I’ve had a version of this enquiry four times in the last fortnight or so. A new business has used ChatGPT (or Claude, or Gemini) to draft its terms and conditions, a privacy notice, sometimes a consultancy agreement or a supplier contract, and wants a solicitor to look over the result. Usually, the request is for a review at a modest fixed fee, on the basis that “most of the work has been done and I just need to tidy up”.
In most of those cases, I’ve said no to the review and offered to draft the documents instead, using what they’ve produced as instructions. That’s a more expensive answer, and I’m conscious it comes from someone who benefits from it being more expensive. So I want to explain the reasoning, and also say where I think the AI draft is useful, because it usually is.
A review isn’t much cheaper than drafting
To review a set of terms properly, I have to read every clause, check it against the law that applies to your business, and check it against how your business actually works. That’s most of the work of drafting. The saving is the typing, and typing was never the expensive part. What I’d be charging you for in a review is the same thinking, but with a worse starting point than my own precedents, which I’ve used for years and know the weaknesses of and know how and why they work well.
The problem is usually what’s missing
AI-drafted documents tend to look complete. Numbered clauses, defined terms, a governing law provision at the end. The clauses that are present are often fine, or close to it. The trouble is what the tool didn’t know to include, because you didn’t know to ask, and it has no way of knowing what it doesn’t know about your business.
From the recent batch, without identifying anyone: a services agreement with no data protection clause at all, for a business that would routinely see other people’s staff data. Terms with unlimited liability, which I doubt the owner intended. A fee model for an online platform that, as drafted, ran into a piece of 1970s legislation about employment agencies that nobody had thought to mention to the chatbot. Subscription terms that hadn’t caught up with the new rules on renewals and cancellation. A liability cap that protected the wrong party. A parties clause that named the contracting party as “or an entity to be confirmed”. None of these would show up as an error in the document. They show up when the document is tested, which is the one time you need it to work.
There’s also the question of what the document asserts. Last year the High Court dealt with two cases in which lawyers had put fictitious case citations before the court after relying on AI tools (the judgment is here if you want to read it). Contracts can do a less visible version of the same thing: cite a regulation that doesn’t apply to you, or assume a statute reaches a situation it doesn’t. I saw one recently that assumed the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act would help a supplier based outside the UK. It might; it wasn’t the safe assumption the draft treated it as.
The audit trail
If a clause is ever argued over, the question of who drafted it and why becomes relevant. If I’ve marked up your AI draft, I’m putting my name to a document whose structure and choices I didn’t make, and I can’t explain reasoning that I didn’t do. If I’ve drafted it from my precedent, I know why every clause is there and I can say so. That matters to you if it goes wrong, and it matters to my insurers, who also have opinions on this.
The bit where I admit the self-interest
I charge more for drafting than for a review, so you’re entitled to be sceptical. I’d only say two things. One is that I use AI tools heavily myself, so this isn’t a lawyer refusing to engage with the technology; my drafts are quicker and, I think, better than they were three years ago because of it. The difference is that they start from precedents that have been tested, and someone with twenty years of doing this reads the output knowing what to look for. The other is that I’d rather lose the instruction than do a review that leaves you thinking your documents are sound when they aren’t. Several people have gone elsewhere after I’ve said this. That’s fine.
What the AI draft is actually good for
It’s a very good instruction brief. When someone sends me their AI-drafted terms, I can see what they want the document to do, how their pricing works, what they’re worried about, and how they’d like to sound to their customers. That saves me a round of questions and it usually makes the first draft closer to right. So don’t bin it. Send it over, and tell me it’s an AI draft (people are sometimes embarrassed to say so, pretend they “put it together” and there’s no need). I’ll quote a fixed fee for drafting from my own precedents with your draft as the instructions.
Where a straightforward review is the right answer: a document drafted by another solicitor that you want a second opinion on, a small change to something already in use, or a contract the other side has sent you, which is a review by definition. In those cases I’ll quote for a review and it’ll be cheaper.
