Speeches by Russell.

“The reality is that if you have an ongoing legal matter and you need ongoing support, you do not want to upset your lawyer by putting in a formal complaint about them, let alone complain to the SRA in any way, shape or form. My gut feeling is that if you did some survey work of the type that you have described of peopl…”

“I would not disagree that it has potential.”

“The report was issued in September last year. What concrete steps have you taken in your organisation to change it to reflect the report?”

“It might be. It depends if the AI is hallucinating. It depends if the AI is trustworthy.”

“The Bar Standards Board made decisions, such as those listed in the report, around male barristers who inappropriately touched and consistently harassed very junior female barristers—sometimes pupils—in ways that constituted public sexual assault. Those men were suspended for three months—the examples are all in the re…”

“Do you think that that discloses any areas in which you should function differently?”

“One of the elements of the report refers to the fact that judicial appointments were not apparently liaising in any way with the Bar Standards Board. Do you feel that indicates a failure on your part?”

“In theory, that all sounds fantastic. There are obviously significant problems with AI models hallucinating. There are significant problems with AI models having inbuilt biases, in respect of both race and sex. How does your current regulatory strategy look at that?”

“You just talked about Garfield AI, and that is an extremely interesting model. Do you feel that your regulatory framework works?”

“On that topic, I am a solicitor—I practised for nearly 14 years—and I have never heard of this website. I spent a year supervising in a law centre, and I am not aware of you having any contact with our law centre about this in that time. You say that you do a lot of promotional activity, but I was a local councillor fo…”

“What extent of protection do you think the public need from AI?”

“You commented that the case for a review of the reserved legal activities is growing. Which reserved legal activities do you think need to change?”

“What work, if any, are you doing on AI bias? How that will be managed within the sector?”

“You were established in 2007, so the SRA is a relatively recent organisation, but not that new. I got the impression from what you just said that it was probably quite innovative work for you to speak to people who had experience of using legal services. Is that a fair characterisation?”

“You were established in 2007, so the SRA is a relatively recent organisation, but not that new. I got the impression from what you just said that it was probably quite innovative work for you to speak to people who had experience of using legal services. Is that a fair characterisation?”

“What are you doing about costs? To put that comment into some context, I am a solicitor, but my experience of friends and family using law firms is that they have not received transparent information up front about costs and that they have been consistently surprised by the bills that they received. As a solicitor, I f…”

“That is great, but fundamentally my question is about when someone instructs a solicitor, and they think it is going to cost £1,000 but then it actually costs £5,000 and that expectation has not been managed from start to finish in the transaction. They may get a retrospective explanation for why that cost escalated, b…”

“The reality is that if you have an ongoing legal matter and you need ongoing support, you do not want to upset your lawyer by putting in a formal complaint about them, let alone complain to the SRA in any way, shape or form. My gut feeling is that if you did some survey work of the type that you have described of peopl…”

“That is super. I have one last, very short point that I want to make. In my constituency, there is an ongoing problem with leaseholders whose estates have subsequently not been adopted, who do not understand the service charges they are going to be subject to on an ongoing basis and who have not understood the risks as…”

“Perhaps, but as a regulator, that is quite a big assumption.”