Ready, Willing, and Able? Challenges Facing the Governance of Generative AI in the UK’s Legal Services Sector

In light of the increasing prominence of generative AI, this paper examines a number of critical challenges facing the stratified policy and governance frameworks shaping the adoption of this technology in the legal services sector. We argue that there are counterproductive tensions within the existing policy and governance framework, and that if we are to make the UK legal sector ‘ready, willing, and able’ to harness the potential of artificial intelligence, it is imperative that we set in place a new governance framework that is capable of setting, promoting, and supporting innovation across the legal sector as a whole. Furthermore, within this policy and governance framework we consider two critical factors that are relevant to state-of-the-art AI systems which present critical challenges to the development of legal AI: (1) data access issues in the domain of law and (2) knowledge, skills, and awareness of capabilities relating to the application of generative AI to legal problems.