The master of the rolls has outlined a future where personal injury disputes are largely settled through automated systems and perhaps without any legal costs incurred at all.

In a speech yesterday on the future for dispute resolution, Sir Geoffrey Vos said that for small claims, parties often want a swift cost-free resolution ‘without much caring whether the outcome is robust and dependable’.

That desire for almost immediate resolution of disputes is likely to grow, and Vos said the justice system will have to adapt further to cater for those needs. ‘The evidential landscape is likely to look very different in 2040 when most of what individuals and corporations do will be indelibly recorded and payment systems will be using cryptoassets on-chain,’ he said.

Crutches lay on a sofa next to a blurred image of a man on a laptop

The master of the rolls looked ahead to a justice system offering automated and almost immediate resolution

Source: iStock

‘Factual disputes as we know them will become almost entirely a thing of the past certainly in most civil claims.’

Referring to the 60 million small claims brought every year on eBay, the master of the rolls said that, by 2040, parties to these type and size of transactions ‘will be even more unwilling to wait any time at all for such issues to be resolved, and even less willing to consider paying for the privilege’.

‘I would expect that most such disputes will be resolved very quickly indeed by AI-driven portals that provide a rough and ready resolution,’ he added.

Personal injury and medical negligence claims are likely to look different once events that give rise to them are recorded on-chain, Vos suggested. Cars recording speeds at the moment of impact – or even who programmed the system piloting the vehicle – would make any disagreements between parties obsolete.

Vos continued: ‘I would hazard a guess that such claims will be more about the evaluation of indisputable evidence and the assessment of compensation than anything else.’

For the more immediate future, he predicted that a fully functioning digital justice system should be in place by the mid-2020s, with the focus very much on resolution and identifying issues that truly divide the parties. This would coincide, he insisted, with the end of paper in the county court. He noted that increasing numbers of lawyers and judges he meets on court visits welcome the convenience and practicality of working on-screen.

‘The days of carting trolley loads of papers around courts are mercifully numbered,’ added Vos.

 

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