Should AI Decide Your Court Case? This Judge Says Yes
In a few days, judge Geoffrey Vos will retire as Master of the Rolls, the most senior position in England’s civil justice system. As one of his final acts, he’s trying to stoke a d…
In a few days, judge Geoffrey Vos will retire as Master of the Rolls, the most senior position in England’s civil justice system. As one of his final acts, he’s trying to stoke a debate about whether—and how—judges should be using artificial intelligence.
Under the latest guidance, judges in England are advised to confine their use of AI to administrative tasks, and Vos tells WIRED he uses Microsoft Copilot all the time to locate far-flung documents and summarize large bodies of text.
But recently, he visited a court in Shenzhen, China, where civil disputes are already being decided by judges with heavy assistance from AI.Impressed by what he saw, Vos believes that courts across the globe should consider following.
That road is littered with pitfalls. Multiple lawyers have been caught citing case law hallucinated by AI, and in a first for the UK, somebody recently lost their license to practice in part because they misused the technology. Meanwhile, with chatbots as their legal counsel, litigants are flooding the courts with an unprecedented number of claims, some of them bogus.
Yet Vos remains convinced that AI will someday help resolve civil disputes more rapidly and in ways that cost far less. While complicated commercial disputes and sensitive family cases might require a human judge, he believes that personal injury claims, low-value professional negligence cases, and the like could easily be adjudicated by AI.
“What most people desperately want in civil disputes is resolution,” Vos tells WIRED. “The question is, where is the line to be drawn?”
Given his impending retirement, the debate for Vos is largely a philosophical one. But for everyone else in the profession—and for coders, cybersecurity experts, math professors, and a whole host of others—the rules are changing fast.
In October, WIRED met with Vos at his office at the Royal Courts of Justice, London. We discussed the ways that AI is spilling into the courts, the practical and ethical issues it raises, and how the justice system might adapt to serve a new generation raised alongside the technology.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: You’re just a few days away from retirement. How do you feel about leaving the post at this particular juncture, as AI begins to reshape how law is practiced and justice administered?
GEOFFREY VOS: When I started as a lawyer, we had foolscap paper, typists, and Tipp-Ex. We moved rapidly into word processors, faxes, and eventually computers.
Lawyers are conservative with a lowercase c. But that doesn’t mean that they should be backward-looking or retrogressive. It means they should be adopting change cautiously, with their eyes open.
The legal system is for the people of this country. You can’t be effective in providing access to justice if you’re not on the same technological wavelength. But it’s time to leave it to a new generation of leadership judges.
How have you built AI into your practice to date?
I don’t use it for writing judgments, but I use it for finding things out, navigating large quantities of material, and checking things. It saves me time. I have 11 meetings a day. I know there’s a document created years ago that’s relevant to my meeting—and Copilot finds it in seconds. I do that every day.
In law, isn’t the devil always in the details? Doesn’t confidence in the legal system depend on the understanding that a judge will review and consider every inch of every court submission?
I’m a little more cautious about using it to read papers for my cases, but that’s because I do the most important cases in the system.
People have confidence in our justice system because they believe that our judges have absolute integrity. In order not to lose that integrity, you have to explain how you’re adopting technology and achieve a broad consensus that it is appropriate.
How is AI spilling into the courts right now? Is it changing how litigants and legal professionals behave? What issues is it throwing up?
It’s changing everything remarkably quickly. We see a 10 percent rise in the number of county court cases started every year—and it looks as if this may increase. That’s because everybody who has a legal problem now puts it into Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude. Ask it to create a particulars of claim, a case, a claim form—it can.
What proportion of these claims are based on sound legal principles, though? How often are people led by a chatbot to mistakenly believe they have a claim?
We don’t have the data. But I think it’s a mistake to assume that just because a claim is created by AI, it’s totally frivolous.
In a way it’s a good problem, because it shows there’s greater access to justice because of technology. One of the problems with justice in the past is that it’s only been available to rich people.
If people have a problem sufficient to bother ChatGPT, they probably genuinely think they have a claim. When you explore their problem in detail, you might find it is actually a bit different