Reviewing AI legal work takes about the twenty minutes you would give a trainee's note. Read it in a fixed order: open questions first, then the files it read, then the summary against the action items, then the authorities and their verdicts. Follow one verified link by hand. Then sign, amend or send it back for another run. The order matters more than the speed.
Read the open questions first
The open questions sit near the end of the memo. Read them before anything else. They are what the run could not settle: on a contract review, the things the agreement does not say or says in two places differently; on a research run, the point where the authorities ran out. What the machine did not know is where your risk is.
Each open question takes a typed answer, and answering some of them starts a refined run that folds your answers back into the work. Answer the two you can settle from the file, start the refined run, and read the rest of the memo while it works.
Check the file list
Look at what it read. A memo grounded on the wrong four documents is worse than no memo, because it is coherent: it will reason correctly from the superseded draft and reach a conclusion you can follow all the way to the wrong answer.
Three checks, quickly. Confirm the executed version is there rather than a draft. Confirm the side letter is there. Confirm nothing in the list belongs to a different matter. If the list is wrong, stop reading, fix the matter's documents, and run it again.
Read the summary against the action items
Read the summary, then the action items, then ask whether the second follows from the first. The action items are the memo's operative part: each has a tick box, because the product will not treat an item as agreed until a person has agreed it.
The failure to look for is a summary that identifies a problem and action items that do not address it, or action items that address something the summary never raised. Tick what you accept and leave the rest. An unticked item is a live instruction to whoever picks the matter up next.
Read the verdicts as a work list
The authorities table lists every authority the memo relies on with a verdict against each. Read not found first: the check looked and could not locate that authority on any allowed source, and this is the verdict a fabricated case earns. The reason every firm now looks for it is Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank, decided by the Divisional Court in June 2025.
Needs a check means the check could not confirm the authority and would not guess. Treat each one as fifteen minutes of somebody's time, and decide whose. Verified means the four deterministic gates passed against a source on the allow-list. It does not mean the case is good law and it does not mean it supports the proposition the way the memo uses it, because there is no citator behind the verdict.
Spot-check one verified authority, by hand, every time
Pick one authority marked verified, click the link, and read the passage. Do this on every memo you sign, including the twentieth. It takes under a minute. A checker you never test is a checker you do not know, and the value of the whole verdict column rests on your having tested it recently enough to have an opinion.
Vary which one you pick: the most-cited authority on one memo, an obscure one on the next, a statutory section on the one after. If you only ever test the easy case you have learned nothing about the hard one.
Sign, amend or re-run
Three outcomes, reached in the same session. Sign it, with your amendments, exporting to Word to edit there; the product produces the file, it does not live inside it. Amend it, if the substance is right and the expression is not. Re-run it, if the file list was wrong or the open questions go to the heart of the question.
If your firm has turned on 'hold work with a failed authority', the share and the export are both blocked while the memo cites an authority we checked and could not confirm. Nothing in the product changes who is accountable: the fee-earner and the supervising solicitor answer for the work that leaves the firm, exactly as they did before. The SRA Risk Outlook report on the use of artificial intelligence in the legal market, published in November 2023, addresses the supervision of these tools.