Top judge ‘cautiously positive’
Litigants who represent themselves are producing clearer, easier-to-follow submissions when they use AI tools to help draft them, according to the Lady Chief Justice.
Giving evidence at the House of Lords Constitution Committee’s annual session this week, Baroness Carr of Walton-on-the-Hill said that while judges are trained to look out for “fake hallucinations [and] fake cases”, many were finding AI-assisted submissions a genuine improvement on the unaided alternative.
“[M]any judges are saying to me that they find AI-assisted submissions from litigants in person more helpful, easier to digest, than submissions that are drafted without the support of AI,” she told peers. “They’re shorter, they’re crafted.”
The comments came during a discussion of the impact of reduced Legal Aid on court delays. Carr accepted that litigants in person tend to slow cases down, since they “are unlikely to be able to move as fast and are likely to need more support than somebody who is represented”. But she said AI could help, giving unrepresented people “access to justice because they can get support in drafting their submissions”.
Carr, who described herself as “cautiously positive” about AI, stressed that the courts were not handing decisions to machines. “We are not talking about AIs doing the judging,” she said. “We are talking about AI doing the laundry so that judges can do the art.”
She also told peers that England and Wales had “as good a grip, and I would respectfully suggest actually a better grip than nearly any other jurisdiction in the world when it comes to AI”, pointing to guidance the judiciary had produced from the very outset and updated regularly.
On the human side, Carr said district judges were “expert” at dealing with litigants in person and helping them through the process, and commended the huge amount of pro bono work carried out by the legal profession in support of the unrepresented.
