LSB writes to Lord Chancellor and tech minister
The legal profession’s super regulator, the Legal Services Board (LSB), is planning to review its guidance on AI training for lawyers, a newly published letter reveals.
The letter, authored by Richard Orpin, interim chief executive of the LSB, is directed to Technology Minister Michell Donelan MP and Lord Chancellor Alex Chalk MP, in response to a request from the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology.
“We recognise the increasingly important role that technology, including AI, plays in society and its potential to improve the diversity and reach of legal services,” Orpin writes. He goes on to note that “greater reliance on AI in the production of legal advice has the potential to introduce additional risks to consumers of legal services”.
The letter continues by stating that the LSB is planning to undertake a review of its existing guidance on regulatory arrangements for education and training.
The letter continues:
“This review is likely to include the consideration of how regulatory frameworks for education and training should reflect what requirements are necessary to ensure that legal professionals are competent in the use of technology, such as AI tools, at both the point of entry into the profession and throughout their careers.”
The letter also notes the role of the individual regulators in managing the future of AI usage. Whilst the existing guidance does not “specifically require” individual regulators to provide their own AI guidance, it does state that “individual regulators are best placed to assess these risks within their regulated communities and put in place mitigation strategies to address them in line with the outcomes in our guidance”.
The Solicitors Regulation Authority published its own guidance back in November last year looking both at the uses of AI in law, and the wide range of potential risks.