The Civil Justice Council has created a working group to examine the use of artificial intelligence in preparing court documents and consider amendments to procedure rules. Terms of reference should be published within the next few weeks, a spokesperson told the Gazette.
Lord Justice Birss, deputy head of civil justice, alluded to the group’s establishment at last week's London International Disputes Week during a debate on global innovation in the courts. He sat on a panel of senior jurists who agreed that the judiciary must take the lead on the deployment of AI to streamline court processes.
Judges in England and Wales now have access to large-language model artificial intelligence software on their own personal computers. Revised guidance to the judiciary published a few weeks ago has been expanded to cover terms including ‘hallucination’ and ‘AI agent’. Tips for spotting submissions produced by AI are also given.
The panel, which included former lord chief justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, stressed that the emerging problem of fake citations was a consequence of lawyers failing to check their own work. ‘You should be taking personal responsibility for what goes in your name, and that applies whether you’re a judge or you’re a lawyer,’ said the Court of Appeal judge. ‘Looked at that way round, lawyers producing documents with hallucinated case references [would not be] a problem. You shouldn’t be putting anything to a court that you’re not prepared to put your name to.’
Birss gave the simple example of using AI to summarise a document. Producing summaries is a difficult and skilled function traditionally performed by younger lawyers, he stressed. ‘You can use AI [to summarise], but you can only use it if you have read the document. What you can’t do, is not read the document, and then get AI to summarise it. That’s crazy.’
He added: ‘The CJC set up a group last month to work on whether we need any court rules about use of AI in preparation of court documents. We may do, we may not. I suspect we’ll need some adjustments to the rules. We’ve got a practice direction on witness statements which probably could do with a look.’
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