By Legal Futures Associate National Claims [1]
Personal injury law is undergoing a significant shift. While established claim types such as road traffic injuries continue to decline, cases linked to unsafe housing and poorly maintained public spaces are becoming more prominent and more complex. Increasingly, these incidents stem not only from the physical conditions on the ground but also from the performance of the digital systems behind them, including reporting portals, maintenance logs, inspection apps and contractor-management tools.
For claimants and legal professionals, this means negligence now often has a digital footprint. Understanding how data was handled or mishandled long before an accident occurred can be crucial in determining liability. National Claims has positioned itself at the centre of this evolution, using artificial intelligence to strengthen personal injury cases across housing negligence, public space incidents and a wide range of public liability claims in the UK.
AI is not replacing legal judgement. It is enhancing it by helping to uncover evidence, patterns and failings that traditional casework alone cannot easily identify.
A sector growing in value and complexity
Despite shifts in claim volumes, the UK personal injury market remains significant. The UK Personal Injury Market Report 2024 values the sector at over £4.2 billion. Accidents in streets, parks, shopping areas, public buildings and communal spaces now account for around 21% of all personal injury claims.
Public liability activity also remains substantial. According to the latest Compensation Recovery Unit data, 64,423 public liability claims were registered across the UK in the year to March 2025. This reflects a wider truth about modern negligence. It often results from systemic failings rather than isolated hazards. Problems develop over time and are fuelled by missed inspections, ignored maintenance requests, inaccurate data entry or communication gaps between landlords, councils and contractors.
In many cases, the physical hazard is simply the final symptom of a deeper issue. A tenant may raise repeated complaints about damp through an online platform with no action taken. A defective paving slab might appear in inspection logs multiple times without repair. A damaged handrail in a communal stairwell may be noted by a contractor but never escalated because different systems do not communicate properly.
Negligence today frequently begins with fragmented or flawed data and ends with a preventable injury.
How National Claims uses AI to reveal systemic negligence
To address this shift, National Claims uses artificial intelligence to analyse the digital evidence surrounding an incident. AI helps uncover patterns, gaps and failures that would be difficult and time consuming to identify manually.
Our AI-supported approach allows us to:
- Analyse hundreds or thousands of repair and maintenance logs
- Identify recurring complaints recorded across multiple databases
- Detect contradictions between reported issues and recorded actions
- Examine long-term inspection data for statutory breaches
- Highlight systemic problems that affect entire buildings or estates
- Construct clear timelines linking digital oversight to the injury
This method is particularly effective in housing negligence claims and public space negligence claims, where liability rarely stems from a single moment. Injuries often arise from a series of failures, including missed warning signs, delayed repairs, unprocessed reports or outdated inspection cycles.
AI makes it possible to demonstrate that risks were known, foreseeable and avoidable. It also helps show how long an issue may have been left unresolved, which is often crucial when assessing breach of duty.
As many defendants, including councils, housing associations and managing agents, rely on digital systems to justify their processes, identifying failures within those systems can significantly shift liability. AI allows National Claims to build a clear evidential narrative where traditional casework may only uncover isolated pieces of information.
AI as the new evidential standard in public liability claims
Modern public liability claims in the UK increasingly depend on digital information. Maintenance records, inspection schedules, contractor workflows and tenant-reporting portals all play a part in demonstrating whether an organisation met its obligations.
AI is particularly powerful when information is spread across different platforms. By comparing datasets, it can reveal repair tickets that were closed without any physical work. It can also highlight repeated complaints that were never escalated and inspection logs with unexplained gaps. AI can also identify delays caused by contractor backlogs or system failures. It can even expose inconsistencies in timestamped records that point to wider oversight issues.
This depth of analysis offers claimants and solicitors a stronger and more defensible evidential foundation. It also strengthens causation arguments by showing when an organisation became aware of a hazard or should reasonably have identified it.
National Claims has already used AI-supported investigation to overturn early case rejections. In several situations, claims initi ally dismissed due to insufficient evidence were reassessed once AI revealed months of ignored reports or incomplete digital records. Insights like these can fundamentally reshape both negotiations and litigation strategy.
For legal professionals, the direction of travel is clear. The future of personal injury work will require an understanding of digital negligence as well as physical hazards.
The shift in AI’s role within personal injury and public liability work is explored in the feature on how AI is transforming personal injury claims and protecting tenants and public space users in the UK [2].
Call to action for legal professionals
At National Claims, we work closely with solicitors and legal teams on complex personal injury and public liability matters involving system failures, digital record keeping, housing disrepair and public-space hazards. Our AI-supported investigations deliver clearer timelines, stronger evidence and a deeper understanding of systemic negligence.
If your firm is handling or preparing to handle claims involving housing conditions, digital maintenance processes or public-space hazards, our team can help you uncover the full evidential picture from the outset.
To explore collaboration opportunities or learn more, visit National Claims [3]