Drafting an Appeal With AI: A Step-by-Step Workflow for Arab Litigators

By Stephane Boghossian · 2026-10-28 · 7 min read · Guides

Lawyers already upload the first-instance judgment and their pleadings to a chatbot and ask for an appeal. Here's a safer workflow: seven steps, where AI helps, and where it must not decide.

A litigator in Lebanon described his new routine to us. He uploads the first-instance judgment and the pleadings he wrote, so the tool understands the whole defence, and asks it to draft the appeal. It started recently, and it works well enough that he keeps doing it.

He's not alone. The question isn't whether lawyers will use AI for appeals. It's whether they'll do it in a way that survives a judge reading the result.

The short answer

Calendar the deadline before you open any tool. AI won't track it for you.
Give the tool the full file, not a summary. The judgment, your pleadings, the other side's pleadings, key exhibits.
Use AI to map and draft. Decide the grounds yourself. The choice of grounds is legal judgment.
Verify every authority at the source before filing. This is where AI-assisted appeals go wrong.

The seven-step workflow

Step 1. Deadline and admissibility, by hand

Confirm the appeal deadline and when it started running (judgment date, service date) under your procedure code, plus any admissibility conditions: value thresholds, fees, required form. Put it in the calendar. Do this before anything else, and don't take an AI's word on the number of days.

Step 2. Build the file

Collect, in one place:

The first-instance judgment (full text)
Your pleadings and the other side's
Hearing minutes, expert reports, key exhibits
Your client's instructions on what outcome they want

If the material is confidential, check your tool's data handling before uploading. The UAE Ministry of Justice's guiding principles for law firms, for example, list protecting the confidentiality of information among their aims.

Step 3. Ask for a map, not a draft

First prompt: "From this judgment, list each finding of fact and each legal conclusion, with the paragraph it appears in." Then: "For each, list what our pleadings argued and what the court did with it."

This gives you a table you can check against the judgment in minutes. If the map is wrong, the draft will be too.

Step 4. Choose the grounds yourself

Using the map, decide which findings you'll attack and why: error of law, error in fact-finding, failure to address a defence, procedural defect. Ask the AI to stress-test each ground ("What's the strongest reply to this?"), but make the call yourself. A tool that sees ten possible grounds doesn't know which three a court of appeal in your jurisdiction will take seriously.

Step 5. Draft section by section

Draft one ground at a time, giving the tool the relevant judgment paragraph, your earlier argument and the authorities you want to rely on. Ask it to anticipate the respondent's defences for each ground. Section-by-section drafting keeps the reasoning tight and makes errors easier to spot than one long generated document.

Step 6. Verify every authority

For every article and judgment cited: open the source, match number, year, chamber and date, read the paragraph relied on, and confirm the article's current version. See How to Check an AI Legal Citation Before You File It. The ADGM Courts ordered AED 282,508 in wasted costs in Arabyads v Alam after a defence relied on authorities that didn't exist or didn't support the point.

Step 7. Read it as the judge will

Read the whole appeal once, start to finish, as the bench will. Cut repetition. Check the requested relief matches the grounds. Check it's in the court's language and format. Then sign it, because your signature is the one that counts.

What AI is good at here, and what it isn't

Good at	Not reliable for
Mapping a long judgment against the pleadings	Your deadline and admissibility rules
Spotting a defence the court didn't address	Choosing which grounds to run
First drafts of each ground, in formal Arabic	Authorities you haven't checked
Anticipating the respondent's replies	Local practice of a specific chamber
Consistency checks across a long brief	Final judgment on the client's risk

Where HAQQ Legal AI fits

HAQQ Legal AI lets you keep a matter's documents together, so later drafts build on the same file, and shows a reference beside each paragraph so step 6 is faster. It's built to do the heavy drafting. The grounds, the checks and the signature stay with you.

Frequently asked questions

Can AI draft the whole appeal in one go?

It can produce one. You'll spend longer checking a single long draft than a section-by-section one. Steps 3 to 5 are faster overall.

Should I tell the court I used AI?

Rules differ. Some courts in the region expect disclosure when asked or early in proceedings; many have no specific rule yet. Check your court's current guidance.

What about the other side's AI-drafted pleadings?

Check their authorities too. An invented or misapplied citation in the respondent's brief is a point for you.

Sources and further reading

FAQ