AI Is Too Risky to Use, Says Barrister Who Has All of His Emails Printed for Him

2 June 2026

SYDNEY — A senior barrister who has warned colleagues that artificial intelligence is too unreliable for serious legal work has confirmed that every email he receives is printed out by his secretary and delivered to him as a letter. 

Roderick Bellingham KC, of Greycourt Chambers, has emerged in recent months as one of the profession’s more vocal sceptics, cautioning at a recent CPD seminar that lawyers who rely on AI are “outsourcing their judgement to a machine that cannot be trusted.” 

Mr. Bellingham does not use a computer. 

His secretary of thirty-one years, Margaret, retrieves his emails each morning, prints them, and places them in a leather folder on his desk, where they sit alongside his physical correspondence. He reads them as letters and dictates his responses, which Margaret types and sends from her own terminal. 

His objections to AI are wide-ranging. 

He is troubled, first, that these systems invent things. A machine, he warns, will produce a citation for a case that does not exist, confidently and in proper form, and a lawyer who has not checked it will put it before a court. The profession, he says, cannot tolerate a single fabricated authority. 

Mr. Bellingham works from the brief. The authorities are collated by his instructing solicitor and the cases pulled by a junior, and he reads what he is given. He has not personally confirmed that a case exists since the 1990s, and assumes, as he always has, that the people below him have done it correctly. 

He is concerned, second, that the machine “keeps your confidential material.” Privileged client information, he warns, is fed into a system that retains it, stores it on servers he will never see, and may surface it later in ways no one intended. 

Mr. Bellingham dictates his advices onto microcassette. The cassettes are placed in an unlocked drawer in the corridor, collected twice a week by a courier, and transcribed off-site by a typing service he has used since 1998 and has never visited.  

He objects, third, that AI is “simply another thing you have to learn,” a demand on the time of senior practitioners who, in his view, have managed perfectly well for decades without it.  

He owns a mobile telephone. It has large keys, displays the time, and can dial a telephone number. It is capable of sending a text message by repeatedly pressing each number key until the desired letter appears. 

He has never sent one. 

When a document requires amendment, Mr. Bellingham dictates each amendment individually for Margaret to enter, reading the surrounding text aloud so that she can locate the passage, a process that for lengthy advice can take several days. 

Formal correspondence is prepared on chambers letterhead, printed, signed by hand, scanned back into the computer, and emailed. Where the recipient is known to keep a fax machine, it is sent by fax instead. Margaret operates the fax. 

The arrangement has caused some friction with instructing solicitors. 

“If he could just send a one-line email, that would honestly be fine,” said one solicitor who has briefed Mr. Bellingham repeatedly. “Instead I get a signed letter, scanned as a PDF, attached to an email his secretary sends. I’m reading it on my phone in a taxi. You can’t read a scanned letter on a phone. You just see the top left corner of the page and you have to drag it around.” 

Mr. Bellingham is unmoved. He intends to continue as he has and believes the profession would do well to follow him. 

“The law is built on judgement, and judgement cannot be automated,” he said. “A machine cannot be trusted with work of this importance. There is no substitute for doing it yourself.” 

At press time, Mr. Bellingham was dictating a one-sentence reply to an email, which Margaret will then print, read back to him, retype, present for signature, scan, and send. 

This article is satire. No barristers were modernised in its production.