You have been handed a login and told to get on with it. AI for paralegals in the UK works best when you start narrow. On day one, open one real matter and ask a question you already know the answer to. Then build from there: a matter-grounded question, an authorities table, a review grid, and a deliverable your supervising solicitor can sign. Nothing in this week makes you less necessary. It makes your judgement more visible.
Day one: one matter, one question you already know the answer to
Open a real matter, with the client name, reference, responsible partner, practice area and jurisdiction filled in. When a matter opens, a conflict check runs automatically against names across other matters, parties and documents, which is worth seeing once so it does not surprise you later. Add three or four documents, not thirty.
Then ask something you already know the answer to: the completion date, the notice period, who the counterparty's guarantor is. If the answer is right, you have learned what a right answer looks like here. If it is wrong, you have learned that on a question with no consequences. Never calibrate a new tool on a question you cannot mark.
Day two: ask the matter, not the internet
An NDA and a set of board minutes were added to the same matter, and the question was plain: what is wrong with this NDA. The answer came back as a clause-level list. Among the items was a governing law and jurisdiction clause pointing to Singapore. On its own, that is a drafting observation. What made it a finding was the second half: the board minutes recorded the transaction as an English-law deal, at item 4, and the answer put the two side by side and flagged the mismatch.
Paste the clause into a general assistant and you would get a sound description of a Singapore jurisdiction clause, but not the mismatch, because the assistant never saw the minutes. That is the argument for working inside a matter. Your job is to notice the finding came from a cross-reference, then read minute 4 yourself.
Day three: authorities and verdicts
Ask a research question. The answer arrives with an authorities table, each authority carrying verified, needs a check or not found, and a 'Where we looked' panel listing the searches that were run. Every authority passes four deterministic gates: match-set, quote-verbatim, confidence-floor and closed-world-URL. The tool is only permitted to cite from the closed world of 74 approved domains, 44 UK and Irish, 18 EU and ECHR, 12 treaty and international, including legislation.gov.uk, BAILII, Find Case Law, EUR-Lex and the FCA, ICO and SRA handbooks. Ten paywalled domains are refused by name, among them Westlaw, Practical Law, Lexis, Bloomberg Law, Justis and vLex.
Pick one authority marked verified and follow the link. Read the quoted passage that produced the verdict, and ask whether the proposition is genuinely supported by it, or merely adjacent to it. Not found is the failure mode these verdicts are built against, and the reason every firm now looks for it is the Divisional Court's June 2025 judgment in Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank.
Day four: the review grid
Open the Document Review grid. Documents go in as rows, questions across as columns. Five seeded playbooks, NDA, MSA, M&A due diligence, lease abstraction and employment, mean you do not have to invent the questions. Pick the one closest to your bundle and run it over eight or ten documents, not the whole data room.
Each cell can be opened: a filled cell shows a 'Verified against source' chip with the quote it came from and a link into the document. Then read down a column rather than across a row. Ten assignment clauses in a vertical line, nine of them roughly the same, and the tenth is your afternoon. Reading across a row tells you about one document. Reading down a column tells you about the deal.
Day five: the deliverable
Run an agent on the matter. Before you run it, set 'Prepare for' to the audience: an Executive Brief for a partner, a Work-Stream Memo for the team, a Client Update, a Court-Ready OSCOLA output, or a Regulator Response. What comes back is a memo, not a chat: a summary, a list of files it read, action items you tick to confirm, open questions whose answers feed a refined run, an authorities table with verdicts, and a 'How this was made' section. Download the Word file.
Then write the note that makes you useful, three or four lines in your own words about which authorities you checked, which support the proposition directly, which is narrower than the memo suggests, and which you have not resolved. A supervising solicitor reading that knows precisely where to spend their time. That note is the work product. The memo is the raw material.
What a paralegal should never do with it
Do not send output to a client without a supervising solicitor reading it first: the deliverable is a draft until somebody qualified signs it. Do not treat a verified verdict as advice; verified means the citation resolved to a real source containing the quoted words, and says nothing about whether the authority is still good law.
Do not paste privileged or client-confidential material anywhere outside the firm's own account, because the controls here apply to work done inside the matter. And do not use it to skip reading the document the matter turns on: read that clause with your own eyes, and use the tool on the other forty documents to buy yourself the time. Credits are firm-level, and when the firm runs low only an admin can buy more.
What this does not do
It does not connect to iManage, NetDocuments or SharePoint; those appear as tiles and documents are added directly. It does not work inside Word: there is no add-in and no redlining, and you edit the Word file yourself. It does not cover US, Canadian or Australian law; the verified sources are UK and EU.
It does not give you ethical walls, only restricted matters and conflict redaction, which your COLP will want described accurately. It does not give advice, and it does not supervise. You still need a solicitor for both. At the end of the week you can say, precisely, what was checked, and very few people in the building can do that yet.