The Solicitors Regulation Authority has rewritten its supervision guidance and expanded it from nine pages to twenty-four, and the direction of the change is worth reading closely if your firm uses AI.
A regulator rarely trebles the length of a document without a reason. When the SRA gives a subject more room, it is signalling that the subject has grown in importance and that the shorter treatment no longer does the job. Supervision has become one of those subjects, and the reason is not hard to find. The way work is produced inside a firm has changed, and the oversight that sits around it has to change with it.
What the guidance now says
The scale of the expansion tells you something on its own. Guidance that ran to nine pages now runs to twenty-four, which is the regulator devoting far more attention to how firms oversee the work they produce. The core statement is plain. Firms can use AI tools to support their work, and the regulator does not stand in the way of that. What the guidance insists on is that an authorised individual must remain accountable for the process and for the work produced. The tool assists. The named person answers for the result.
What real supervision looks like
The difference the guidance draws is between supervision that is real and supervision that is nominal. Nominal supervision is a name on a file and a signature at the end, with no genuine check in between. Real supervision is a person who has looked at the work, understood what the tool did, and satisfied themselves that the output is right before it goes anywhere.
Turning that into practice asks for a few things a firm can put in place without much difficulty. Give every piece of AI-assisted work a named owner, so that responsibility is never left to drift. Require sign-off before anything leaves the firm, so that the check happens at the point it matters rather than after a complaint. And keep a record that shows a person checked the work, because the ability to demonstrate supervision is what turns a private habit into something you can put in front of the regulator.
The word the guidance keeps returning to is accountable, and it is worth being precise about what that asks. Accountability is not the same as blame after the event. It means that at the moment the work is done, a specific authorised person is answerable for it, and that person knew they were answerable and acted accordingly. A tool that drafts, summarises or researches does not carry that weight and never will. The obligation rests where it always has, on the person the client and the court can name.
What a firm should do
Read the expanded guidance against how your firm works now, and be honest about the gap. If AI-assisted work passes through the firm without a named owner and a real check, the guidance has told you where the exposure sits. Set up the ownership, the sign-off and the record, and make each of them a routine part of the file rather than an extra step people skip when they are busy. Supervision that exists only on paper is the thing the regulator has moved to close off, and a small firm can close it off first.
The advantage a smaller firm holds here is that the chain of responsibility is short. In a practice of a handful of people, the supervisor knows the work, knows the staff, and can put a real check in place without building a committee to run it. What the guidance now asks for is within reach of any firm willing to write down who owns what and to hold to it. Doing that before a complaint or an inspection turns a regulatory expectation into a simple matter of routine.
The guidance itself is in the SRA's guidance library.
If the new guidance names duties your supervision arrangements do not yet meet, we close that gap with firms in a day: start with a conversation.