Using AI for legal drafting: a reality check

What AI does well, where it fails with confidence, and how to use it safely — from a barrister who reads its output every week

Let us start where most legal notes on AI do not: AI is a sensible place to start. A well-prompted model produces a cleaner first draft of many documents than most templates, in minutes, for pennies. The problem is not that AI drafts are bad. The problem is that a confident-sounding document is not the same as a sound one — and AI produces the most confident-sounding documents ever written. This note explains where the risk actually lives, with a worked example, and a checklist for using AI drafts safely. It is general information, not advice on your document.

What AI genuinely does well

—Structure and first drafts. It knows what a contract, will, or policy usually contains, and produces a coherent skeleton faster than any human.
—Plain-English translation. Summarising a dense document, explaining a clause, listing questions to ask — genuinely useful, low-risk work.
—Spotting the obvious. Asked to review, it reliably finds missing signature blocks, undefined terms, and internal inconsistencies.

The five failure modes that actually bite

1 The confident invention

Models fill gaps with plausible-sounding law: a statute that does not exist, a “standard” notice period that is not standard, a case cited for the opposite of what it decided. The prose reads identically whether the law is real or invented — that is the trap. Nothing in the document signals which sentences to distrust.

2 The wrong jurisdiction, fluently

Much of the training data is American. Drafts routinely arrive with US concepts dressed in English words — “at-will employment,” notarisation requirements, warranty disclaimers in SCREAMING CAPITALS that do nothing here, indemnity structures that sit oddly with English law. It looks legal; it is just not our legal.

3 Valid words, void effect

Some clauses fail not because they are badly written but because the law refuses to enforce them: a restrictive covenant drawn wider than necessary (void entirely, not trimmed), an exclusion of liability that falls foul of the Unfair Contract Terms Act or consumer law, a penalty clause. AI reproduces these fluently because the internet is full of them.

4 The missing deal-specific term

The costliest failure is invisible: the clause that is not there. AI drafts the generic deal, not your deal — the IP assignment your investor will demand, the retention of title your cash-flow needs, the guardianship clause your family situation requires. You cannot spot an absence unless you know what should be present.

5 Execution and formality

Some documents fail on ceremony, not content: a will witnessed wrongly, a deed signed without a witness, an LPA never registered. AI rarely explains the signing rules, and no drafting quality survives invalid execution. (See Signing a document as a deed.)

A worked example — the clause that read perfectly

A composite of what the check finds in practice. A founder asked an AI for a consultancy agreement and received, among forty tidy clauses, this one:

The AI draft

“All intellectual property created by the Consultant in connection with the Services shall be deemed a work made for hire, and to the extent such rights do not vest automatically, the Consultant agrees to assign such rights upon request and payment of reasonable consideration.”

It reads like boilerplate. It contains three problems that would each surface at the worst moment — a sale or investment round, when the buyer’s lawyers ask who owns the code:

✗“Work made for hire” is US copyright law. It has no effect in England and Wales — and a contractor’s work, unlike an employee’s, does not vest automatically here. The clause assumes the opposite of the English rule.
✗“Agrees to assign upon request” is a promise, not a transfer. If the consultant later refuses or disappears, the company owns nothing until it litigates the promise.
✗“Payment of reasonable consideration” hands the consultant a price ticket for what the fee was already meant to buy.

What the clause needed to say

“The Consultant hereby assigns to the Company, with full title guarantee, all intellectual property rights (present and future) in the work, in consideration of the fees payable under this agreement. The Consultant waives their moral rights in the work, and shall do all further acts the Company reasonably requires to perfect or register this assignment.”

The rights transfer on signing, not on a later request; the agreed fee is the consideration; only the moral rights are waived; and the duty of further assurance is imposed on the consultant, not waived.

That is the shape of the risk generally: nothing in the AI draft looked wrong. The document worked perfectly right up until the day it mattered.

Using AI safely: the working rules

—Tell it the jurisdiction, twice. Specify England and Wales in the prompt and ask it to flag any concept that is not native. This filters the worst imports; it does not catch them all.
—Never paste in what you would not email to a stranger. Client names, financials and secrets do not belong in a consumer chatbot; anonymise before you prompt.
—Ask it to argue against its own draft. “What would a lawyer for the other side attack here?” produces the most useful output of the whole session.
—Scale scrutiny to stakes. A meeting-room booking policy can go out as drafted. Anything that allocates real money, real risk, or real rights — contracts, wills, anything you would sue on or be sued under — deserves a professional eye before signature.

The honest economics

The AI draft plus a barrister’s check costs a fraction of traditional drafting — you pay for the judgement, not the typing. That is not a compromise; for most defined documents it is simply the modern way to do it well. What does not work is the middle path: relying on an unchecked draft because it sounds finished. The fluency is the product. The soundness is not.

Where we come in — the AI draft check

Send me the draft and one paragraph on what it is for. You get back a fixed-fee, plain-English report: what is sound, what is wrong, what is missing for your situation, and the corrected wording where it matters — reviewed personally by a barrister of twenty years’ call. You did the drafting; you pay for the check.

Single document

£450

Suite of up to five

£950

Review & repair

Review fee credited

If you go on to have the failures redrafted, whatever you paid for the review comes off the drafting fee — so the check is never money wasted. All plus VAT.

This note is general information about the use of AI drafting tools and does not constitute advice on any document. The worked example is a composite drawn from recurring patterns, not a client’s document.

Barraj Legal — a trading style of Rhys Johns, a barrister authorised & regulated by the Bar Standards Board. Sophia House, 28 Cathedral Road, Cardiff CF11 9LJ