AI for law firms in Saudi Arabia: where it helps, where it stops, and the review every draft needs

AI for law firms in Saudi Arabia is useful for first drafts of contracts, memoranda and letters, for keeping Arabic and English versions aligned, and for a first pass through long files and research. It stops where the work has to be true, current and signed: the facts, the client's requests, deadlines, every cited article, and the Arabic text the court reads. Those stay with the licensed lawyer, whether your team drafts in Riyadh, Dubai or London.

This article is general information, not legal advice. Check your firm's obligations against the current text of the law and its implementing regulations.

AI for law firms in Saudi Arabia: what has changed, what hasn't

Saudi Arabia's General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT) found that 43.9% of establishments in "professional activities" used AI technologies in 2025 [1], up from 39.2% in 2024 [2]. The category covers far more than law firms; GASTAT publishes no law-firm figure.

Litigation has moved online. Saudi courts held more than 2.3 million sessions in 2024, 98% of them remotely through the Ministry of Justice's e-litigation service, which covers exchanging memoranda and submitting documents. Najiz, the Ministry's e-services platform, has a portal for lawyers [3]. When pleadings travel as files, little stands between a draft and the court record except the lawyer's review.

The duties have not moved. The Law of Legal Practice (نظام المحاماة) appears in Arabic, with its amendments, on laws.boe.gov.sa, where the Bureau of Experts at the Council of Ministers publishes the official texts of Saudi laws [4]. It requires a lawyer to practise "in accordance with Sharia and applicable laws" (Article 11) and forbids disclosing client secrets (Article 23) [5]. The Saudi Data & AI Authority (SDAIA) states in its generative AI guideline that "it is users' responsibility to verify the content generated by GenAI" [6, §5.3].

We found no guidance from the Saudi Ministry of Justice or the Saudi Bar Association written specifically for lawyers' use of AI (checked 29 September 2026).

Using AI in law practice: a task-by-task map

In the table below, Draft means AI writes a first version. Assist means AI reads, lists or summarises, and nothing is quoted from it. Lawyer only means AI stays out.

First drafts of contracts, memoranda and letters

Drafting works best from the firm's own templates and clause library, because the draft inherits a structure the firm already trusts. Give the tool the documents from the file itself, so the draft works from the record. The lawyer's time then moves from typing to the parts that carry risk: the facts, the requests and every citation.

Arabic and English versions of the same document

Many clients, and many foreign parent companies, read English; the court reads Arabic. AI does well at keeping defined terms, names and figures aligned across both versions, and at flagging a clause that appears in only one. It cannot decide which version governs if they differ: the lawyer makes that choice and states it in the document.

Where it stops: four failure points in Saudi practice

Each of these can reach a court file unnoticed unless the review is built to catch it.

1. AI hallucination in legal research: invented and misapplied articles

An AI hallucination is a confident statement that is false. SDAIA warns that models can "over-confidently generate 'facts' that are complete fiction" [6, §5.3].

Specialist tools are not immune. In a study first published in 2024, Stanford RegLab found that legal research tools from LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters "each hallucinate between 17% and 33% of the time" [7]. Those were US tools answering US legal questions; we found no comparable study for Saudi law or for Arabic. The study also counts as a hallucination any response that "falsely asserts that a source supports a statement" [7, §4.3]. That misgrounded citation is the harder error to catch, because the reference opens and looks right.

The AI Hallucination Cases database lists 2,095 decisions by courts and tribunals worldwide (count on 28 September 2026), 241 of them involving a legal norm such as a statute or rule, and 17 a repealed law. None is from Saudi Arabia [8]. That zero most likely reflects which decisions get published and indexed, so it tells you little about Saudi filings. Where most citations are to statutory articles, as in Saudi practice, the risk shifts from invented cases to wrong or outdated articles. An AI hallucination checker may flag a citation that does not exist; an old article quoted in its old wording can still pass it.

2. The amended article

On a laws.boe.gov.sa law page, each article shows its original text first. Amendments follow underneath, under the heading «تعديلات المادة» ("amendments to the article"). A hurried reader, or a tool trained on older copies, takes the first text. SDAIA reminds users that AI outputs can be "inaccurate, outdated, biased, or even deceptive" [6, §5.3].

When we checked the Law of Legal Practice on 29 September 2026, its page alone held three examples [4]. Saudi laws are issued by Royal Decree (numbered M/…) and dated in the Hijri calendar, the Islamic lunar calendar used on official texts:

• Article 18(a), which let any agent, not only a registered lawyer, plead for others in one to three cases, was deleted by Royal Decree M/66 of 15/7/1443H (16 February 2022). The article was amended again, with new wording, by M/21 of 26/1/1447H (21 July 2025).
• Article 25 was repealed by M/191 of 29/11/1444H (18 June 2023).
• Article 26 was amended by M/21 of 26/1/1447H (21 July 2025).

The site's only English translation, The Code of Law Practice, a PDF created in August 2021, still prints all three articles in their old form [5]. An English-first reviewer can "check the official source" and still approve a dead text. Check the Arabic.

3. Client secrets, and where the text goes

Article 23 of the Law of Legal Practice bars a lawyer from disclosing "any confidential information" learned through the profession, even after the power of attorney ends, unless a Sharia requirement dictates otherwise [5]. SDAIA explains the technical risk: GenAI services "use the information received through prompts as training data", which "can then be exposed to third parties" [6, §5.4]. If client personal data is transferred outside the Kingdom, the Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL) sets conditions, including limiting the transfer "to the minimum amount of Personal Data needed" (Article 29) [9]. The law also covers processing from abroad of personal data about people residing in the Kingdom (Article 2) [9], so it can reach a team in Dubai or London.

4. The court reads Arabic

Article 23 of the Law of Procedure before Sharia Courts (نظام المرافعات الشرعية; "Law of Civil Procedure" in the Bureau of Experts' English translation) provides: "Arabic shall be the official language of courts… A certified Arabic translation prepared by a licensed office shall be presented for documents in a foreign language" [10].

So, before these courts, an English AI draft is only a working copy, and a machine translation is not a certified translation. A foreign company's English contract reaches the court as its certified Arabic translation, so have a lawyer review the Arabic before filing.

What courts and regulators in the Gulf and beyond now expect

The same database lists AI hallucination cases from the UAE (two) and Qatar (one) [8]. The table shows how those courts, and others a Gulf firm may appear before, have responded. None of it is Saudi law, and some of it is guidance rather than binding rules, but a firm working across the region may be measured against it.

The ADGM Courts (Abu Dhabi Global Market), the DIFC Courts (Dubai International Financial Centre) and the QFC Court (Qatar Financial Centre, part of the Qatar International Court and Dispute Resolution Centre) serve financial centres. ADGM law "operates on the basis of English common law", so its judge gave the English Ayinde decisions "particular weight" [11, para. 43]. Where precedent carries that weight, invented cases do the damage; in Saudi practice, the statutory article carries the argument (failure point 2).

The duty covers research you receive. In Al-Haroun, a solicitor relied on legal research his client had produced with publicly available AI tools and online sources. Of 45 citations put before the court, 18 were to cases that did not exist. The court found it "extraordinary that the lawyer was relying on the client for the accuracy of their legal research" [15].

The person who ran the search carries the fault. In the ADGM judge's words, it "lies not with the research programme used… but with the person responsible for conducting the search" [11].

Practical advice from us, which no rule requires: a firm that appears before several of these forums should adopt one review standard that meets the strictest of them.

The review every AI draft needs before it leaves the firm

Run these ten checks, drawn up for this article, on every AI-assisted draft before it goes to a client, another party or a court. Adapt them to your practice.

If you cannot open a citation in its official source, take it out before filing.

A worked example: three errors in one AI memo

This is a hypothetical draft, for illustration. An associate receives an AI first draft of a reply memorandum. It objects to the other side's representative, a non-lawyer agent, on the "one to three cases" limit in Article 18(a) of the Law of Legal Practice, quoted word for word from the English translation.

• Check 4 catches the article. Under Article 18 on laws.boe.gov.sa, «تعديلات المادة» shows paragraph (a) deleted in 1443H and the article amended again in 1447H. The objection may still stand under the current text; the deleted paragraph cannot carry it. The fix: cite the current wording if it supports the objection, and drop the objection if it does not.
• Check 1 catches the name. The client company's English name differs from its commercial registration. The fix: copy the name from the CR, in both languages.
• Check 2 catches the date. A Hijri contract date was converted to the wrong Gregorian day. The fix: reconvert it on the Umm al-Qura calendar, Saudi Arabia's official Hijri calendar, and state both dates.

Five house rules for AI in your firm

A starting set, drawn up for this article. It follows SDAIA's guideline, which asks organisations to set rules that prohibit "entering classified information into third-party tools", describe acceptable use and prevent leaks, backed by "oversight and regular reviews" [6, §5.4].

1. Approved tools only, by type of data. Public tools get no client names, ID or CR numbers, privileged documents or unfiled pleadings. A firm tool is approved once the vendor answers in writing: where requests are processed, whether content trains models, who can access it, and how it is deleted.
2. AI output is a draft until a named lawyer signs it, after the ten checks.
3. AI research is a lead, not an authority, including research a client brings.
4. Keep a file note of the tool, the purpose and the checks done. If a court or client asks, as the QFC Court now can [12], the answer already exists.
5. Decide what you tell clients. Agree the firm's position and put it in the engagement letter. A fair benchmark comes from the CCBE (the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe), whose 2025 guide says to be transparent where an informed client would object [16].

Name the partner who owns these rules, and review them every quarter.

This week: test the checklist on five drafts

1. Pick the one document type your firm drafts most often.
2. Run the ten checks on the next five AI-assisted drafts of that type, and log what each check catches.
3. Put the five house rules on the agenda of the next partners' meeting.

For picking and testing a single task, see our guide How can AI help my business? Start with one repetitive task.

Rushd is legal AI built for Saudi firms: a practice-management platform that O AI, a Saudi AI and software company in Al Khobar, builds for law firms. It drafts contracts, agreements and memoranda in Arabic, English or both, grounded in Saudi law and the firm's templates; the licensed lawyer reviews and approves, and Rushd gives no legal advice. Its drafts are first drafts like any other, so run the ten checks on them too. On house rule 1: core hosting (compute, database and files) is on Saudi-based cloud infrastructure inside the Kingdom; AI requests go to a third-party AI provider and may be processed outside it; customer content is not used to train AI models without the firm's explicit consent; access inside the firm is role-based, with an audit log. Ask us about deletion in writing, as you would any vendor.

See how Rushd prepares first drafts in Arabic and English for your lawyers to review and approve.