Think AI Can Help With Your Legal Question? A Solicitor Makes It Count.

General Legal Information Provided by AI, Guidelines and Best Practices for Using AI, Unique Value and Protections Provided by Solicitors, W & G Lawyers

Think AI Can Help With Your Legal Question? A Solicitor Makes It Count.

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This article was written by Jialin Liu Solicitor and Nancy Wang Principal Solicitor at W & G Lawyers. 

When you are facing a legal problem — a disputed lease, an estate to organise, a property settlement after separation — it is natural to open an AI tool and type in your question. Within seconds you get something that sounds clear and structured, sometimes with section numbers and case names attached.

That instinct is entirely reasonable. AI tools can give you a framework, help you understand unfamiliar legal concepts, and mean you are not walking into a lawyer’s office completely in the dark. We think that is a good thing.

But before you make any decision based on that answer, it is worth remembering: a starting point is not an answer.

What AI does well

AI tools can help you grasp basic legal concepts, get the gist of a contract before you sign it, organise the questions you want to ask, and make sense of a government document full of unfamiliar terms. Ask it what a “caveat” is, or roughly how an estate is administered, and you will get a serviceable explanation in plain language. The Queensland Law Society itself recognises that AI has real potential to improve access to justice and reduce the burden of routine work on practitioners.

Used this way, AI lowers the barrier to legal information. That is a genuine advance, and we encourage clients to make use of it.

But here is the thing worth pausing on. Legal information has never actually been hard to find. A search engine, a government website, a community Facebook group, a forum thread full of people sharing what happened in their matter — all of these have offered free legal information for years. AI is simply the fastest and most conversational version of something that already existed. What none of these sources has ever been able to provide is advice.

Information is a general statement about what the law says. It is available to anyone, and AI has made it more accessible than ever. Advice is a judgment made for your situation, your documents and your objectives, by someone who is accountable for the result. AI has narrowed the distance between you and information. It has not touched the gap between information and advice — and four things sit squarely in that gap.

What only a solicitor can provide

Confidentiality that the law protects. When you speak to your solicitor for legal advice, that conversation is generally protected by legal professional privilege. It cannot ordinarily be forced out of you in a courtroom, and the other side cannot demand to see it. When you type the same facts into an AI tool, none of that applies. Your words may be stored on a server, reviewed by people you will never meet, or used to train the system — and there is no privilege shielding them if your matter is ever litigated. Without realising it, you may be creating a permanent, written record of your own case, in your own admissions, that one day works against you. A solicitor’s office is a safe place to say the difficult thing out loud. An AI prompt is not.

Your story, in your own words. Much of a solicitor’s skill lies in drawing out the full account — the chronology, the context, and especially the details you might think are too small to mention. Cases are often won or lost on exactly those details: an offhand remark made at the time, a date that does not line up, a document you forgot you had. When you filter your situation through AI first, you tend to arrive with the AI’s version of it: tidied up, compressed into a generic legal category, and stripped of the specifics. You can end up repeating the machine’s story instead of telling your own — and the fact that got left out, because it did not fit the AI’s tidy summary, is sometimes the one your whole claim turns on. We need to hear it from you, in your words, with the things that felt important to you still attached, before anything is built around it.

Judgment for your actual circumstances. AI produces the answer that is statistically most likely to be correct in general. Legal problems are the opposite of general. The same contract term can be enforceable in one situation and worthless in another. The same deadline can be fatal in one type of matter and flexible in the next. Your outcome turns on the specific clauses in your documents, the history of your dispute, the jurisdiction it falls under, and the procedural rules that apply to it in your particular jurisdiction. A solicitor reasons from your facts to your answer. AI reasons from everyone’s facts to an average one.

Verification and accountability. AI tools can state, with complete confidence, that a case or a section of an Act exists when it simply does not — a problem known as “hallucination.” This is not hypothetical. Australian courts have already had to deal with fabricated AI citations in real proceedings, including matters run by experienced lawyers, and the number of documented cases worldwide has climbed sharply year on year as more people lean on these tools. If qualified practitioners are being caught out, the risk for someone relying on AI to make a decision on their own is greater still. A solicitor checks every authority before relying on it, holds a practising certificate and professional indemnity insurance, and stands behind the advice they give. If that advice is wrong, you have a formal avenue of recourse. If an AI answer is wrong, the consequences are entirely yours, and there is no one to hold to account.

If you have already used AI

That is not a problem — it can make your appointment more efficient. Just do three things.

  • Tell us it was AI-generated, so we can verify any sections, cases, or clauses before relying on them. This is not a reflection on your judgment; it is simply part of doing the job properly. Plausible is not the same as accurate.
  • Tell us what you have already done. If you signed something, replied to the other side, or made a decision based on an AI answer, that changes where you stand — and our advice about your current position depends on knowing it.
  • Tell us the story yourself. Bring the AI material by all means, but don’t let it speak for you.

In February 2026, the Queensland Law Society joined law societies across several Australian states to publish a joint Warning to Clients — Use of AI Tools, addressing exactly these risks to privilege, privacy and accuracy. In May 2026, during Law Week, QLS launched its public campaign For real legal advice, ask a solicitor — a direct response to a growing number of matters where people had relied on AI material without understanding its limits.

The point

When anyone can obtain legal information instantly, the value of a solicitor does not shrink — it grows. Information tells you what the law says in general. Advice tells you what it means for you: from someone who can keep your confidence, hear your whole story, weigh the risks you have not thought of, verify what you bring, and answer for the result.

Use AI to get general information. Then let us give you advice so you can act on it.

References

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 Disclaimer

This article is general information only and does not constitute legal advice under Australian law. For advice specific to your situation, please contact W & G Lawyers. For further details, please click here to view our disclaimer.

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