Judges are using AI to help make rulings, a senior High Court justice has disclosed.
Sir Colin Birss, the chancellor of the High Court, said they were using AI tools to help make the judgments consistent, redact content to anonymise details, create transcripts and search for key details in emails and files.
He described the application of the technology as “exciting”, “helpful” and “transforming” in helping to speed up justice and improve judgments.
His comments came after it emerged that judges in immigration tribunals were using AI tools to generate skeleton judgments. They also have official approval to ask chatbots to check their decisions.
As chancellor of the High Court, Sir Colin is the senior chancery judge with day-to-day responsibility for the business and property courts.
‘Remarkably effective’
He said: “Once I have finished writing a judgment, I give it to the secure Copilot system on my computer and ask it to identify any internal inconsistencies. It is remarkably effective.”
Sir Colin said judgments drafted in the normal way could be anonymised with AI.
He said the technology was able to pick up details that, if read together, might have led to “jigsaw identification” of individuals. These details could then be redacted.
Transcript generation, he said, was “very exciting and has potential to make a big difference in all our courts and tribunals”.
He also said AI could be used for administrative tasks. “With the form of Copilot available to leadership judges like me, the ability to find things in emails and files has been transformed. No longer do I need to do word searches on old emails.”
In a lecture to the City of London Law Society, Sir Colin warned judges not to use public AI systems unless they were known to be secure. All judges in England and Wales already have access to a secure version of Microsoft Copilot.
He said AI had played a role in improving how litigants presented their cases. He said that “quite often the litigant’s case is presented more clearly and coherently than I would have expected in similar circumstances in the past”.
However, he said that if these litigants had taken advice from a legal professional, they would have been entitled to claim legal professional privilege, meaning that communications between lawyer and client would generally be protected from disclosure.
But if the litigant had taken legal advice from a public AI system, he believed the advice might not be privileged because these systems appeared not to be confidential.
The use of AI in immigration cases has raised hopes that the technology could speed up decisions ahead of plans to streamline the appeals system, which are expected to be set out in new legislation this autumn.
However, AI experts and barristers have expressed concern that current AI models are unreliable and need to be closely monitored for potential errors before they are widely used.