Young: Mazur has created absurd situation
The Mazur ruling will have no impact on the work of the first regulated AI law firm as the technology is not conducting litigation, its founder has asserted.
Questions have been raised about whether the Mazur ruling that non-authorised people can only support an authorised person in the conduct of litigation would affect artificial intelligence-driven operations like Garfield.AI.
The firm helps businesses recover unpaid debts of up to £10,000 in the small claims court and the Solicitors Regulation Authority described [1] its decision to authorise the law firm, whose offering is solely provided by a web-based AI-powered litigation assistant, as a “landmark moment for legal services in this country”.
Founder Philip Young said Mazur was not an issue for him. “The Garfield software application is not a person within the meaning of the Legal Services Act, and therefore cannot ‘conduct litigation’ in the statutory sense,” he wrote on its website [2] yesterday.
“Moreover, every case that passes through Garfield’s platform remains under the oversight of a qualified solicitor, who checks each document before it is sent.
“In this way, Garfield combines the benefits of automation with the safeguards of professional supervision.”
That oversight at the moment is Mr Young but he told Legal Futures that, in the event Garfield started producing more documents than he could look at, he would recruit more solicitors to support customers.
He pointed out that most cases settled before the need to issue proceedings and the key 2023 High Court case of Baxter v Doble [3] made clear that pre-action work did not amount to the conduct of litigation.
“Our experience, in common with many other law firms, is that letters before action usually lead to payment or at least a resolution short of litigation between about 70% to 80% of the time.
“Hence, as we scale, a lot of the work that Garfield does is not within the regulatory framework in any event and we will build automated processes that help to check these documents for accuracy and completeness, as an layer additional to human oversight.”
When it came to issued cases, Mr Young said the area that took up the most time in checking was where a claim was defended – and official statistics showed this only occurred in about 2-5% of all cases.
The solicitor, who has experience of professional discipline and negligence work from his time in practice, added that he had actually been approached by “several volume firms that see Garfield’s model as a way to preserve their business viability in light of Mazur”.
He added: “The logic is straightforward: automation, properly deployed within a regulated structure, keeps costs down and margins up, while maintaining compliance.”
His article argued too that the Legal Services Act 2007 was “never designed” to change the settled practice that non-authorised staff could carry out litigation tasks under supervision.
It was “an obvious absurdity” that a highly experienced CILEX fellow who has run hundreds of cases “may now be prohibited from sending an item of correspondence or filing a document that a newly qualified solicitor could send with impunity”.
He added: “The Legal Services Act was not meant to criminalise competent, supervised professionals working within authorised firms. Yet without legislative or regulatory reform, that may be the practical result,” he said.
Meanwhile, Garfield featured in a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary last week entitled ‘Will AI take my job?
It was pitched head-to-head with trainee solicitor Charlotte Jaques to prepare a claim form and particulars for a builder owed £4,500.
The documents were then assessed by the trainee’s supervisor, Zainab Zaeem, an associate director of multi-office firm Summerfield Browne, without her knowing who had drafted which.
Ms Jaques took four hours to do the work at £225 + VAT per hour (£1,080 in total), while Garfield took less than 10 minutes and charged £100 + VAT of £20.
The builder said: “Having a solicitor is great because you have someone to speak to but if you think of the solicitors’ fees, which is quite a lot of money, and then you look at the AI system, which is £100, I would definitely opt for the AI.”
Ms Zaeem chose Ms Jaques’s documents because they included more information. She described Garfield’s as “a good attempt” but said the judge “would have to ask quite a few questions”.
She added: “You never know how quickly AI can change. But right now I’m quite content. Come at us, AI.”