Geoffrey Vos highlighted litigants’ increased use of AI tools like ChatGPT as legal consultants
UK master of rolls Geoffrey Vos has suggested that artificial intelligence could overtake human judges as the preferred resolver of minor disputes in the future, reported the Law Society Gazette.
In his Justice for All lecture, Vos highlighted individual litigants’ increased use of AI tools as legal consultants.
“AI is now being used by almost every individual litigant in person and small business. The first port of call used to be a lawyer if one was available and affordable. Now the first port of call is ChatGPT or CoPilot,” he said in a snippet of the lecture published by the Gazette. “Whatever answer generative AI gives, the would-be litigant in person can easily use it to transform a mass of documents and personal information into an arguable legal claim.”
Vos predicted that the volume of civil, family, and tribunals claims would rise due to AI’s ability to generate them for free, noting that lawyer cost and availability had previously restricted the number of claims people could file. He added that individuals and businesses would likely want small disputes to be “decided by machines, once they understand that such resolutions will be far quicker and cheaper than waiting for human judges to decide outcomes using outdated analogue processes and procedures.”
He also suggested that AI hallucinations were “very likely soon to be things of the past.” In a statement published by the Gazette, he said the profession needed to “to consider the more fundamental questions of how justice should be delivered when AI is able to decide cases, both civil and criminal, as or more reliably than humans and certainly far more cheaply and quickly.”
The Justice for All lecture series was launched by the City of London as a year-long project. Vos, who is set to retire on October 31, delivered his lecture at the Central Criminal Court.
