Garfield AI beat a solicitor-and-barrister team in open court last week. No equivalent firm is licensed in Australia, but the result arrives at a moment when local courts and firms are actively drawing lines around how AI is used
The opposing side had both a solicitor and a barrister. Garfield AI had a chatbot and a recently called junior advocate. Last month, at Wandsworth County Court in southwest London, Garfield won.
The case was a £7,000 small claims dispute over unpaid freelance fees. Garfield AI, a London firm that uses artificial intelligence to prepare legal claims without any human lawyer involvement, drafted every document for the three-hour trial, including witness statements, and engaged a human barrister only for the courtroom advocacy. The client, freelance HR consultant Tamires Camal Taquidir, paid approximately £400 for a service that the other side could not beat with a conventionally staffed legal team.
Founder Philip Young, a former City of London litigator, called it "a landmark moment, not just for Garfield AI, but for access to justice."
Garfield received approval from the Solicitors Regulation Authority in May 2025 — the first and still only AI-only firm licensed to provide regulated legal services in England and Wales. Nothing equivalent exists in Australia. The Law Council of Australia, which coordinates the nation's legal profession across state and territory jurisdictions, does not authorise legal entities, and no state or territory regulator has moved to approve an AI-only practice. The existing framework requires a human lawyer to hold the practising certificate behind any regulated legal service.
What Australian courts have been doing in the meantime is building procedural guardrails. The Victorian County Court issued a practice note on AI use for practitioners and judicial officers this month, requiring AI-produced content to be current, accurate and applicable to the relevant jurisdiction. The Victorian Supreme Court issued its own practice note and judicial guidelines in May, flagging possible sanctions for lawyers who cite unverified AI output. The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia published a practice direction on AI use in early June.
On the firm side, Clayton Utz became the first Australian law firm to secure ISO/IEC 42001 certification — the international standard for AI management systems — with AI head Simon Newcomb citing direct client demand for responsible AI use as the driver. MinterEllison appointed its first chief AI officer the same week, naming former Domain Group chief data officer Pooyan Asgari to lead the firm's AI integration.
The Garfield win landed the same week that Sullivan & Cromwell disclosed to a US federal bankruptcy court that a filing it had prepared contained multiple AI hallucinations, and weeks after UK firm Pinsent Masons was publicly reprimanded by a London court for submitting AI-drafted letters that twice misquoted insolvency legislation. The pattern is exactly what Victoria's new practice notes are designed to prevent.
The investment has not slowed. Kirkland & Ellis, the world's highest-grossing law firm, announced last month it is committing US$500m to build its own proprietary AI platform. Freshfields signed a deal with Anthropic in April. The direction globally is set, and Australian firms are moving with it — the governance question is how fast and on whose terms.
The Garfield result is harder to dismiss than the cautionary tales. SRA chief executive Paul Philip put it plainly when approving the firm last year: regulators "cannot afford to pull up the drawbridge on innovations that could have big public benefits." A freelancer with £400 just recovered £7,000 against a fully represented opponent. That arithmetic is difficult to argue against, and Australia has no shortage of disputes where legal costs make recovery uneconomic.
The Garfield model — AI preparation, human advocacy — does not map directly onto Australian regulatory structures. But the question it raises is one every jurisdiction will eventually have to answer: at what point does AI preparation of legal documents become the practice of law, and who is authorised to provide it? Australian regulators have not answered that yet. Last week's verdict makes the question harder to leave on the shelf.
