CLA News / Transforming Legal Practice Through AI: Towards Greater Access to Justice by CLA President Steven Thiru

“The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”[1]

Generative AI: State of the Market  

Just two months ago, the United Kingdom (“UK”)’s Solicitors Regulation Authority (“SRA”) approved the country’s “first law firm providing legal services through artificial intelligence (AI)”. The firm leverages an “AI-powered litigation assistant” to support clients in recovering unpaid debts, guiding them through the small claims court process up to trial. This is a significant regulatory milestone – not only for the UK legal sector in its willingness to support innovation in legal services –  but potentially for other Commonwealth jurisdictions looking to do so as well. In its statement, the SRA notes that it is “encouraging the development of new approaches and models due to the potential consumer benefits. AI-driven legal services could deliver better, quicker and more affordable legal services.”

As part of the approval process, the SRA conducted a robust review to ensure that the firm would be able to adhere to professional and ethical rules and standards. These included appropriate processes in place for quality control, protection of client confidentiality, safeguarding against conflicts of interest, and managing the risk of ‘AI hallucinations’ (incidences of false citations and fictional case law). Crucially, the SRA emphasised that solicitors remain ultimately accountable for the services provided — reinforcing the principle that AI augments but does not supplant a lawyer’s professional judgment and ethical responsibilities.

The appetite for generative AI has been insatiable in recent years. An estimated 79% of legal-related startup investment since 2024 — nearly $2.2 billion — has flowed into companies leveraging AI, including notable players such as Clio, Harvey, and Luminance. A Thomson Reuters survey in July 2024 reported that AI could free up additional work time of 4 hours per week within one year, increasing over time to up to 12 hours a week in five years with the predicted pace of AI adoption. An OECD report in June 2025, reinforces this outlook, highlighting that AI supply is rising exponentially, and that AI is getting better, cheaper and more accessible.

The extent of economic and productivity gains, however, will depend on how quickly and broadly AI is adopted across the legal sector.

Opportunities for the Legal Sector: An Expansion of Access to Justice

The opportunities generative AI presents are manifold, and can be broadly characterised by two major shifts:

1) Equipping Lawyers to Do More:

The first, is a “turbo-charged version” of today’s legal practice where emerging AI-powered products and services significantly enhance how lawyers operate at every stage of a matter. By streamlining time-intensive tasks such as information-gathering, compilation and summarisation, search and retrieval, document review, and legal research, these tools enable lawyers to work more efficiently, freeing up time and capacity for higher-order analysis, strategic thinking and client engagement.

Take the following illustration*. You receive a new client brief involving a complex contractual dispute.

• Onboarding clients and conflict check:

You seamlessly organise and capture client data using client-relationship management platforms such as Lawmatics, Clio or Intapp and run a conflict check across the firm database.

• Information/document-gathering and review:

You receive bundles of documents from the client (emails, contracts, correspondence, etc). You run the documents through platforms like Reveal, Everlaw, or RelativityOne, which help review, cluster, and tag documents by keywords or topics. These tools also help identify potentially privileged content and visualise data patterns for ease of review.

If contract analysis is needed, tools like Kira Systems or Luminance extract key clauses, compare versions, and summarise contractual obligations or risks, while products such  as Draftwise and Spellbook plug-in directly to Microsoft Word to assist in drafting contracts.

• Legal research and drafting:

Instead of traditional keyword-reliant searches, you now use sophisticated engines such as Lexis+ AI, Westlaw Precision with CoCounsel, vLex, or Harvey[2] to conduct legal research. These platforms provide natural-language answers to legal questions, as well as summarise the relevant cases, statutes, and precedents. You then generate initial drafts of legal documents. BriefCatch is an alternative product which directly plugs-in to Microsoft Word and reviews legal writing, providing editorial feedback on tone, clarity, structure, etc.

• Trial preparation:

As you prepare for the hearing or trial, platforms such as NexLaw and Lex Machina, inform your strategy and risk assessment, by providing litigation analytics (eg. judges’ profiling, tracking case outcomes, highlighting historical patterns and trends).

You have now saved substantial hours that would otherwise have been spent on manual review, drafting, and research – time that can now be reinvested into higher-level analysis and strategies, taking on more clients, firm development, or engaging in other professional and public interest work.

* Note: The availability and functionality of legal AI platforms/tools vary across jurisdictions. The examples provided are illustrative only, not endorsements, and are not indicative of all its functionalities. Many platforms offer overlapping or multiple functionalities. These are currently in use or emerging in more advanced markets, some of which are expanding globally. They offer a glimpse of what is already possible — and what may well become standard practice — as these technologies continue to mature, expand, and gain broader adoption across the legal profession.

2) The “AI-empowered” Client and Lawyers as Stewards

The second, more transformational shift is the rise of the “AI-empowered client where individuals, small businesses, and startups gain access to legal guidance and can complete basic legal tasks with minimal professional assistance. Increasingly accessible AI tools are enabling users to prepare contracts and generate legal correspondence, while the recently approved AI-powered law firm in the UK — mentioned at the outset of this article — demonstrates how these tools are growing more sophisticated.

These shifts are best understood not as binary or mutually exclusive; instead, they lie along a continuum  where its spread, accessibility and adoption, vary across jurisdictions, practice areas and clients. In reality, the boundaries between these shifts will increasingly overlap, as AI tools become more ubiquitous, embedded not only within the workflows of law firms and in-house legal teams, but also made directly available to the public in ways that are more intuitive, accessible, and user-friendly than has ever been.

The end result is a broader and more inclusive expansion of access to justice. The delivery of legal services is increasingly being shaped by technology-enabled approaches that not only drive productivity gains for lawyers — allowing them to serve more clients more efficiently —but also empower the public to engage with the law more directly. Some examples include:

• Citizens Advice (UK): Following a successful pilot, Citizens Advice is rolling out Caddy, an AI-powered assistant designed to help frontline staff, such as trainees and advisors, to provide rapid, guided responses to client legal queries. Drawing from verified and trusted sources, Caddy generates proposed responses to support advisers in their interactions with clients.
• BarefootLaw (Uganda): The non-profit organisation complements its team of full-time attorneys with Winnie, its AI “lawyer”, that assists citizens in rural areas with legal queries. It has reduced the time taken from an average 72 hours for lawyers to respond to queries, to 24 hours with Winnie. As of January 2024, BarefootLaw has facilitated over 800,000 users to access their services and resolved over 20,000 cases.
• Citizens’ Gavel (Nigeria): PodusAI was launched last year, an AI-powered tool that offers initial legal guidance, helps users report human rights violations, and connects victims to nearby pro bono lawyers. It prioritises urgent cases such as police extortion, brutality, fundamental rights issues, illegal arrest, and illegal detention. Over 30,000 Nigerians have benefited from the service since.
• Migrasia (Hong Kong): With support from Linklaters Asia, Migrasia launched PoBot, an AI chatbot assisting migrant workers with legal concerns related to forced labour. PoBot triages user queries and provides relevant advice, significantly reducing response times for straightforward legal questions.
• Similarly, in India, the rise and development of AI-powered chatbots and digital assistants such as NyayGuru, LawBot Pro, and LawPal, are transforming access to legal support making legal information more accessible to diverse communities across the country, and helping individuals better understand their rights and responsibilities.

In this evolving landscape, the role of lawyers is reimagined: not merely as service providers, but as architects and stewards of systems that democratise legal support for the public. These emerging models offer the potential to make legal services more affordable, accessible, and responsive to the needs of a wider segment of society , offering a path to bridging the justice gap.

Addressing a room of neurosurgeons, Richard Susskind once quipped, “Patients don’t want neurosurgeons. Patients want health.”[3] Likewise, clients seek practical outcomes be it legal queries, resolving disputes, ensuring compliance, anticipating and managing legal risks, or simply better understanding their rights.

The value of professional services, lawyers included, lies in our ability to deliver meaningful and effective results to our clients and public, rather than the specific techniques and methods used to get there. Emerging innovations that are reshaping the legal industry challenge us to meet long-standing client needs but through radically new, AI-driven processes.

Ultimately, the responsible adoption and integration of AI in the legal industry is not only to enhance efficiency and reduce costs, but to deliver justice that is proportional, inclusive, and accessible to all[4].

AI Training Session in Collaboration with LexisNexis

Last month, I had the opportunity to hold a productive meeting with representatives from LexisNexis in the UK and plans are underway to hold an AI training for CLA members.

This collaboration builds on the remarkable work of the CLA Legal Technology and Innovation Committee, whose co-convenors are CLA Treasurer, Maria Mbeneka (Kenya) and CLA Council member, Amirali Nasir (Hong Kong). Most recently, the Committee worked on the “Declaration on AI Statement”, a foundational statement that outlines the principles and safeguards that should underpin the use of AI in legal services. The Declaration was adopted at the 24^th Commonwealth Lawyers Conference in Malta.

Through this forthcoming training initiative with LexisNexis, we hope to bring these principles into action by empowering members with the tools, understanding, and confidence to adopt AI responsibly and effectively in their work.

Steven Thiru

President

Commonwealth Lawyers Association

 29th July 2025

 Steven Thiru records his appreciation to Boo Sha-Lyn and Chin Oy Sim for their assistance in preparing this article for publication.

[1] Susskind quoting John Maynard Keynes, in Susskind, R. & Susskind, D. (2022). The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform The Work of Human Experts. Updated Edition. Oxford University Press.

[2] In the US market, LexisNexis and Harvey have recently announced a partnership which integrates LexisNexis’ generative AI technology, primary law content and citations within the Harvey platform for advanced legal workflows.

[3] Susskind, Richard. (2025). How To Think About AI: A Guide for the Perplexed. Oxford University Press. pg. 71

[4] Kho, Feng Ming (2024). “Reimagining Access to Justice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. The Law Review 2024, LR 532.