Vos: AI is acting as an aid to litigants
Many property disputes “could be amenable to machine-made decision-making” in the future, the Master of the Rolls (MR) has predicted.
In the meantime, said Sir Geoffrey Vos, people were already using artificial intelligence (AI) as “their agent to pursue litigation”.
He said that in “a few minutes”, AI could transform “lengthy ramblings explaining why a tenant dislikes and wishes to claim against their landlord” into “a well-ordered intelligible legal claim against that landlord”.
The recent increase in civil claims in the county court, he suggested, “may be because some people and businesses are using AI to translate their oral complaints into comprehensible legal claims and defence documents that can be uploaded to the civil claims platforms and issued in court”.
The MR went on: “These developments may, if they have not already done so, transform the justice system.
“It will be necessary for HMCTS [HM Courts and Tribunals Service], the judiciary, the ombuds and all pre-action online services to work together to make sure that our digitised systems can handle and deal effectively with the likely increases in claims and defences generated plausibly by AI.
“This is not about whether it is or is not a good thing for claims to be created by AI. AI is a reality now, and individuals are and will be able to use it as their agent to pursue litigation.”
In his address to last week’s Housing Law Practitioners’ Association conference, Sir Geoffrey said it was “incredibly important” that the pre- and post-action online civil justice systems were integrated and aligned.
This was why the Online Civil Procedure Rules Committee (OPRC) was making rules for both.
AI could be “particularly helpful” for tenants defending possession actions as litigants in person.
“Tenants are often unable to express their complaints about their situation as a defendant to a possession action with much coherence. AI can help marshal those thoughts into any legal defence that the thoughts expressed by the tenant might disclose.
“In rent disputes, AI is ideally suited to sort out complex payment and accounting data.”
Sir Geoffrey referred earlier in his speech to the new online platform for possession and property claims being designed by HMCTS to sit alongside the Online Civil Money Claims and Damages Online Claims platforms, the first iteration of which is expected to be released next spring.
He said it was important to design the platform on the basis that AI tools would “inevitably play a part in the preparation of property claims, if not, at a later stage, their resolution”.
Agentic AI, where people asked AI to undertake tasks on their behalf, was going to be “very important to the preparation and conduct of property disputes and also to mediation and even to the creation of mediated outcomes”.
The MR said he would not repeat the several lectures he had given on whether AI ought to be used for judicial decision-making.
“Suffice it to say that I am sure that many property disputes could be amenable to machine-made decision-making.
“It will be for future discussion whether, as a society, we would want decisions about people’s right to stay in their home to be decided by a machine rather than a human. This conversation is rather more urgent than many people imagine.”
The OPRC launched its first rules consultation last week, beginning with general principles and “core” rules which will, in the future, apply to all proceedings, along with draft rules for possession proceedings.
The committee said that, in future, the Online Procedure Rules (OPR) would be expanded “to establish rules relating to specific types of online proceedings”.
In his speech, Sir Geoffrey said the general OPR would be “far more simple and accessible” than the current Civil Procedure Rules.
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