Last time in Jargon Buster, we met the meat proxy: the person who forwards your question to a chatbot and sends the answer straight back. This time, I want to look at what they leave behind.

Workslop is "AI generated work content that masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task".

The term was coined by researchers at BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab, writing in the Harvard Business Review in September 2025. Their key point is that workslop does not save work at all. It simply moves it. In their words, it "shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work."

Their survey of 1,150 full-time US employees found that 40% had received workslop in the past month, and that each piece took almost two hours to deal with. For a 10,000-person organisation, they put the cost at about US$9 million a year. That is a US survey, but I doubt UK law firms are immune.

You will know it when you see it:

It looks finished and that is the inherent problem. A rough draft announces on its face that it needs more work. Workslop hides that, presenting polish that disguises lack of quality or rigour.

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A trainee's AI draft can take a supervisor longer to fix than it would have taken to write. The SRA's updated supervision guidance is clear that AI output must be subject to appropriate human review and professional judgement before use (rule 6 of my Golden Rules). Someone has to actually do that review. Workslop simply ensures that the burden will not be on the person who produced it.

Consider the court perspective. In Ndaryiyumvire v Birmingham City University (County Court at Birmingham, October 2025), fake cases generated by the firm's legal research software were filed by administrative staff. The judge called it "in substance a failure of management at the firm more than the failure of [the solicitor] as an individual", and the wasted costs order was made against the firm (Judiciary, PDF). This is easy to reproduce with workslop because the file will look complete at a cursory glance. Workslop that nobody catches eventually becomes the whole firm's problem.

Here is a question I do not have a tidy answer to. If a fee earner's AI draft takes two hours to put right, who pays for those two hours? The client asked for the work, not the slop. I suspect many firms have not thought about it yet, and it is better to do so before a client asks.

And what if the workslop goes to the other side? See Hancox in the last Jargon Buster. The courts are (understandably) not impressed.

And if workslop lands on your desk, politely send it back with the question it has not answered. That is supervision, not rudeness.

One test before you hit send: if it would take the reader longer to check than it took you to make, it is not a finished product.

The term and the research belong to BetterUp Labs and the Stanford Social Media Lab: "AI-Generated 'Workslop' Is Destroying Productivity", Harvard Business Review, September 2025.