Sackman: AI dividend must be seen across the country
The government cannot allow the emergence of a two-tier system where large City law firms are at the cutting edge of AI use while the courts are “stuck in the analogue age”, justice minister Sarah Sackman said yesterday.
She also told City lawyers that their work was “mission critical” for the government’s growth agenda.
The minister for courts and legal services was speaking at a City of London Law Society conference, entitled The London Law Imperative, and described emerging technologies and AI in particular as both a huge opportunity but also “a risk factor” to England and Wales.
“I think we have no choice but to embrace the opportunities that it presents. I know that in your law firms you will already be doing just that, but we’ve got to ensure that the big major legal tech platforms are not defaulting to local law and the law of our competitors, that they are providing a level playing field when it comes to English law so that we retain our preeminence or at very least the opportunity to market our preeminence.”
Ms Sackman said the “traditional strengths” of England and Wales as a jurisdiction – including good governance – made it “very, very well placed to take advantage” of those opportunities.
When it came to what the government could do, she identified three tasks. First was “ensuring the regulatory framework is up-to-date and robust”; she pointed as an example to the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025, a two-clause Act that says digital assets are property.
Second was to “provide the conditions for responsible innovation”. Ms Sackman hailed the AI Growth Lab for legal services [1], a pioneering regulatory sandbox to allow safe testing of new products before they go to market.
“The third thing we need to do is to ensure… that we harness the benefits of that innovation for the entirety of our justice system.”
Ms Sackman explained: “What I don’t want for us to have is a two-tier system where our top-tier firms are at the cutting edge using AI and then, if you’re a litigator or an arbitrator, you trot off to court and you find a court that feels stuck in the analogue age.
“I want to ensure that the entirety of our justice system is at the races when it comes to digitisation and harnessing those AI tools.
“One of the things we are doing within the Ministry of Justice, which is really a leader of the pack in government, is adopting lots of those AI tools, like transcription tools and case summarisation tools for our judges.
“Are there ways that we can use AI to expand access to justice and lead people to the right resources and sources of human legal advice?
“I want to make sure that the excellence of our top-tier City law firms matches the modernisation and transformation that is badly needed in our justice system, particularly our courts.”
In outlining the importance of legal services, the minister noted how it underpinned the other areas where the UK led the world, like financial services and life sciences.
“What we can’t afford to do is to stand still. Part of the purpose of discussions like this are to reassure all of you that government has a strategy and a plan for this because we have to be intentional.”
She revealed that the government would be hosting a global business and law summit in December to launch this strategy.
Ms Sackman added that its job was “to provide the conditions for success which involve promoting English law and then to socialise the benefits of all the brilliant wealth and ideas that you create so that the prosperity and the ideas that you are developing can be shared right across the country.”