AI-generated correspondence is reaching in-house legal teams in volume, and none of the lawyers who answer it expect the flow to ease. That finding runs through From AI Adoption to AI Advantage, a report by Carlo Salizzo and David Kirton, technology partners at Dentons Ireland in Dublin, which Legal Futures reported on 28 October 2026.
The report rests on interviews with in-house legal and compliance leaders at Irish and international companies, among them eir, Mastercard, Gilead Sciences and Flipdish. It is not a survey of English firms or their clients, and it puts no number on the volume. Anyone who acts for a small employer, a landlord or a business with a complaints line will still recognise what it describes.
What the in-house lawyers described
The report's executive summary says AI-assisted drafting now seems to touch most of the disputes, subject access requests, grievances and customer complaints these teams receive. Polished text costs the sender almost nothing to produce, so the letters arrive longer and more often. The law often obliges a legal team to answer such a letter point by point, the report notes, even where only one or two points carry substance, and it describes a second lengthy reply landing twenty minutes after the first.
The cost lies in the sorting rather than the reading. The general counsel at eir told the authors that the team ends up working out, line by line, what is relevant. At Flipdish, the vice president of people and legal expects grievances written wholly or partly by AI to keep coming, long and framed in legally sophisticated language, and says HR will need a more legally informed eye to deal with them. Kirton warns of the risk that genuine voices and genuine issues get drowned out by AI-generated arguments that are exaggerated or not based on fact.
Where it reaches a small firm
Your commercial and employment clients have no in-house team. When a long grievance or a subject access request built with a chatbot lands on a fifteen-person business, the owner forwards it to you and asks what to do. The same letters reach your own desk from litigants in person, as set out in what an AI-assisted litigant in person changes. They also come from clients unhappy with your service, where the Legal Ombudsman found signs of AI in about half the complaint files it reviewed, covered in AI-assisted complaints, and how your firm should reply.
Dentons has answered the trend by offering its clients a managed service for high-volume complaints, staffed and priced for the step up in volume. Nothing stops a small firm offering the same thing at its own scale.
What to offer, and how to run it
Start with a fixed-fee triage for any long letter a client receives. The first task is to separate the points that carry legal weight from the rest, and to diary the deadlines, which run whoever drafted the letter. A subject access request is different in kind, because the client must answer it with the personal data within one month of receipt, whatever the letter argues. That period extends by up to two further months only where the request is complex or the requester has made several, and the client must tell the requester within the first month. For a grievance or a complaint, tell the client in writing which points need a full answer and which a sentence will dispose of, and price the reply on that basis.
Do not answer volume with volume. Sergey Kinchin, senior counsel at Uniphar, described five colleagues bringing six AI-generated opinions to one call on a question touching a regulatory issue, and the attempt to reconcile them left the AI confused. A reply your firm drafts with AI needs the same review as any other piece of advice, and the report found that clients now expect a firm to show how a person checked the output.
Watch what the tools cost you while you do this work. Cornelius Grossmann, global head of solutions development at Dentons, expects the move to consumption-based pricing to raise AI costs between two and five times within two years, the change explained in what AI consumption pricing means for your firm. Build that into the fixed fee before you quote it.
Dentons publishes From AI Adoption to AI Advantage as a free PDF of 31 pages that opens without registration, and Legal Futures reported its findings on 28 October 2026.
If you want to set up a triage service for the AI-drafted letters your clients receive, talk it through with us.
