Ignoring artificial intelligence is not an option - and blaming the technology ‘for our own inadequacies’ is a mistake, the master of the rolls has said in his latest speech on the topic.

Sir Geoffrey Vos told the Expert Witness Institute’s annual conference that, although change is taking place 'at what some find to be an alarming pace’, the technology can help: for example, AI-generated submissions by litigants in person are ‘often, if not always, more concise [and] make more sense’.

Meanwhile clients expect lawyers to use AI wisely and effectively to save chargeable hours. 'Ignoring AI is not really an option for anyone in the litigation business,' the master of the rolls said. As for the risks of errors, privilege-based privacy, regulatory compliance and hallucinations, there are two ‘simple’ answers. 'First, any professional is personally responsible for their own work produced, however it is produced. If an expert, lawyer, accountant, engineer, or doctor produces inaccurate or unreliable opinions…[they] are likely to be liable whether they used AI or not.’

‘I would not dream of putting a case in one of my judgments that I had not looked at and read and was confident existed. Why put in something they have not checked and know to be credible from their own professional knowledge? We are mistaken when we blame AI for our own inadequacies.'

He noted: ‘AI makes very subtle mistakes often so it really is important to check every word.’

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Secondly, the way to avoid risks to confidentiality and privacy is not to feed private information into a public large-language model system, Vos said.

Expert witnesses, he said, should likewise not rely on AI to generate entire reports and must make required disclosures. However it would be ‘quite wrong to think experts should not use AI at all unless it is specifically prohibited' - in which case, 'it would be hard to use a computer’, he said. 

‘If you left AI behind, you would be left behind,’ he added. ‘The question is not how it will be used but when it will be used,’ he added. 

‘It is incredibly important to stay up to date. Being scared of AI is the very worst reaction to have. It is here to stay and we have to learn to use it,’ Vos said, adding that the opportunities for court experts would not be reduced by AI but ‘rather the reverse’.