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Sir Geoffrey Vos, England and Wales’ Master of the Rolls, has been won over by the “generally remarkable” things generative artificial intelligence can do and has encouraged his Australian peers to embrace it for the sake of public confidence and access to justice.
In a speech delivered at the John Lehane Memorial Lecture in the Supreme Court of NSW, England and Wales’ Master of the Rolls and head of the civil jurisdiction, Sir Geoffrey Vos, said practitioners have “no choice but wholeheartedly to embrace and adopt” AI.
Sir Geoffrey said that not only do large language models (LLMs) deliver “outputs more efficient, cost-effective and more quickly deliverable”, but they also provide better access to justice and ensure the law remains relevant “to the new generation of litigants and businesses”.
“Legal systems and legal profession depend on public trust and confidence. It would damage that public confidence if those providing legal services and dispute resolution services appeared protectionist or self-serving in the face of evermore-capable AI systems that can provide reasonable, if less orthodox, assistance to lawyers and judges.
“The ways in which our justice systems resolve disputes and deliver just outcomes must move with the times. If they do not, they will risk becoming irrelevant. An irrelevant justice system would be the greatest of all possible threats to the rule of law,” Sir Geoffrey said.
Sir Geoffrey shared that he and his colleagues have found that pleadings and skeleton arguments generated by AI “are of generally higher quality than was ever the case before”. While these arguments need careful scrutiny, so too did the “lengthy material generated without AI by the litigants in person of a previous generation”.
While there may be more cases than ever before, Sir Geoffrey argued this change “actually produces improved access to justice”, even if it has forced courts to develop AI mechanisms to process them all.
In making the argument for adopting and embracing AI, Sir Geoffrey used his speech – titled “The implications of the development of artificial intelligence on the judiciary and the legal profession” – to point out that arguments against AI use “ignore a number of things”.
It includes that LLMs are at an early stage and are “improving rapidly”, and that many critics have a tendency to “gloss over” what they can do, such as creating case summaries, translations, transcripts, case chronologies, and basic legal research. All of which have given lawyers a “significant head start”, Sir Geoffrey said.
Further, the hallucinations argument is “entirely flawed” and a lawyer caught using false or inaccurate material “deserves all the opprobrium and professional sanctions that are applied to them”. Sir Geoffrey said the first rule of the use of AI within the legal process “is that none of its work must be used without human checking”.
Sir Geoffrey acknowledged that LLMs are prone to bias but pointed out that humans are too, both consciously and unconsciously: “The important thing is for humans to be aware that they may be biased and for humans to also realise that machines may be biased.”
“We need to be wary of illogically holding AI to a different standard. Standing out against proper, careful usage of AI within the legal process risks damaging the trust and confidence that citizens and businesses have in the legal community and in justice itself.
“Of course, lawyers and judges must be careful to ensure that AI is used responsibly and appropriately.”
Sir Geoffrey said there was also “much exaggeration” about the quality of the work produced by LLMs: “I use LLMs daily to find things out – always checking the outcome against documented material before using it. But I find the quality generally remarkable.”
Looking to the future, Sir Geoffrey said it was likely that litigants “will come to have confidence in machine-made decisions” once those decisions are shown to be “as or more reliable than human decisions”.
Last December, the American Arbitration Association – International Centre for Dispute Resolution (AAA-ICDR) announced an AI arbitrator for two-party, document-only construction disputes up to a certain value. While the AI arbitrator will evaluate the merits of claims and prepare draft reforms, a human will review and test them.
What would need more time – and legislative change – is the ability of AI to deliver judgments in crime, civil, family and administrative cases. The use of AI in advising judges on case outcomes in common law countries is also “some way ahead”, but humans could come to accept machine-enabled resolution in small disputes.
For now, Sir Geoffrey said the law “needs to prepare itself urgently” and have an informed debate about “where the lines are to be drawn so as to preserve the humans’ rights to an independent and impartial human judicial decisions, save where there has been freely and fully informed consent given to machine-made decision making”.
In conclusion, Sir Geoffrey said the legal community needs to “work with the grain of technological advances” and be its “vanguard”.
“To ensure legal certainty in the face of rapid technological advance, they need to work out the circumstances in which there will be legal liability for harms caused by AI,” Sir Geoffrey said.
“There needs to be an open debate involving the entire international legal community as to what decisions can and what decisions should not properly be assisted or taken by machines rather than human judges. These questions need to be seen as connected, not disjointed.”
