Clients’ barrage of AI-generated queries risks pushing up lawyers’ fees

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Clients are sending their lawyers swaths of letters, emails, questions and patents generated by AI chatbots, raising the prospect of higher legal bills to reflect the time spent responding to them.

One partner at a US-headquartered litigation firm told the FT he had received so many AI-generated emails from one client that his firm could not keep up with the “barrage”. The firm decided it would only respond at “appropriate intervals” to points it considered to be “material”.

As litigation lawyers typically charge by the hour, the partner said: “The longer it takes for us to respond, read, digest, and respond to long AI-generated instruction emails, the greater our time costs will be.”

One patent attorney partner said her firm could raise charges for fixed-fee contracts as it had been “absorbing” some of the costs associated with time spent reviewing AI-generated documents.

She said clients often approached her firm with AI-generated patents because the documents had encountered “significant problems” at the patent office.

Chatbots often generated “pages and pages of stuff to go through that may or may not be relevant” and that “certainly slows down the process”, the attorney said.

Kerry Westland, head of Addleshaw Goddard’s innovation group, said the impact of AI on legal fees was still developing.

The time spent by the firm’s lawyers reviewing or responding to AI-generated content was included in a fixed-fee contract. However, for clients billed hourly, Westland said: “Obviously that’s another hour on the clock if you’re asking us to review the AI output.”

She said Addleshaw Goddard was receiving AI-generated correspondence from clients across all of its practice areas. The material often needed “properly validating and reviewing . . . it’s not reducing the work at all in some ways”, Westland added.

Greg Falkof, a senior disputes partner at Mishcon de Reya, told the FT that clients were increasingly using the technology to suggest litigation strategies, or for “drafts of letters that they want me to send to the opponent on my firm’s letterhead”.

While AI-drafted strategies might cost “a little bit of extra time” to review, letters posed a bigger problem because they often failed to follow Mishcon’s house style, he said.

He said AI was more of an issue when dealing directly with business owners and people without legal training, rather than with clients’ in-house lawyers.

AI is playing a bigger role in the legal profession, with UK firm Shoosmiths adding £1mn to its bonus pot last year as a reward for staff entering 1mn prompts into Microsoft’s Copilot. US firm Ropes & Gray has encouraged junior lawyers to spend a fifth of their billable hours researching and experimenting with the technology.

Although AI has contributed to job cuts at firms such as Clifford Chance, concerns around client confidentiality, data protection and accuracy mean the technology is yet to replace lawyers en masse.