The Law Society’s AI guidance: explained for practices.

Two documents now define what Australian legal regulators expect when solicitors use AI. The first is the December 2024 joint statement on AI in legal practice, issued together by the Law Society of NSW, the Legal Practice Board of Western Australia and the Victorian Legal Services Board and Commissioner. The second is the Law Society of NSW publication A Solicitor’s Guide to Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence, updated January 2026. This page summarises both in plain English and links to a detailed guide on each obligation. Read the originals; they are short, and they are the source.

What the documents are, and what they are not

Neither document creates new rules. Both explain how existing binding obligations, the Legal Profession Uniform Law and the Australian Solicitors’ Conduct Rules 2015, apply when AI tools are involved. That framing matters: a firm cannot wait for AI-specific legislation to know where it stands, because the regulators’ position is that the current rules already answer most questions. The guide states the working principle simply: understand the tool you are using, and know how your professional and ethical obligations apply to it.

The obligations, mapped

Each of these gets its own detailed guide:

• Client confidentiality (rule 9). The regulators’ sharpest line: confidential, sensitive or privileged client information cannot safely be entered into public AI chatbots.
• Accuracy and the duty to the court (rules 4 and 19). Hallucinated citations have already cost Australian practitioners in court, and in one case regulatory action followed against a practising certificate.
• Supervision (rule 37 and s 34). Principals are responsible for how everyone in the practice uses AI, including staff who use it without asking.
• Costs and billing (ss 172–174). Bills must reflect work actually done, and AI use should lower cost to clients rather than raise it.
• The firm AI policy. The statement recommends clear, risk-based policies, made available to clients on request.
• Procurement. The guide sets out the questions to ask before adopting any AI tool, from contract terms to onshore data hosting.

Who this applies to

The joint statement was issued by regulators in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia. The conduct rules it interprets apply in the Uniform Law jurisdictions directly, and every state regulator has signalled the same expectations in substance. A practice in any Australian jurisdiction that treats these two documents as its baseline will rarely be caught out.

Where deployment posture fits

Most obligations in the guidance are about solicitor behaviour: verification, supervision, honest billing. No tool satisfies those for you. The confidentiality and data-security obligations are different, because they turn on where client information travels, and that is an architecture question. Processing on hardware inside the practice answers it structurally, which is why our AI for law firms page and privilege guide keep coming back to deployment posture. The regulators do not endorse products, and this guidance does not require any particular tool; it requires that you can account for where client information goes.

Keeping current

The regulators have said they will review and update their guidance as AI use evolves; the guide is already on its second significant version. We re-check this series against the published documents on the same cycle as our comparison pages, and the January 2026 update is reflected throughout.

Common questions