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In about 1988/9 I prepared for Butterworths a prototype will drafting program using the same expert system, Crystal, that Richard Susskind used to prepare an expert system on Latent Damage Law. Both experiments were in deliberately narrow ranges of law. The biggest technical problem that I met was need to design a process would recognise its limits and tell the user: "Ask a human."

I doubt whether the techies have cracked that problem yet. Until they do, the rules of the online court will have to allow for human intervention when cases go wrong for technical reasons. I expect that cases submitted to an electronic system will be burdened with a disproportionate of preparatory work to ensure that the system has in it every crumb of evidence and law that might conceivably be relevant no matter how remotely.