AI at the Bar: Using AI Responsibly on the Route to Pupillage and Practice

A practical guide to using AI well on the route to pupillage and practice, built by a practising barrister — second edition, September 2026.

Used well, AI is one of the most effective ways to test yourself, prepare for interview and push your work further than you could alone. It is not a replacement for your own thinking, and it will not rescue a rushed application. This guide shows you where the rules stand, where AI helps, and how to make it do the testing while you do the thinking.

Buy once, updated forever. Every future edition of this guide is included — when the guidance changes, your copy changes with it, at no extra cost.

Written to the current position

The guide works from the sources themselves, and every one is linked: the Pupillage Gateway Applicant User Guide (Version 4.0, December 2025), the BSB's guidance on the use of AI (valid from 18 May 2026), the Bar Council's considerations on generative AI (last reviewed November 2025), and the recent judgments on false citations, confidentiality and privilege.

Inside you'll find:

• The rules you are working within, including why you need to read the AI policy of every set you apply to
• Where AI helps: learning the law, researching a set, mock interviews in voice mode, advocacy practice and keeping your application plan on track
• Eighteen prompts written out in full across five areas, each with what it is for and how to judge the answer
• A verification routine for checking every authority in a primary source
• What must never go into a public AI tool, and how to upload a judgment or your CV, or connect your calendar, sensibly
• How to answer when chambers ask you about AI, and a checklist to run before you submit

Built to navigate

The PDF is bookmarked, every line of the contents page is clickable, and every source is hyperlinked, so you can go straight from a point in the guide to the guidance or judgment behind it.

Who it's for

Law students, Bar course students and pupillage applicants who want to use AI to prepare properly, and junior practitioners who want a clear picture of the professional position before using these tools on real work.

Second edition, September 2026 — a 14-page PDF, delivered as an instant digital download.

This guide is general information, not legal advice, and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or produced in conjunction with the Bar Standards Board, the Bar Council, the Pupillage Gateway, OpenAI, Google or Anthropic. ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and their logos, are trademarks of their respective owners and are shown only to identify the tools the guide discusses. The rules and the tools both change, so always check the Applicant User Guide for your own application cycle, the AI policy of each set you apply to, and the current version of each source.