Lyle Hopkins with the case papers
An Oxford doctoral student with no legal training is celebrating using AI to bring a successful claim against energy provider SSE over a defunct electricity meter for which it tried to charge him.
Lyle Hopkins told Legal Futures that he used AI to prepare the entire small claim – a paginated bundle of over 100 pages, a skeleton with authorities, a supplemental bundle answering SSE’s late-served evidence within a day, and a cross-examination plan.
“AI was the difference between coping and not,” he said.
He presented the case himself against a barrister at Oxford County Court and District Judge Walker found comprehensively in his favour, noting that where SSE had put him to proof, Mr Hopkins had produced the necessary documentation.
“The defendant has subjected Mr Hopkins to a rollercoaster ride and not a good one,” the judge wrote, describing the “long and painful process” SSE had put him through.
“What I would add to that is that when one reads the evidence and the chronology of what happened here, it seems all the defendant is interested in billing inappropriately someone they know to be a domestic residential consumer for a property they know to be a single property for two accounts and at commercial rates.
“I find that Mr Hopkins could not have done more to tell the defendant of the circumstances and give them what they needed to do.”
What made SSE’s conduct worse was that, even after the energy ombudsman found in Mr Hopkins’ favour, SSE sent debt collectors after him.
DJ Walker issued a declaration that Mr Hopkins was not liable for the £1,091 SSE was demanding and awarded him £750 for distress and inconvenience, indicating that he would have allowed more had Mr Hopkins claimed it, plus interest and expenses.
The judge also added a recital to his order that, should debt collection continue, it would amount to harassment. Mr Hopkins said he received a new demand for the money three days after judgment.
However, his claim for £250 in damages for the impact on his credit score was dismissed because it did not appear to be a legally recognisable claim, and in any event there was no proven loss.
Mr Hopkins recounted how he was able to correct multiple errors in SSE’s filed defence – such as saying that it did not receive his letter before action, when its own emails show the company received and answered it.
He added that, before the hearing, SSE offered more than the court ultimately awarded but he refused because it was conditional on confidentiality and non-disparagement clauses, and he wanted what happened in the public domain.
Mr Hopkins – who is an experienced user of AI and a part-time software engineer – explained that he did not have the funds to instruct a lawyer at the time. He initially used an old version of ChatGPT, which hallucinated a lot more than later iterations and was not good at checking actual laws and case law.
However, Claude Fable was “great” as the case went on and he used ChatGPT 5.5 for collecting the evidence together.
“If Fable had been around at the time, I probably would have claimed for a lot more, probably around £5,000 and included harassment and not had the credit data part, which would have been more in line with the case law it found when we were preparing the court documents about three weeks before the hearing,” he said.
Mr Hopkins argued that the justice system needed to digitise properly, as many more would try and do the same as him.
“Consumers should take advantage of AI with their claims, but they must be careful to check all the references and case work it quotes. They should also keep in mind that the current AIs tend to want to tell you what you want to hear which is dangerous.
“AI is only going to keep getting better at this, so hopefully it’ll mean more people can get access to justice.
“From the lawyers’ perspective, they are actually best placed to use AI as they have a good understanding of the laws already. I imagine those who adopt it properly will be able to offer a lot more for a lot less cost, and quickly dominate the market.”
An SSE spokesman said: “We apologise for any inconvenience caused to Mr Hopkins during this process. Following the court’s judgment, we have paid compensation to the claimant.”
Mr Hopkins’ research project at the Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP is entitled ‘Developing interpretable machine learning models to gain insight into the relationship between metabolic health and lifestyle’.