Can ChatGPT act as a lawyer?

Can ChatGPT act as a lawyer?

The short answer is no. While ChatGPT can process legal information, draft text, and summarise documents with impressive speed, it cannot "act" as a lawyer. It lacks three fundamental components of legal practice: a duty of care, professional liability, and, crucially, a conception of truth.

For solicitors and law firms, treating a Large Language Model (LLM) as a lawyer isn't just a category error; it is a regulatory minefield. As we moved through 2024 and 2025, the legal sector saw a wave of sanctions against professionals who mistook a probabilistic text generator for a legal reasoning engine. From the SRA's strict guidance to High Court rulings, the message is clear: AI is a tool, not a fee earner.

The "Hallucination" Risk: Why it Lies with Confidence

The most dangerous misconception about ChatGPT is that it is a knowledge database like Westlaw or LexisNexis. It is not. It is a prediction engine. Its primary function is to predict the next plausible word in a sentence based on statistical likelihood, not factual accuracy.

In legal contexts, this leads to "hallucinations", fabrications that look terrifyingly authentic. We saw this in the now-infamous US case of Mata v. Avianca, where lawyers submitted a brief full of non-existent case law. But the problem hit closer to home in 2025 with the High Court judgment in Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey. The court issued a stark warning to legal representatives: if you rely on AI-generated citations without independent verification, you are breaching your duty to the court.

When you ask ChatGPT for a case precedent, it doesn't "look up" a case. It generates a string of text that looks like a case citation. It mimics the style, the parties, and the citation format perfectly, but the case itself often does not exist.

Confidentiality: The "Public AI" Problem

Beyond accuracy, there is the issue of privilege. Standard versions of ChatGPT (and similar consumer-grade LLMs) are often "public" systems. Data entered into them can be used to train future versions of the model.

For a solicitor, this is catastrophic. Pasting a client’s sensitive merger details, witness statements, or financial disclosures into a public chatbot is potentially a breach of client confidentiality and GDPR. The SRA has made it clear that firms must have rigid governance in place to prevent "shadow AI" usage, where junior staff, under pressure to meet deadlines, quietly use public tools to draft work, inadvertently exposing client data to third-party servers.

The Accountability Gap

A lawyer is accountable for their advice. If a solicitor is negligent, they can be sued, sanctioned, or struck off. An algorithm cannot be sued. It has no assets, no professional indemnity insurance, and no fear of the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Pattrn Data’s stance is that the "Human in the Loop" (HITL) is non-negotiable. AI can draft, summarising, and categorise, but a qualified human must verify every output. The lawyer remains the interface of liability. You cannot delegate your duty of competence to a machine.

Where AI Actually Fits in a Law Firm

None of this is to say law firms should ignore AI. Quite the opposite. When wrapped in proper governance, using "Private AI" instances that do not train on your data, LLMs are powerful paralegals. They excel at:

• First-pass review: Summarising vast document bundles for relevance.
• Drafting assistance: Creating first drafts of routine correspondence (which must be reviewed).
• Comparisons: Quickly identifying differences between two clauses.

The question is not "Can ChatGPT be a lawyer?" but "How can lawyers safe-guard their practice while using this tool?" The answer lies in governance, training, and a healthy dose of professional scepticism.

Conclusion

ChatGPT cannot act as a lawyer because it cannot care if it is right or wrong; it only cares if its output looks plausible. For the legal sector, the utility of AI lies in efficiency, not judgment. Use it to do the heavy lifting, but never let it sign the letter.