The UK Jurisdiction Taskforce has published a legal statement concluding that existing English private law, principally contract and the law of negligence, is sufficient to determine liability for non-deliberate harms arising from artificial intelligence.
Released on or around 7 July 2026, the document addresses whether a professional can be found liable in negligence for failing to use an AI system where a reasonable professional of comparable standing or specialism would have deployed it in the same circumstances. This positions market incentives for efficiency and productivity as the primary driver of adoption across the legal sector, rather than top-down mandates.
Reasonable professional standard
The statement applies the ordinary test of breach of duty. It supplies concrete examples. A solicitor reviewing documents in the Business and Property Courts, a radiologist screening for tumours, and an auditor performing anomaly detection could each face liability if they omitted AI tools that peers in their position would reasonably employ.
Such an approach maintains human accountability at the centre. Professionals remain personally responsible for exercising judgment. AI functions as a tool under oversight, not an autonomous substitute that diminishes the dignity of individual decision-making or the independence of the courts.
We have reached the view that providing remedies for AI harms does not require a new liability regime, and that English law’s existing approach to legal liability already provides a coherent framework for analysing where responsibility should fall. While some factual scenarios may throw up difficulties, English law has long been capable of rising to the challenges of novel technologies, and we consider that it will be able to do so in relation to AI.
The words belong to Matthew Lavy KC, who chaired the drafting committee. His assessment underscores a preference for organic evolution of common-law principles over bespoke statutory intervention.
Improper use and due diligence
Liability can also arise from the manner in which AI is deployed. The statement identifies several failures that could ground a claim: inadequate due diligence on the chosen tool, absence of proper explanation to the client about its role, failure to verify outputs for errors or bias, and lapses in securing client data within AI systems.