Every law firm is using AI. Almost none can prove they supervised it. Countersigned runs AI-generated legal work through a five-layer supervision process that ends in an immutable audit record and a named solicitor's signature: the artefact a court, a regulator or an insurer can actually inspect.
Courts expect substantive human engagement with AI-assisted work, and the Upper Tribunal has held that using public AI tools on client matters can put legal professional privilege at risk. A read-through and a click do not meet the bar. Evidence of supervision does.
The SRA has been clear that the duty sits with the professional, and it has deliberately not prescribed the tool. Firms that can evidence a structured supervision process will be treated very differently from firms that cannot evidence anything at all.
Underwriters are already pricing AI-assisted work into claims expectations. A firm with no supervisory record of its AI use is a risk they cannot rate. A firm that produces a signed, auditable record for every matter is a risk they can.
AI has quietly crossed the threshold into routine professional use. Solicitors draft with it, check with it, research with it, and most of that work is excellent. What is missing is the supervisory artefact: the standardised, signed, auditable record of who reviewed the AI output, in what capacity, applying what judgement, to what effect.
Traditional file notes are retrospective and subjective. Email chains are fragmented and incomplete. Neither gives a firm anything it can hand an insurer at renewal or a regulator in response to a complaint. Every firm is improvising its own answer, and no two answers match.
The reason runs deeper than tooling. Professionals sell four things, and AI has only automated two of them.
The machine compresses it. Drafting that took a day takes minutes, and the market has already repriced it.
AI has won this market.The machine reproduces it at scale. The current generation of legal technology is a race to commoditise it.
AI has won this one too.Not a capability but a relationship: a person with a regulator over their shoulder and a duty that can be breached. No model can carry it.
What Countersigned protects.You can automate competence. You cannot automate the thing that earns you the right to be believed.
What Countersigned proves.The AI flags. The solicitor engages. The system challenges. The solicitor signs. The record seals. Every layer is documented and timestamped, and no layer can be skipped once countersigning begins.
Before any human review, the AI produces a structured audit of its own draft: confidence flags, every citation requiring verification against the primary source, risk factors, material assumptions, and the points a supervising solicitor should examine first. The risk terrain, mapped before the review begins.
Solicitor-led review against structured questions: who is this for, has it been read in full, what surprised you, what did you change and why, and does it reflect the advice you would have given independently. Amendments are instructed, incorporated and recorded.
System-led questions generated from the actual claims, citations and recommendations in the draft, never from a generic checklist. Layer 2 records that the solicitor engaged; Layer 3 tests the quality of that engagement. Together they evidence the meaningful review the courts and the SRA Code of Conduct contemplate.
The named individual, their SRA number, role, firm and firm authorisation number, recorded with an explicit confirmation: read, reviewed, approved, and full professional responsibility accepted. One authenticated act, attached to the file.
The countersign compliance document: the self-audit in full, both rounds of supervision, the sign-off, every amendment and any outstanding flags, with the complete transcript preserved as an immutable record. The document a solicitor can hand to a court or regulator and say: this is exactly what happened.
The AI companies are building the engines. The regulators are writing the rules. The professionals are exposed in the middle. Countersigned is the bridge none of them will build, and all of them need.
Chris Dias, founder
The capability layer will keep shifting for the next decade. The supervisory layer, designed properly, does not have to.
Countersigned stands as its own supervision layer over the AI tools your fee earners already use. It is how Lawyery, an SRA regulated firm, runs its AI-assisted work on real client matters: every output supervised through the five layers, every file carrying its compliance record.
Built for UK regulated practice first, where the bar is highest. The framework itself is jurisdiction-agnostic and travels with the common law.
Countersigned powers Control, the supervision agent in the NativeLaw platform: the final gate through which every piece of AI-assisted work passes before it reaches a client, with a named lawyer's sign-off on record.
Adopt it standalone from day one, or as the last stage of the full Brief, Opinion and Control suite as your firm converts, matter type by matter type.
Lived, then written. Written, then supervised. Supervised, then built. Built, then lived again. Countersigned is the third node in the loop: where the lessons of a working practice become a process a solicitor can sign.
An SRA regulated firm living the AI-native model on real matters, one matter type at a time.
lawyery.co → 02The manifesto and thesis: the idea itself, kept deliberately separate from the ventures so it can travel further.
professed.ai →A five-layer supervision process for AI-generated legal work, ending in an immutable record and a solicitor's signature.
you are hereThe supervision discipline built into infrastructure any regulated firm or legal team can adopt.
nativelaw.ai →Countersigned is in early access, built with regulatory specialists, practice managers and forward-thinking partners. If you are managing AI in your practice, or you want to see what defensible supervision looks like on a live file, we want to talk to you.