If your employment legal costs haven’t dropped in the last two years, it’s worth asking a simple question: is your law firm using AI?
Not in a vague, aspirational sense. Not in the way that means a junior associate pasted something into ChatGPT and then spent three hours billing you to tidy it up. Actually using AI — in a structured, disciplined way — to deliver employment law support faster, and at a cost that reflects the genuine time involved.
Because here is the uncomfortable truth: the technology exists right now for lawyers, using all their experience and knowledge, to produce a first-class draft settlement agreement, employment contract, or HR policy in a fraction of the time it used to take. If the savings from that efficiency aren’t showing up in your invoices, someone else may be benefiting from them. And it isn’t you.
The Old Model Was Built on Slow
Traditional employment law billing was structured around time. A senior lawyer would take instructions, pass work to a junior, the junior would draft, the senior would review, and the clock would tick throughout. That model had a logic to it when drafting genuinely was laborious — when researching precedents meant hours in legal databases, and when producing a clean document required multiple rounds of revision.
That logic is now largely gone for routine employment law work. AI-assisted drafting doesn’t replace the judgment of an experienced employment solicitor. What it does is collapse the mechanical part of the process — the part that used to justify putting a junior on the file for half a day — into minutes. The solicitor’s expertise still applies. The time it takes to apply it is dramatically reduced.
If your law firm is absorbing that efficiency gain rather than passing it on, you are effectively subsidising their profit margin.
“But We Have a Good Relationship With Our Solicitors”
This is the most common response, and it’s a fair one. Long-standing legal relationships have real value. Your solicitors know your business, your risk appetite, your history. That context matters, particularly when things get complicated.
But here’s what that argument doesn’t address: do you need your trusted solicitor to draft a standard settlement agreement for a departing employee? Or to review and update your disciplinary procedure? Or to produce a contract for a new starter? These are routine documents. They don’t require years of accumulated knowledge about your organisation. They require competence, care, and an up-to-date understanding of employment law.
Using a traditional firm for that work, at traditional rates, is a bit like hiring a Michelin-starred chef to make a sandwich. The sandwich will be fine. It will also be expensive in a way that isn’t entirely justified by what’s on the plate.
What Fixed-Fee AI-Augmented Legal Support Actually Looks Like
The model we operate at EmploymentSolicitor.com is straightforward. For documents like settlement agreements, COT3s, employment contracts, and policies, AI does the heavy lifting on the initial draft — using our carefully built playbook – replacing the junior lawyer’s role in the process. A senior employment solicitor then reviews, refines, and signs off the document. You get the quality assurance of qualified legal oversight, at a price that reflects the actual time involved.
There is no clock running. You know the fee before work starts. And the solicitor responsible for the document is always a specialist — not a generalist who dabbles in employment law between conveyancing files.
For more complex matters, written advice, or employment tribunal support, the same principle applies: fixed fee, agreed in advance, delivered by an experienced employment solicitor.
The Question Worth Asking
You don’t need to abandon your current legal relationships to start getting better value for routine employment law work. Use your existing solicitors for the matters where that relationship genuinely adds value, and use us for everything else.
But if you’ve never questioned whether your employment legal spend reflects the current state of legal technology, now is a reasonable time to start. The firms that are still billing you the old way aren’t necessarily providing better service. They may simply not have changed.
AI speed. Solicitor judgment. One fixed fee. That’s what employment law support should look like in 2026.
If you’d like to find out what that means in practice, book a free discovery call with us today.
