How We Use AI to Make Legal Help Affordable

We use artificial intelligence to help more people access employment law support they couldn’t otherwise afford. Here’s exactly how it works, what it means for you, and what choices you have.

Why We Use AI

Employment law has a problem. Bringing a tribunal claim properly requires legal documents that take hours to prepare: particulars of claim, witness statements, schedules of loss, chronologies, and more. At traditional solicitor rates, that preparation alone can cost thousands of pounds before a case even reaches a hearing.

Most people who are unfairly dismissed, discriminated against, or have their wages unlawfully deducted simply can’t afford that. They either represent themselves (which puts them at a serious disadvantage against an employer with legal representation) or they give up entirely. The Ministry of Justice’s own data shows that the majority of tribunal claimants are unrepresented.

We think that’s wrong. Access to justice shouldn’t depend on the size of your bank account.

The problem is getting worse, not better. The employment tribunal system is in crisis. More than 515,000 people are currently waiting for their cases to be heard. Cases routinely take 12 to 18 months to reach a hearing. For every case resolved, more than two new ones enter the system. And the Employment Rights Act 2025, which extends unfair dismissal protection to millions more workers from January 2027, will add even more pressure.

This backlog has a direct impact on how firms like ours can operate. Most of our clients come to us on a no-win-no-fee basis. That means we don’t get paid until their case is resolved. When cases took six months, that was manageable. When cases take 18 months, we’re carrying the cost of all that work for a year and a half before we see a penny. The longer the delays, the harder it becomes for any firm to offer no-win-no-fee representation, and the more people are left without legal help.

AI changes the economics. A document that takes a solicitor three hours to draft from scratch can be produced as a high-quality first draft by AI in minutes. The solicitor then reviews it, applies their professional judgement, corrects any errors, and refines the legal arguments. The end result is a solicitor-quality document, but the cost reflects 30 minutes of review rather than three hours of drafting.

That’s not cutting corners. It’s using technology to do what technology does best (processing large amounts of information quickly) so that a solicitor can focus on what they do best (exercising legal judgement, assessing credibility, and making strategic decisions).

What AI Does in Your Case

When you use our services, AI may be involved in several stages. We want you to know exactly what those are.

Reading and organising your documents. When you upload documents to our system (contracts, grievance letters, emails, payslips), AI helps extract key information and categorise the documents. This means your solicitor spends less time on administration and more time on your case.

Drafting legal documents. AI produces first drafts of tribunal documents based on the information you’ve provided. These drafts follow established legal frameworks and templates. They are always reviewed by your solicitor before being used.

Case assessment. When you first contact us, AI helps assess the strength of your potential claim by analysing the facts you’ve described against the relevant legal tests. This gives our solicitors a head start, but they always make the final assessment themselves.

Transcription. If we record a telephone consultation (with your consent), AI transcribes the call so that key details are captured accurately for your case file.

What AI Does Not Do

There are things we will never delegate to AI.

AI does not decide whether to take your case. A solicitor makes that decision.

AI does not give you legal advice. It provides information and drafts. A solicitor provides the advice.

AI does not represent you at a tribunal. A solicitor or barrister does that.

AI does not decide your legal strategy. It doesn’t choose which arguments to run, whether to settle, or what outcome to accept. Those decisions are made by your solicitor in consultation with you.

AI does not have the final word on any document that goes to a tribunal, to your employer, or to Acas. A solicitor reviews and approves every document before it leaves our office.

Your Choice: AI-Assisted or Fully Manual

We believe in giving you a genuine choice about how your case is handled.

We don’t think less of anyone who chooses either option. Both are legitimate. We simply want to be transparent about why the pricing differs: AI lets us do more with less time, and we pass that saving on to you.

Our Free Tribunal Preparation Tool

We also offer a free, self-service Tribunal Preparation tool through LexConnectPro. This tool is AI-powered by design. It’s what makes it possible to offer up to 11 tribunal documents at no cost.

If you use the free tool, AI generates your documents based on the information you provide. These documents are clearly marked as drafts that have not been reviewed by a solicitor. You’re responsible for checking them before use.

At the end of the process, you can choose to have your case reviewed by one of our solicitors. If you do, the solicitor will review and refine everything the AI has produced, and the normal AI-assisted or fully manual options apply from that point.

The free tool requires consent to AI processing because it cannot function without it. There is no free manual alternative, because the tool only exists because AI makes it economically viable. If you need fully manual document preparation, our paid consultation service is available.

How We Protect Your Data

We take the privacy of your case information extremely seriously. Here’s how we protect it when AI is involved:

Your data is never used to train AI models. The AI providers we use (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Deepgram, and ElevenLabs) process your data to generate the specific output requested, then delete it. Their commercial API terms prohibit using customer data for model training. Your witness statement doesn’t end up improving someone else’s chatbot.

Your data is stored in the EU. Our database is hosted in Frankfurt, Germany. When data is sent to AI providers for processing, it is transmitted via encrypted connections, processed, and returned. The AI providers temporarily retain inputs and outputs for abuse monitoring purposes (typically 30 to 55 days depending on the provider), after which it is automatically deleted.

All AI calls are made server-side. Your data never passes through your browser to reach an AI provider. It goes from our secure servers to theirs via encrypted API connections. API keys and credentials are never exposed to users.

We minimise what we send. We don’t send your entire case file to an AI provider to draft a single letter. Each AI request includes only the information needed for that specific task.

Full details of our data protection practices, including the specific AI providers we use, their retention periods, and the safeguards we have in place, are set out in our Privacy Policy and AI Transparency Policy.

A Solicitor Always Has the Final Say

This is the most important thing on this page.

If you have instructed us (meaning you’ve signed a retainer with Tom Street & Co. Solicitors), a qualified solicitor reviews every piece of work before it is used. AI produces drafts. The solicitor decides whether they’re good enough, changes what needs changing, and takes professional responsibility for the final product.

That solicitor is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. They owe you duties of competence, confidentiality, and acting in your best interests. Those duties don’t change because AI was involved in the process. If anything, the solicitor’s review is more focused, because instead of spending hours on first-draft writing, they can devote their time to legal analysis, strategy, and ensuring the documents properly reflect your case.

For the free self-service Tribunal Preparation tool, no solicitor reviews the documents unless you separately instruct us. The documents are drafts, clearly marked as such, and you take responsibility for reviewing them. We make this clear at every stage of the process.

Our Philosophy

We started using AI because we saw too many people losing out on valid employment claims simply because they couldn’t afford legal help. Preparing tribunal documents properly takes time, and time costs money. AI lets us compress that time without compromising on quality.

The tribunal backlog has made this even more urgent. With cases taking 12 to 18 months to resolve, the economics of no-win-no-fee employment law are brutal. A firm that takes on a case today might not see any payment until late 2027. Many firms have simply stopped offering no-win-no-fee employment work because they can’t afford to carry the risk for that long. The people who suffer are the ones who need help most: ordinary employees who can’t afford to pay a solicitor upfront.

AI is what lets us keep the lights on while we wait. By reducing the time it takes to prepare each case, we can take on more clients at fees that reflect the reality of what people can actually pay. We can keep offering no-win-no-fee where the case justifies it, because AI means we’re not spending three hours on a first draft that a solicitor then refines in 30 minutes. The maths works. Without AI, it doesn’t.

We’re not trying to replace solicitors with robots. We’re trying to make solicitors’ expertise accessible to people who would otherwise go without it. The solicitor is still the one making the legal judgements, building the strategy, and taking responsibility for the work. AI just handles the parts that don’t require a law degree.

If you have questions about how we use AI, or if you’d like to discuss your options before deciding, please get in touch. We’re always happy to explain.