'Ding Dong Merrily AI'

Senior lecturer-in-law Kate Ritchie reflects on what an AI-influenced Christmas might entail in this new 'Legally Christmas' blog.

As Christmas approaches, it’s an appropriate time to reflect on 2025 and the growing dominance of artificial intelligence (AI), not least in legal practice where discourse has centred on how efficiencies, for example, in legal research, document review and contract analysis, may come at the expense of data protection and accuracy. For those of us working in legal education, debates have continued to revolve around the challenge of supporting students to use AI confidently but also ethically. If you’re a legal practitioner, a law academic or law student you may be keen to learn more about these issues. The Open University (colleagues from the Open Justice Team and the Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) together with Lincoln University, have authored some training courses. More information is available here — AI Law and Legal Training | Open Justice.

It may be tempting to think that Christmas, at least, offers you some respite — an AI free zone, as it were. However, that would probably be incorrect. AI now shapes much of our experience of this festive period, by, for example, influencing our choice of presents or travel, through to the production of Christmas music, murals and adverts. Meanwhile, several television series, currently streaming, reflect something of the zeitgeist, from Pluribus, in which the human race is infected with a shared consciousness, to the daft, but rather enjoyable, Iris Affair.

It seems fair to say, therefore, that unless you live completely off-grid, you cannot avoid AI this Christmas or, indeed, in 2026 and beyond. Reliability will no doubt continue to be an issue – our ‘Alexa’ the other day played me Handel’s ‘Zadok the Priest’ in response to my request for Nick Cave’s ‘Into My Arms’! 

Moreover, AI is likely to carry on generating concern and calls for regulation, often for good reason. Bear in mind though, that it is easy to view the past through rose-tinted specs and Christmas music, in particular, has always been something of a mixed bag –  after all, for every ‘Fairytale of New York’, there has been a ‘Mistletoe and Wine’ 😊. 

Kate Ritchie is a senior lecturer-in-law in the Open University Law School and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She is a member of the Open Justice Team and is project lead for the Business Law Clinic and Employment Law Clinic Projects, having previously worked in legal practice in corporate and commercial law. She is also Module Team Chair of W323, which aims to provide law students with foundational preparation for the first of the Solicitors Qualification Examinations in the areas of business law and dispute resolution.