How to Review an AI Drafted Legal Notice

A legal notice is a commitment. Once it goes out under your firm's name it fixes the client's position, starts clocks running, and can be read back to you in court. An AI draft makes this harder to police, not easier, because the prose is confident even where the instruction behind it was thin. The model fills gaps with plausible language, and plausible language is exactly what a hurried reviewer waves through.

The goal of review is not to polish the sentences. It is to find the places where the draft asserts more than the client actually told you.

Read the instruction before you read the draft

Put the source material next to the draft: the client's email or note, the contract or correspondence being complained about, and any documents supplied. Read those first. Only then read the notice. If you read the notice first, its framing colours how you read everything else, and you will unconsciously accept its version of events.

As you read, list four things the notice must get exactly right:

• The intended recipient, including correct name, capacity, and address for service.
• The requested action and the deadline attached to it.
• The factual basis for each assertion.
• The remedy or consequence threatened if the recipient does not comply.

Trace every factual claim to a source

Go sentence by sentence through the recitals. For each asserted event — a payment that was due, a breach that occurred, a date on which something happened — mark where that fact comes from. If it comes from a document, note the page or clause. If it comes from a conversation, note who said it and when. Any assertion you cannot trace is either an inference the model made or a fact only the client can confirm. Flag both; do not send either without approval.

Check the demands and the consequences separately

Notices go wrong most often in the operative part. The model may soften or harden a demand, invent a cure period, or threaten a consequence the client has not authorised. Confirm the requested relief matches instructions, the timeline is one the client can actually hold to, and any threatened step — termination, proceedings, referral — is one the client is genuinely prepared to take. A threat you are not willing to carry out weakens every future notice.

Verify anything legal the draft leans on

If the draft cites a clause, a statutory provision, or a limitation period, open the primary source and confirm it. AI models paraphrase legal provisions convincingly and still get the effect wrong. Where a deadline or authority actually matters to the notice, the responsible lawyer should verify it against a current, authoritative text rather than the model's summary.

Keep an annotated copy until it is signed off

Until the notice is approved, keep a working copy that carries your margin notes: source references, open questions, and the points still awaiting client confirmation. This annotated version is what makes the sign-off meaningful and what lets someone else pick up the file if you are away. When the notice is finalised, the clean version goes out and the annotated copy stays on the matter as a record of how it was checked.

Reviewing an AI notice well takes a fraction of the time it takes to draft one from scratch — but only if the review is structured. The model gives you speed. The structure is what keeps the speed from becoming a liability. In Juniorlawyer, a draft stays linked to the material it was built from, so this kind of source-by-source check is a matter of reading across the same workspace rather than hunting through separate files.