Oversight regulator the Legal Services Board is seeking more government help for its work encouraging the safe adoption of AI in legal services.

In an AI plan for 2026-27 published yesterday, the LSB said it ‘recognises the enormous potential for AI-enabled innovation to deliver benefits’. However regulators are currently constrained by limited funding, lack of specialist expertise and the lack of coordination among regulators in different sectors.

To tackle this, it said that the government’s AI Action Plan for Justice should include ‘building regulatory capability’ and commit to ‘sustained, multi-year support for regulatory experimentation’. Continuity of funding would support approaches ‘that demonstrably enable safe AI adoption’.

The LSB also pointed to a gap in understanding about consumers’ use of AI tools, calling for studies to track how this evolves over time and how consumers move between unregulated tools and regulated providers. 

Meanwhile a report for the LSB reveals a gap between the protections consumer users of lawtech think they have and the protections they actually have. The report, Existing Standards for AI-Powered Business-to-Consumer Lawtech, found that standards designed for consumer-facing legal AI are almost entirely absent. 

Most existing standards were developed for other purposes, such as general AI governance, data protection or the professional conduct of regulated lawyers. Of the standards identified, 58% are non-binding guidance with no enforcement mechanisms.

The review notes that consumers who access AI-powered support through a regulated solicitor or law firm benefit from professional oversight and established routes to redress. People who use AI legal tools directly may have no equivalent protection.

Although general consumer and data protection law may apply, these frameworks were not designed to address the specific risks posed by AI-generated legal information or advice.

Richard Orpin, LSB chief executive, said: ‘More and more people are turning to AI for help with legal problems, whether that’s a housing dispute, a problem at work, or a debt they cannot manage. For many people who cannot afford legal advice, these tools could be genuinely transformative.’

But while consumers are open to AI’s potential, ’they expect basic safeguards, and right now those safeguards are largely absent’.