The use of AI in employment law is a hot topic, as lawyers, courts and the tribunals are seeing a lot of individuals using artificial intelligence in lots of ways, including
- Producing chronologies/timelines
- Giving instructions to us
- Drafting claims and letters
An industry survey of over 1,000 UK lawyers and legal professionals conducted by LexisNexis found that:
- the vast majority (95%) of respondents believe generative AI will have a noticeable impact on the law
- 38% believe it will be significant
- 11% believe it will be transformative
It’s clear that the use of AI in employment law is rapidly reshaping our industry’s practice. We’re seeing our employee clients using tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini to produce documents for grievances, disciplinaries and case summaries they give to us at the start of a case.
We’ve even seen smaller employers trying to save money by generating AI settlement agreements instead of using a lawyer to provide one.
Hatton James is not against the use of AI in legal work. We have been using AI spell-checking for a couple of years, for example. We are trialling our own tool for more serious uses, so far with mixed results. We have found it to be very good at producing a concise summary of a document and not so good at generating documents which are accurate and well-structured. We have no doubt that AI tools will improve
The benefit of the use of AI in employment law is obvious: speed and cost savings.
But there are risks: AI can ignore inconsistencies, introduce errors, and give a false sense of security. What looks polished and formal may not be legally sound. The AI-generated documents we have seen are longer than necessary, duplicative and use the ‘kitchen sink’ approach, rather than (for example) focussing on the client’s best points.
The real issue is not the use of AI in employment law itself, but how uncritically it is being relied upon.
There have been several cases where even qualified and experienced lawyers have got into trouble for using AI-generated documents that simply make things up. It tends to ‘hallucinate’ law rather than facts (in our experience). Lawyers have faced severe professional consequences, ranging from admonishments to fines costs orders to disbarment in such cases as:
- Australian lawyer must practice under supervision for using AI-hallucinated caselaw
- In the UK, a massive firm’s use of AI in a £90m case led to a costs order
- In the USA, two lawyers disbarred after both sides did the same thing
- … and, with thanks to Damien Charlotin, a whole host of other cases.
Back in the UK, the Law Society has asked the Government to weigh into the use of AI in the legal sector, including who should be responsible in the event AI gives incorrect or harmful advice.
At Hatton James we have a rule that letters and court documents are reviewed by at least two lawyers, whether or not AI is used to help the drafting process.
We follow the Law Society’s guidance, which alerts lawyers to the risks of AI:
- intellectual property risks
- data protection and privacy risks
- cyber security risks
- training data concerns: biases or inappropriate outputs
- potential to produce misleading, inaccurate or false outputs
- ethical and bias concerns
- negative consequences for clients
And we have also produced an AI Governance & Principles policy for promoting responsible AI use.
But we think as more and more routine tasks become automated, the lawyer’s role will shift from drafting towards exercising judgment – checking, challenging, and refining AI outputs.
AI won’t replace employment lawyers, but does is place a premium on verification, scepticism, and legal insight.
AI was not used in the writing of this article. Image used under CC by permission of Katexic Clippings