How should a law firm trial an AI tool before committing to it?

A useful trial is narrow, short and specific. Pick two or three tasks the firm actually does every week, agree in advance what a good result would look like, run it for a few weeks with a small named group on real matters, and write down what happened. A trial that is just "have a play with it and tell me what you think" produces opinions, not a decision.

Settle the confidentiality position first

Nothing else in the trial matters if the firm cannot put its own papers into the tool. Deal with this before anyone signs up, not after the first fee earner has pasted in a witness statement.

The questions to answer, in writing, from the supplier:

• Where is the firm's data held and processed, and by whom.
• Whether the firm's material is used to train anything for anyone else.
• Whether other firms' users could ever see it.
• What happens to it if the firm stops using the product.
• What access controls exist inside the firm, and whether they can be set matter by matter.

If the answers are vague, that is your answer. You also need to think about whether your retainers and privacy information already cover processing of this kind, and whether any client has told you they want to be asked first. Some panel arrangements and some public sector clients impose their own conditions on third party processing, and a trial is not an exception to them.

A trial on redacted or invented papers avoids all of this, but it also tells you almost nothing. Real documents are messy: bad scans, duplicated exhibits, handwriting, three versions of the same schedule. That mess is what you are testing.

Decide what you are trying to prove

Write down two or three tasks and, for each, what a good result looks like. For example:

• Answering factual questions about a matter from the file, with a page reference for each answer, so the fee earner can check it in seconds.
• Producing a first draft of a routine letter or a chronology that a fee earner would be willing to edit rather than rewrite.
• Getting the current text of a provision and the official guidance around it, with the source named, rather than a summary you cannot trace.

For each task, state the standard the work has to reach. "Every factual assertion carries a page reference and the reference is right" is a standard. "It felt quite good" is not.

Also decide what would make you walk away. Confident wrong answers with no source, invented authority, or output that takes longer to check than to do yourself are all fair grounds to stop.

Choose the people and the matters

Three to six people is usually enough. Include at least one experienced fee earner, one junior, and one person from support or compliance. The experienced fee earner can tell whether an answer is right. The junior will show you how the tool behaves in the hands of someone who cannot always tell. That second finding matters more than the first when you decide how to supervise it later.

Pick matters that are live but not on the edge of a hearing. You want ordinary work with real deadlines, not the most difficult file in the firm and not a closed archive matter nobody cares about.

Give the group a simple instruction: nothing leaves the firm without a qualified person checking it, and every AI-assisted piece of work is checked against the source before it goes on the file. That rule applies during a trial exactly as it would afterwards.

Keep a record as you go

Ask each participant to keep a short log. One line per use is enough: what they asked, whether the answer was usable, whether anything was wrong, and roughly how long the checking took. Ask specifically for the failures. People remember the impressive answers and forget the twenty minutes they lost chasing a citation that did not exist.

At the end, read the logs together. Three questions usually decide it:

1. Did the tool save time after checking, not before it.
2. Could the person checking always tell whether the answer was right, and how quickly.
3. Did anything happen that would have embarrassed the firm if it had reached a client or the court.

A tool that saves time but cannot be checked is a liability. A tool that is checkable but slow may still be worth having for the work where accuracy matters most.

Common ways trials go wrong

Too long. A three month trial drifts and nobody remembers what it was for. Four to six weeks is usually enough.

Too many people. Twenty casual users generate noise. Five committed ones generate evidence.

No baseline. If you do not know roughly how long the task takes now, you cannot say whether anything improved.

Comparing tools on different work. If you are looking at two products, give them the same tasks on the same days.

No decision at the end. Set the date for the decision when you start the trial, and name the person who makes it.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis is an AI assistant for UK law firms, made by L25 Limited, used through the web browser with one conversation for a matter. A firm can trial it without a card and without a subscription: the first person to set the firm up starts with £25 of free credit, each colleague who joins with a verified account adds £15 for up to 20 colleagues, and the firm tops up only when it chooses. During a trial, answers about a matter come from the matter's own papers and name the page each answer came from, and if the papers do not say, Alesis says so. It assists qualified professionals rather than replacing them, and it does not provide legal advice.