Written by: Wiktor Stefański, Head of People & Operations, Digital Colliers
The line getting cited in every legal AI panel this quarter is simple. Purely AI-generated output does not attract copyright protection in the EU. That position is not new law, but it is now being repeated by regulators, academics, and in-house counsel with enough consistency that clients are starting to ask about it. And once a general counsel asks, a partner-level assurance that "we use AI carefully" stops being enough.
What clients actually want is a per-deliverable answer. Which paragraphs did a human author? Which came from a model? Which were model-drafted and then materially edited by a named lawyer? Firms that cannot answer this at the section level are going to lose work to firms that can.
Why partner-level assurance is not the unit anymore
The copyright question is downstream of a bigger shift. The EU AI Act's Article 50 transparency obligations apply from 2 August 2026, and high-risk system obligations follow on 2 December 2027. Between those two dates, disclosure of AI involvement in client-facing content moves from best practice to something clients will contractually require. The UK sits alongside this. The Solicitors Regulation Authority published its AI guidance in November 2023 and has been steadily expanding what "competent supervision" of AI-assisted work means.
Meanwhile the risk floor keeps rising. The Stanford tracker maintained by Damien Charlotin logged AI-fabricated citations in court filings jumping from 87 cases to over 1,300 in eleven months during 2024. Judges are noticing. Clients are reading the coverage. And the ABA's Formal Opinion 512 in 2024 made clear that lawyers cannot bill hours that AI actually saved, which means the billing narrative and the provenance narrative now have to line up.
A blanket engagement letter clause saying "we may use AI tools" does not survive any of this. You need the record at the deliverable level.
What provenance by section actually looks like
Think of it as three artefacts that travel with every matter, not one.
- A matter intake note that records which AI tools are approved for this client, which are prohibited, and what data classification applies. Some clients will forbid any third-party model touching their material. Some will allow it under a specific vendor. This is a client-by-client answer.
- A drafting log kept by the fee-earner. For each substantive section of the deliverable, one of four tags: human-drafted, AI-drafted and materially rewritten, AI-drafted and lightly edited, or AI-drafted and used verbatim. The tag is the fee-earner's own attestation, not the tool's output.
- A hand-off checklist reviewed by a supervising lawyer before the deliverable leaves the firm. This is where citation checks, confidentiality checks, and the billing reconciliation happen together.
The reason to separate these three is that they answer three different questions. Intake answers "were we allowed to use this tool." The log answers "what did the human contribute." The checklist answers "is this safe to send."
Client-facing disclosure language
Most firms are overthinking the wording. The disclosure clients want is short and specific. Something like: "Sections 2 and 4 of this memo were drafted with AI assistance and reviewed by the named associate. Section 3 was human-drafted. All citations were manually verified." That is it. You are not asking the client to consent to anything novel. You are giving them the record they can hand to their own compliance function.
Where this gets harder is code and marketing assets. If the deliverable is a piece of software or a campaign, the sectioning is less obvious. The pattern that seems to work: track provenance per file for code, and per creative asset for marketing. Verbatim AI output in either category is where the EU copyright gap actually bites, because the client cannot then license or enforce against that output as their own.
The hard deadline and what to do before it
2 August 2026 is the date to work backwards from. That gives firms roughly the standard budget cycle to get the intake note, the drafting log, and the hand-off checklist into the matter management system, and to train fee-earners on the tagging. Firms that wait until Q2 2026 will be retrofitting under pressure while clients are already asking for the disclosures in RFP responses.
The firms getting ahead of this are not building anything exotic. They are treating provenance as a documentation discipline, the same way conflicts checks and time recording are documentation disciplines. Boring, repeatable, and defensible when someone asks.