Why could using AI to communicate with your lawyer actually increase your legal fees?

The widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) has made writing easier than ever. With just a few simple instructions, AI can write emails, analyse issues, organise points of dispute, suggest questions and even produce seemingly professional legal analysis. Within seconds, it can generate several pages of comprehensive, professionally worded text. When communicating with your lawyer, providing more information does not necessarily make the communication more efficient.

In fact, using AI to write lengthy emails, legal analyses or extensive lists of questions may sometimes increase your legal costs rather than save you money.

Why does this affect your legal fees?

AI can write ten pages in seconds, but your lawyer still needs time to read those ten pages.

If your legal work is billed according to the time your lawyer spends on it, the more material they need to read, understand, verify and respond to, the longer the work may take and the higher the associated fees may be. Before AI became widespread, writing a lengthy email took considerable time and thought. A client wanting to explain a dispute to their lawyer in five pages of detailed background information had to work through the sequence of events, organise the material and write it out paragraph by paragraph. That process itself took time, so people would generally not readily write emails running to more than ten pages. AI has changed this. Now, you need only enter a brief description for AI to generate several pages immediately. You can also ask it to expand the content, add legal perspectives, analyse potential problems with the other party's position or list every question worth asking your lawyer.

For the client, the entire process may take only ten minutes. But for the lawyer receiving the email, the workload may not be any smaller. A six-page email generated by AI still contains six pages that need to be read. If it raises twenty questions, the lawyer may need to consider all twenty. If it sets out ten legal arguments, the lawyer may need to assess each one for accuracy, relevance and applicability under New Zealand law. AI dramatically reduces the time needed to produce text, but it does not necessarily reduce the time a professional needs to review it. This is something many people overlook when using AI to communicate with their lawyer.

Different law firms use different charging methods. Some legal services can be provided for a fixed fee, particularly matters with a clearly defined scope and relatively predictable procedures. This gives clients a clearer idea of their legal costs before work begins. However, the time required for legal work cannot always be accurately predicted in advance. Litigation, employment disputes and other contentious legal matters, for example, are often affected by many factors that cannot be controlled beforehand.

How will the other party respond? How many documents will the parties need to exchange? How much evidence will the lawyer need to review? Will negotiations be necessary? Will the case proceed to formal legal proceedings? All these factors can affect the overall workload. This type of legal work is therefore often charged according to the professional time actually spent. In these circumstances, how clients communicate with their lawyers can directly affect their legal fees.

Suppose you receive a letter from the other party's lawyer. The most direct approach is to forward it to your own lawyer, briefly explain the background and ask what you should do next. Your lawyer can assess the letter and the relevant facts, identify the issues that need attention and request any further information they need.

Alternatively, you might first give the letter to AI and ask it to identify every possible legal weakness in the other party's position, list every counterargument, suggest different response strategies and compile dozens of questions. You then send the original one-page letter to your lawyer together with eight pages of AI-generated analysis, asking for advice on every point. The legal issues requiring attention have not changed, but the amount of information your lawyer needs to read and assess has increased substantially. If the matter is billed by time, this extra work may increase your legal fees.

A common example involving a New Zealand employment dispute

Suppose an employee working in New Zealand has recently been dismissed. They consider the company's decision unfair and want to know whether they can raise a personal grievance. Ordinarily, they could contact a lawyer directly, briefly explain the circumstances of the dismissal and provide their employment agreement, warning letters from the company, relevant emails and dismissal notice. The lawyer could use this material to understand the background and assess whether further investigation is needed.

Now, however, the employee might use AI first. They describe the circumstances of their dismissal and ask AI to analyse which New Zealand employment laws the employer may have breached and list every possible ground for challenging the decision.

AI quickly produces several pages of analysis. The employee then asks it to strengthen the arguments, analyse possible errors in the company's dismissal process, draft a formal complaint and prepare twenty questions to ask a lawyer. In less than half an hour, a relatively straightforward initial legal enquiry has become a document running to more than ten pages.

The client may feel that, having done extensive preparation with AI, their lawyer should be able to handle the case more quickly. In practice, the opposite may be true.

The lawyer still needs to start with the basic facts. Exactly when was the employee dismissed? What reasons did the employer give? Were any meetings held before the dismissal? Was the employee given an opportunity to explain? What documents did the parties exchange? What does the employment agreement say?

The lawyer also needs to consider the relevant legal time limits. In New Zealand, most personal grievances generally need to be raised with the employer within ninety days of the relevant event occurring or coming to the employee's attention, although different rules apply to some categories of grievance and special circumstances. The lawyer therefore needs to establish the facts that truly matter first and assess whether prompt action is required. Having to read more than ten pages of AI-generated legal analysis before identifying the real issues in the case may not be the most efficient approach.

Because the information AI uses may draw on the laws of countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia or Canada, some of its legal arguments may not apply in New Zealand. Material that appears highly professional may actually have no direct relevance to New Zealand's employment law system. If the client asks their lawyer to comment on every AI-generated argument, the lawyer may need extra time to explain why some arguments do not apply. That time could otherwise be spent addressing the issues that really matter in the case. A simple email clearly setting out the dismissal date, what happened, the relevant documents and the assistance sought may be more effective.

The same problem can arise in New Zealand immigration cases

Immigration cases are another example worth considering. For people applying for visas, dealing with immigration issues or receiving correspondence from Immigration New Zealand, these matters are often stressful.

Suppose an applicant receives a letter from Immigration New Zealand requesting further information or an explanation of certain issues in their application. The most direct approach is to give the original letter to a lawyer or qualified immigration adviser, together with the relevant background information and documents.

Some applicants, however, may first give the letter to AI and ask it to draft the most persuasive possible response. For example, AI might produce three pages that the applicant considers insufficient. They then ask it to add more reasons, use more formal legal language, propose different counterarguments and provide several versions for comparison. The applicant gives their lawyer the original letter from Immigration New Zealand, the various AI-drafted responses and a series of questions. The lawyer still needs to establish the details of the case afresh.

What information is Immigration New Zealand actually requesting? What documents has the applicant already provided? What is their immigration history? What evidence is currently available to support their explanation? Is there a response deadline? Does anything in the AI-drafted material contradict information previously submitted to Immigration New Zealand? AI-generated text alone cannot provide reliable answers to these questions. More importantly, AI may not know the applicant's full immigration background, may refer to other countries' immigration systems and may even introduce assumptions the applicant never supplied.

Accuracy and consistency of information are crucial in immigration cases. An elaborately worded five-page response full of legal terminology is not necessarily more helpful than a clear, factually accurate response supported by appropriate documents. If a lawyer needs to spend substantial time checking the AI-generated text sentence by sentence for errors or inconsistencies with existing information, AI may actually increase the overall workload.

Professional-sounding AI writing is not necessarily correct

One potentially misleading feature of AI is its ability to express information with great confidence even when that information may be incorrect. The writing can be fluent, the structure comprehensive and the legal analysis seemingly persuasive. None of this guarantees that the content is correct.

A lawyer cannot assume that every legal argument in a document is accurate simply because it is professionally written. If a client provides five AI-generated legal arguments, the lawyer may need to consider each one to determine whether it fits the facts of the case and applies under New Zealand law.

Some AI-generated arguments may be useful, others entirely irrelevant, and some may originate from other countries' legal systems. The lawyer needs to identify which information is worth using, which needs correcting and which should not form part of the case at all. Sometimes, analysing the original issue directly would be quicker. In other words, AI may turn one question into ten, and someone still needs to spend time answering all ten.

More text can sometimes obscure important facts

When you first contact a lawyer, what usually matters most is your ability to explain clearly what happened, rather than how much you know about the law.

Your lawyer needs to know what happened, when it happened, who was involved, what relevant documents exist, whether there are any urgent deadlines and what outcome you want. These facts often matter more than a lengthy AI-generated legal analysis. There is another issue to consider when using AI to organise information. If you ask AI to make your account sound more professional, it may inadvertently change the original meaning. For example, you may simply say you cannot quite remember the exact date of a meeting, but AI may rewrite this as a definite statement.

You may only have a tentative recollection of something the other party said, but after AI polishes the wording, it may sound as though you can recall the entire conversation accurately. These subtle distinctions can be very important in legal work. If you are unsure when something happened, tell your lawyer directly that you are unsure.

If you cannot accurately recall what your employer said at a meeting, tell your lawyer honestly rather than relying on AI to infer or add unverified details. Similarly, if you have questions about a letter from Immigration New Zealand, the most effective approach is to give the original letter directly to your lawyer so they can advise you based on its actual contents and your particular circumstances. An accurate, truthful account for your lawyer is usually more valuable than a heavily AI-polished document that may alter the facts.

Use AI to organise information rather than create more of it

None of this means AI should never be used when dealing with legal matters. Used appropriately, it can be a very practical tool. For example, you can use AI to help organise a timeline, arrange disordered notes by date or turn a lengthy background account into a clearer summary. These approaches can help you explain events to your lawyer more effectively.

But using AI to organise information and using it to create more information are different things. The former may save time; the latter may increase the workload.

If you have written five hundred words and AI helps you reduce them to three hundred without changing the facts, that may be helpful. But if you have a question of just one hundred words and AI expands it into a three-thousand-word legal analysis, the result may be counterproductive. You should also consider confidentiality and privacy when using AI to organise legal documents or personal information. In particular, sensitive information involving employment records, immigration information, identity documents or confidential communications with your lawyer should not be casually entered into AI platforms whose credentials are unclear.

Before sending AI-generated documents, ask yourself whether they are really necessary

Do not assume you need to send everything to your lawyer simply because AI has written it for you. Read it carefully before sending it. Does your lawyer really need to know every detail? Has AI repeated the same questions? Has it added legal arguments you do not understand yourself? Does the content concern another country's laws? Has it made unverified assumptions about the facts? More importantly, does something that could be clearly explained in three paragraphs really need three pages?

Generating a lengthy analysis with AI may take you only seconds, but your lawyer still needs time to read it carefully, verify its accuracy, analyse the relevant legal issues and provide professional advice. Although AI reduces writing time, it does not necessarily produce a corresponding reduction in the time your lawyer needs to process that information.

How can you communicate more effectively with your lawyer?

In many cases, the simplest way of communicating is the most effective. You need only explain clearly what happened, provide important documents, flag any urgent deadlines, explain your concerns and say what help you would like. Your email does not need to read like a legal opinion.

You do not need to use AI to identify every possible legal argument before contacting a lawyer. If you have just been dismissed, a simple email may be enough for your lawyer to begin understanding the situation. For example, you could say that you were dismissed last Friday, that you believe the decision was unreasonable and that you have attached your employment agreement, relevant correspondence and dismissal notice. You would like help assessing whether you can raise a personal grievance and whether any immediate action is needed. This already provides clear background information, important documents and specific questions.

Your lawyer can use their professional judgement to decide what information is needed next. The purpose of engaging a lawyer is to have someone with specialist knowledge help analyse your legal issues, rather than first using AI to write a legal analysis and then paying a lawyer to check every point.

AI is fast, but professional judgement still takes time

AI has changed how quickly we produce information, but it has not changed the fundamental need for judgement and analysis in professional legal advice.

Lawyers still need to understand the facts, identify the issues that really matter, consider the applicable New Zealand law and advise you according to your particular circumstances. All of this takes time.

If your legal matter is billed by time, unnecessary information and additional analysis may translate into extra legal fees. So, before you send your lawyer five pages of AI-generated analysis based on a five-line question, ask yourself: does my lawyer really need to read these five pages? AI can certainly help us organise information more efficiently and communicate more clearly.

But having AI produce more text does not mean saving your lawyer more time. When you are paying for your lawyer's professional time, that distinction may be the difference between reducing your legal fees and increasing them.

About the author

Senior immigration lawyer at Queen City Law

Former immigration officer at Immigration New Zealand

With 15 years of litigation experience and experience as a former Immigration New Zealand immigration officer, he currently practises as an immigration lawyer at Queen City Law. After leaving Immigration New Zealand in 2015, he began focusing on immigration matters, offering sound professional advice on immigration and employment law issues from the perspectives of both applicants and the immigration officers assessing their cases.