AI for Lawyers: Research Assistant, Not Advocate
Advocate Omondi has a confession. Late one night, with a submission due in the morning and the office generator making noises like a matatu climbing Ngong Road, he asked an AI assistant to find him authorities on a point of contract law. It gave him four beautiful cases, neatly cited, perfectly on point. He was delighted, and briefly convinced that AI for law firms in Kenya had just solved his life. Then, out of habit, he went to look them up. Two of them did not exist.
He did not file them, which is why this is a funny story and not a disciplinary one. Lawyers elsewhere have not been so lucky. The lesson is not that AI is useless for legal work. It is that AI is a research assistant, not an advocate, and you would never let a first-week pupil file submissions without checking them.
What AI for law firms in Kenya is genuinely good at
Used well, AI tools can take a lot of grinding work off an advocate's desk. The sweet spot is anything where the AI is working from documents you give it, and a human checks the output.
Summarising long documents, judgments and witness statements into a first-pass overview
Producing a chronology of events from a stack of correspondence
Drafting first versions of routine letters, demand notices and client updates
Comparing two versions of a contract and listing the changes
Turning dense legal language into plain English for a client who just wants to know if they will win
Each of these saves time without asking the AI to know the law on its own. It is reading, sorting and drafting, not deciding.
What it must never do unsupervised
General AI assistants are trained to produce fluent, plausible text. Plausible is not the same as true. When asked for authorities, they can invent case names, citations and even quotes that sound exactly right. They may also mix up jurisdictions, quoting English or American positions as if they were Kenyan law, or miss recent amendments entirely.
So a few firm rules:
Never cite a case you have not personally read in an authoritative source such as Kenya Law
Never send AI-drafted advice to a client without an advocate reviewing it line by line
Never treat an AI summary as a substitute for reading the key parts of the document yourself
Be wary of any answer about the law that comes without a source you can check
The professional responsibility stays with the advocate. The court will not accept "the software did it" any more than it accepts "my clerk forgot".
Confidentiality is the bigger trap
Hallucinated cases get the headlines, but client confidentiality is the quieter risk. Pasting a client's pleadings, medical records or settlement figures into a free consumer chatbot may mean that information is stored on servers you know nothing about, and possibly used to improve the service.
Before anyone in the firm uses an AI tool on client material, someone needs to check the terms. Does the provider use your inputs for training? Where is the data stored? Can you delete it? Business and enterprise plans often offer stronger protections than free versions, but read the terms rather than assuming. Kenya's Data Protection Act 2019 applies to the personal data in your files, and your duty of confidentiality to clients applies regardless of what any software licence says.
A sensible middle ground is to anonymise. Replace names, ID numbers and identifying details before asking the AI to help with structure or wording. "Client A sued Company B over a lease" is enough for most drafting help.
A workflow that keeps everyone out of trouble
Here is how many careful firms are approaching it:
Write a one-page AI policy saying which tools are approved and what must never be pasted in
Use AI for first drafts and summaries, then have an advocate review and sign off
Verify every authority in a proper legal database before it goes near a court
Keep a note in the file when AI was used, so reviewers know what to check closely
Train pupils and clerks on the policy, because they are the ones most likely to experiment at midnight
AI also works best when your firm's own information is organised. If your matters, documents and deadlines live in one place, like a practice management system such as LegalDesk, it is far easier to find the right documents to work from and to keep a clear record of who did what.
The bottom line
AI will not replace advocates. Clients pay for judgment, strategy and someone who will stand up in court and take responsibility. What AI can do is clear away hours of summarising and first-drafting, so that judgment gets more of your time.
Advocate Omondi still uses AI every week. He just reads every case it suggests, and he has a sticky note on his monitor that says "Trust, but verify on Kenya Law". The generator, sadly, remains unverified.
Your next step: write that one-page AI policy this month, before a pupil writes it for you by accident at midnight. And if your matters and documents are still scattered across email and filing cabinets, talk to Philsoft about getting the practice organised first.