The Law Society of Ireland launched its Essentials in Practice Toolkit at Blackhall Place on 28 April 2026. Acuity AI contributed the AI section. Here is what it covers — and what Irish legal practices should be doing with it.
On 28 April 2026, the Law Society of Ireland launched its Essentials in Practice Toolkit at Blackhall Place in Dublin. The Toolkit is a practical collection of templates, guides, and resources designed to support the day-to-day running of a modern legal practice — covering AI, people management, processes, compliance, and risk.
Acuity AI Advisory contributed the AI section. What follows is a plain-language account of what it covers and why the timing matters for every Irish legal practice.
What the Toolkit is
The Essentials in Practice Toolkit is not another guidance document. The Law Society has framed it deliberately as a working resource — something a solicitor or practice manager can open on a Monday morning and apply immediately, not something to read once and file away.
The AI workbook within it addresses the specific questions that come up repeatedly when legal practices start taking AI seriously: what tools are actually running in the practice right now, whether the firm has a policy that maps to professional obligations, and where AI can legitimately help without creating a compliance or confidentiality problem.
The five areas the AI workbook covers are:
- Knowing what is in your practice — surfacing every AI tool in use, including informal and shadow use, and mapping data exposures by tool type
- Getting compliant — policy frameworks that map to the Law Society's December 2025 AI guidance and solicitors' existing professional obligations
- Using AI better in practice — governance-approved use patterns by practice area, with verification requirements and disclosure guidance
- Building practice readiness — assessing whether workflows and data are actually in a state where AI will add value, rather than accelerating existing problems
- Staying current — structured approaches to tracking regulatory change, Law Society guidance updates, and EU AI Act enforcement developments
The Professional Obligations Frame
The single most important framing decision in the AI workbook is this: AI does not create new professional obligations for solicitors. It maps onto existing ones.
Duty of competence means understanding AI well enough to supervise its use. Confidentiality obligations extend to what happens when client data enters an AI tool — whether that tool is a standalone product or an AI feature embedded in software the firm already uses. The duty not to mislead applies fully to AI-generated content in court submissions. Human verification is not optional good practice; it is required.
This framing matters because the alternative — treating AI governance as a separate compliance exercise — creates a compliance programme that sits alongside the practice rather than inside it. The Law Society's December 2025 guidance takes the same position, and the toolkit is built on it.
The EU AI Act Dimension
The August 2026 enforcement deadline for Ireland's AI regulatory framework is not a background consideration for legal practices. It is a live operational matter.
The Ireland Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Bill 2026, published in February, establishes thirteen sectoral regulators — with the Legal Services Regulatory Authority the relevant body for the legal profession. Practices that use AI systems in employment decisions, client risk assessment, or document review may already be operating systems that fall into the high-risk classification requiring conformity assessments and human oversight mechanisms.
The Toolkit's AI workbook builds in the classification question: for each tool in use, what risk tier applies under the Act, and what does that require of the practice?
What Irish Solicitors Should Do With This
The Toolkit is available to all Law Society members. The starting point is the AI usage audit — building a complete inventory of every AI tool in use across the practice, including AI features embedded in platforms the firm already uses. Most practices are surprised by how many there are.
From there, the policy framework: does the firm have a written AI use policy, signed off by management, that maps to the Law Society's guidance? If not, that is the single most disproportionate risk reduction available at the moment — particularly for practices with employed solicitors, where the supervision obligations extend to AI use.
A survey of attendees at the launch event is instructive: 56% said they occasionally use AI, 25% use it regularly, and the remainder are still uncertain. That distribution — a majority dabbling without a governance framework in place — is exactly the gap the AI workbook is designed to close.
The August 2026 enforcement deadline means this is not a next-year problem. For practices that want structured support beyond what the Toolkit provides — including EU AI Act risk classification, policy development, and readiness review — that work needs to start now.
The Toolkit is here: lawsociety.ie Essentials in Practice
Coverage: Law Society Gazette, April 2026