaint responses go wrong on tone more often than on facts. A defensive, template-sounding letter turns a fixable complaint into an Ombudsman referral. That is a human judgement about a particular client.
4. The regulatory content. Your complaints procedure, your timescales and what you tell the client about the Legal Ombudsman need to reflect what the Solicitors Regulation Authority and the Legal Ombudsman actually expect. Check that against the source, not against a draft's memory of it.

Handle the file carefully

A complaint file is not a normal matter file. It often contains internal comments about the fee earner, correspondence with your insurer, notes made in contemplation of a dispute, and sometimes information about the client that the client has not seen. Before you put material into any tool, be clear about three things.

First, where the material goes and who can reach it. The client's information, and any third party's, is still subject to UK GDPR and to your duty of confidentiality; a complaint does not relax either.

Second, who inside the firm can see it. If the complaint concerns a colleague, the file should be visible to the people handling the complaint and not to the wider team. Access controls that follow the matter, rather than following seniority, matter here more than anywhere.

Third, whether you may be notifying your insurer. If the complaint could become a claim, the insurer's requirements come first, and anything you draft is likely to be seen by them.

A sensible sequence

A workable order of operations for a firm of your size:

1. Log the complaint and start the clock under your own procedure.
2. Ask the tool to build a cited chronology from the matter papers, with page references, and to flag anything it could not read.
3. Read the chronology against the complaint point by point. Where the file does not support the client, note it. Where it supports the client, note that too, honestly.
4. Decide, as a person, what the firm's position is and whether anything is being offered.
5. Have a draft prepared on that basis, then rewrite it in your own voice.
6. Have it reviewed by someone who did not conduct the matter.
7. Keep the chronology, the draft and the final letter on the complaint file, with a short note of how they were produced.

That last step is worth the two minutes. If the complaint travels further, you want a clear record of what the firm looked at and who decided what.

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. Inside a firm, people see only the matters they are on, and seniority alone grants no view.