Who owns the documents our firm produces with an AI tool?

In practical terms, a draft produced with the help of an AI tool is your firm's work product, in the same way a draft typed by a trainee is. What settles the position is the supplier's contract and your retainer with the client, not the technology. The questions worth asking are narrow: does the supplier claim any rights in what the tool produces, does it claim any rights in what you put in, and does your client agreement give the client what it expects at the end.

What the supplier's contract should say

This is the part that matters most, because it is the only part anyone can actually enforce. Before you commit, read the terms for these points and ask for them in writing if they are not there:

• Rights in the output sit with the customer, or the supplier disclaims any claim to them. You should be free to use, adapt, send and charge for the result without asking permission.
• Your inputs remain yours. The supplier takes only the narrow licence it needs to run the service for you, and nothing wider.
• Your material is not used to train anything, for the supplier or for any other customer.
• Confidentiality obligations survive the end of the contract, and so does your right to use documents you already produced.
• There is no clause allowing the supplier to publish, quote or showcase your content.

If a contract is silent on output rights, that silence is worth a question. A supplier that is comfortable with its own position will answer it in a sentence.

Copyright is a narrower question than it sounds

Firms sometimes worry that an AI-assisted document falls into some ownerless gap. In day to day practice this rarely bites.

Most legal documents that leave a firm are heavily shaped by a fee earner: the structure, the facts, the choices about what to include and what to leave out, the final wording. A document of that kind is the product of the person who made those choices. Where text is generated with very little human input, the position under copyright law is less settled and is still developing. That is a reason to keep a human genuinely in the drafting seat, which you should be doing anyway for professional reasons.

It is also worth keeping the commercial reality in view. The value in your drafting is usually in the client relationship, the confidentiality of the file and the quality of the judgement applied, not in asserting copyright against anyone. Very few firms ever need to litigate ownership of a letter of advice.

What your client is entitled to

Your retainer and your firm's terms of business govern what the client receives and what happens to the file at the end of the matter. Using an AI tool does not change that, and it should not be allowed to change it by accident.

Two practical points follow:

1. Deliverables must be exportable. If drafts, notes or summaries live only inside a tool you might stop using, you have created a problem for file closure and for any future request for papers. Save work product to the file in your usual system.
2. The client is buying advice from a qualified person, not output from a tool. Whatever you tell clients about AI use, the signed document is yours and the responsibility for it is yours.

Reuse, precedents and the confidentiality trap

The ownership question most likely to cause real damage is not the supplier's, it is your own. When a fee earner likes a clause or a passage produced on one matter and drops it into a precedent bank, client material can travel with it.

Before anything becomes a firm precedent:

• Strip names, figures, dates, property details and any fact that identifies the original matter.
• Check that the passage is not substantially lifted from a document the other side drafted, or from material the client gave you under restriction.
• Record where the precedent came from, so the next person knows whether it has been reviewed.

The same discipline applies to training material and to examples used in internal know-how notes.

A short checklist before you sign

• Who owns the output under the contract, in plain words.
• What licence the supplier takes over your inputs, and how long it lasts.
• Whether your material is used to train anything.
• How you get your work product out, in a usable format, at any time.
• Whether your retainer and terms of business need any adjustment to match.
• Who in the firm signs off that these answers are acceptable, and where that record is kept.

None of this takes long. It takes one person reading the contract with those six points in front of them, and a note of the answers on your supplier file.

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. It prepares drafts for a qualified person to review and sign off; it does not file, serve or email anything. A firm's information is held in the UK and processed only in the UK and the EU, kept apart from every other firm, and never used to train anything for anyone else.