Legal Brief Roundup: AI and privilege, women innovators and lawyers as NEDs

AI and legal privilege lead this roundup: the Upper Tribunal’s decision in Munir, now verified against the published judgment, warns that uploading confidential material to an open-source AI tool breaches confidentiality and may waive privilege. Also this week: three solicitors are among the winners of £75,000 Innovate UK awards, and a new Odgers report asks why fewer than 2% of UK board seats go to former lawyers.

What did the Upper Tribunal say about AI and privilege?

In Munir v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2026] UKUT 81 (IAC), a three-judge panel of the Upper Tribunal (Immigration and Asylum Chamber), exercising its Hamid jurisdiction over professional standards, considered two cases in which grounds cited authorities that did not exist. The immediate subject was hallucinated case law and the supervision of those responsible, one of whom accepted that he had pasted client emails and Home Office decision letters into ChatGPT. The tribunal observed that uploading confidential documents into an open-source AI tool places that information on the internet in the public domain, breaching client confidentiality and waiving legal privilege, conduct which might itself warrant referral to the SRA and the Information Commissioner’s Office.

Two limits deserve attention before firms rewrite policy around a single paragraph. The tribunal was not asked to decide whether privilege had actually been lost on the facts, and an Upper Tribunal decision does not bind the High Court, so several summaries circulating in the profession overstate its reach.

Read alongside our report on Bourlakova and the iniquity exception, the contrast is instructive: privilege held firm there against a deliberate attack, while Munir shows how casually it can be put at risk from inside a firm. The full decision is on the tribunal decisions service.

Three solicitors among Innovate UK’s £75,000 award winners

Innovate UK announced its largest Women in Innovation cohort on 5 August: 100 founders recognised, of whom 61 receive a £75,000 grant with 12 months of tailored business support, and a further 39 highly commended applicants receive the support package alone. Legal Futures reports that three of the recognised founders are solicitors, and the Law Society Gazette has profiled one of them, Rachel Roche of York firm Roche Legal, whose PetPact platform lets owners name a guardian and record care instructions for a pet alongside a will.

Since the awards launched in 2016 the programme has invested over £15m in 260 women innovators, and previous winners have gone on to raise a further £358m in funding and investment, which is a record worth knowing about for any practitioner sitting on a product idea. Details of the 2026 cohort are on the UKRI site.

Why aren’t more lawyers NEDs?

Boardrooms have built a structural blind spot around lawyers, according to Why Aren’t More Lawyers NEDs?, a report by Alex Hamilton-Baily and Mark Freebairn of executive search firm Odgers. Former lawyers occupy fewer than 2% of board seats, and the authors count only around half a dozen former-lawyer non-executive directors across more than 1,000 FTSE 100 positions. Having interviewed some 30 former lawyers who did make the transition, the authors conclude the gap is one of perception rather than capability: chairs and headhunters pigeonhole lawyers as technical and risk-averse, and job specifications demanding prior NED experience create a circular trap for candidates who, by definition, have none.

Their prescription runs in both directions, asking lawyers to broaden their experience through general counsel, managing partner or trustee roles while headhunters challenge their own filters. It lands close to the pressures we covered in our report on in-house lawyers and burnout, where breadth of role was part of the problem rather than the plan. The full report is published by Odgers.