Artificial Intelligence: New Table Released

In recent years, AI has gone from being a much-hyped if slippery concept to an everyday tool, and presence, in the lives of millions. It is now suffused in all areas of life, and so increasingly all disciplines of law, while still novel enough to not yet really have a legal discipline of its own.

For the 2026 edition of the Chambers Guide, we have taken a tentative and perhaps somewhat conservative approach. Only seven people feature in this table, which is a spotlight table assembling people ranked in disparate if thematically related categories of the Chambers UK Guide. It is not stratified into bands.  

For this inaugural table, we have chosen to build on our Global Guide’s Global Market Leaders: Artificial Intelligence table, taking the UK-based entries as a base from which to conduct our own research. For the most part we have concentrated on people involved in working directly with leading AI models. We have based our research on submissions for TMT-related submissions and recommendations from people already noted in the Global Market Leaders table. AI work may not be the mainstay of the featured lawyers’ practices, since that will only be the case for a handful of people, mostly based in the US. 

At time of launch, the UK lacks a comprehensive, singular regulatory framework for AI. This is true also of the USA, although existing federal initiatives and state-level regulations are multiplying and gaining traction. The EU AI Act, which established a unified, risk-based regulatory framework has already begun phased implementation as of 2025. The UK’s lack of AI regulation naturally limits the extent to which we can speak of AI law expertise in this country; the current Government is working on a comprehensive AI Bill to address copyright, safety and civil liberties. For the time being, laws on data protection (GDPR), copyright, competition and human rights apply, however imperfectly. Most work we are seeing concerning AI is advisory, although the Stability AI vs Getty Images High Court trial in June of this year litigated questions of copyright, database rights and trademark law and whether AI models trained on protected IP constitutes infringement. We await a ruling at time of launch. 

We at the Chambers & Partners UK Guide have taken a cautious approach to this initial recognition of individual lawyers’ AI work. We expect it to give rise to productive suggestions as to how we can better recognise the leading legal practitioners working at the coalface of a fast-moving and protean technological revolution. For the next cycle of Chambers UK research, we are not opening the table to submissions and referees. Rather, we will build on our research by interviewing leading practitioners known to us and leads from dynamic AI companies. A more journalistic approach is more appropriate given the novelty and complexity the subject. That said, we expect the table to grow significantly from one year to the next and will endeavour to open the table to submissions once it is better established. 

For now, we recommend that firms seeking to highlight individual lawyers with growing AI specialisms promote their work front and centre in submissions for categories such as Data Protection & Information Law, IP, IT & Outsourcing, Media & Entertainment and Telecommunications.