Can a UK law firm let AI answer client calls?

Yes. There is no rule in the SRA Standards and Regulations that prevents a firm using an AI assistant to answer calls, and no provision of UK GDPR that forbids it. What both regimes do is attach conditions, and the conditions are specific enough that they should shape which product you buy rather than whether you buy one.

This is a summary of how we read the landscape as a supplier. It is not legal advice, and your COLP will have views. That is the correct order of operations.

What does the SRA Code actually require?

Three things bear directly on this, and none of them is about technology.

The first is that clients receive information in a way they can understand, and are not misled. That is what makes disclosure non-negotiable. A caller who believes they are speaking to a member of staff, and is not, has been misled, regardless of how well the call went. This is why disclosure should be a deterministic step in the call flow rather than an instruction the model is asked to remember.

The second is that you remain accountable for work carried out on your behalf. Outsourcing the front door does not outsource the obligation. If the assistant tells a caller something wrong, that is the firm's problem, which is the practical argument for a system that refuses to answer out of scope rather than one that is merely usually right.

The third is competence, and it is the one people forget. Only a person qualified to give it can give legal advice. So the line an assistant must not cross is not 'saying anything substantive', it is advising. Capturing that a caller has a refusal letter dated eleven days ago is administration. Telling them whether their appeal window is still open is advice. A product that cannot tell those apart is not deployable in a law firm.

Capturing the date on the letter is administration. Saying whether the deadline has passed is advice. The whole design sits on that line.

Do we need consent to record calls?

Recording and transcribing engages UK GDPR because you are processing personal data, frequently including special-category data, since what people ring a law firm about is often their health, their family or an alleged offence.

Consent is one lawful basis and not automatically the right one. Many firms rely on legitimate interests for call handling and consent for recording, and document that assessment. What matters in practice is that the caller is told at the start, that the assessment exists in writing, and that retention is set deliberately rather than left at whatever the vendor's default happens to be.

Ask any supplier what their default retention period is and whether you can change it. If the answer is that you cannot, the data is being kept for their convenience rather than your obligation.

What about confidentiality and legal professional privilege?

This is the question that decides most deals, and it deserves a more careful answer than it usually gets.

A first call from a prospective client is generally not privileged material in the way a file note on a live matter is. That is why the sensible first deployment is pre-client: contact details, matter category, urgency, source, booking status. It is genuinely useful and it is not the firm's crown jewels.

Once an assistant is answering an existing client's call about a live matter, the scope has changed and so should the analysis. Ask how access is scoped. Ask whether adding a colleague to a matter silently gives them the attendance notes on it. In our experience that specific question is what separates products designed for firms from products designed for sales teams and renamed.

Do we have to tell clients in our engagement letter?

Telling callers at the point of the call is the load-bearing requirement. Most firms we work with also add a line to their privacy notice covering call handling and recording, and some add one to the engagement letter. Firms with an in-house DPO tend to want both. It is cheap to do and it removes an argument later.

Where are the real limits?

Three, stated plainly, because a supplier who lists none is not being straight with you.

• Language. Our assistant operates in English, and that is enforced rather than left to the model. For a practice with significant non-English intake this is a real constraint, and the honest answer is to route those calls to a person.
• Advice. It will not tell a caller their position, assess merits, calculate a deadline or quote a fee. Some firms want exactly that and we are the wrong supplier for them.
• Judgment about people. We do not do voice biometrics or guess who a caller is from how they sound. Voiceprints are special-category data and the necessity test is not one we think a law firm's intake line passes. A caller is identified by their number and their record, and the fee-earner sees the raw number rather than a guess.

What is a sensible first deployment?

One office. One phone flow. Two fee-earners with cover on their own lines. Pre-client data only. Retention set by you. A named person who reviews the first fortnight of transcripts, because the first fortnight is where you learn what your callers actually ask, and it is rarely what the firm expects.

How we handle data specifically is written up in confidentiality, and the shorter operational answers are in the FAQ. If you want to talk it through with your COLP in the room, that is the conversation we prefer to have.