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The ACT Magistrates Court’s outdated technology left much to be desired, according to retired Chief Magistrate Lorraine Walker, who has since considered how AI can fill in the gaps.
Speaking to Lawyers Weekly ahead of her keynote at the Women in Law Forum 2026, Lorraine Walker, the first woman to hold the role of ACT chief magistrate, said the court’s technological ineptitude “has been very disappointing to me”.
“It was a source of significant trying to get our filing and record-keeping electronic, and that still hasn’t happened.
“That was one of my biggest failures and that was really in part a result of my own ignorance, but also the bureaucratic processes that sit behind that,” Walker said.
The ACT Courts and Tribunal 2025-26 Business Plan identified its “inadequate resourcing of courts and tribunal operations” as a key risk, along with the reduced court capacity from December 2024 due to an upgrade of audio-visual capabilities.
The year prior, a key risk was “low digital and data maturity”.
Behind the facilitation of access to justice, ACT Courts and Tribunal set an objective to adopt a digital-first approach, including upgrading courtroom technology, developing an infrastructure master plan “based on future technology and population growth, and implementing a cyber security plan”.
In a 2024 Practice Note, the ACT Magistrates Court said that having technology to allow participants to appear remotely “has the potential to aid in the provision of access to justice”.
In her conversation with Lawyers Weekly, Walker made the case for introducing regulated artificial intelligence (AI), and encouraging its use before litigants come into the courtroom.
By leaning on its assistance, participants can learn more about what they need to do to prepare, such as writing an affidavit.
“In the Children’s Court, when you say to a parent who has just had a child removed, and they’re struggling enormously – which is why they’re there in the first place – hearing ‘oh, you need to file an affidavit before we can hear evidence from you’ is like saying ‘go and climb Mount Everest tomorrow’,” Walker said.
“AI can definitely help with some of those process issues.”
Acknowledging the resistance to the use of AI by a judicial officer, Walker said there could be some benefits to allowing a tool to “help with some basic decision-making”.
“There are some decisions which are pretty basic, and it could offer, in some areas, a form of a mediated outcome, which might allow for quick resolution of matters,” Walker said.
The Australasian Institute of Judicial Administration Limited’s (AIJA) 2026 report, titled AI Decision-Making and the Courts, set out that AI in the courtroom “has consequences for open justice, accountability, impartiality and equality before the law, procedural fairness, access to justice and efficiency”.
A number of risk factors – such as bias, hallucinations and the need for human judgement – “can be mitigated through better specification of requirements in procurement and design processes”, the AIJA set out in its conclusion.
The Victorian Law Reform Commission (VLRC) also researched AI in courtrooms and identified the opportunities for using tools responsibly, such as enhancing access to justice.
Supporting the VLRC report were comments from Federation of Community Legal Centres and Justice Connect, which highlighted that the benefits of ethically adopting and using AI to improve access to justice “far outweighs any potential risks”.
There were “greater risks in Victorian courts and tribunals not using AI and failing to invest in becoming AI literate”, they said.
Reflecting on her experience, Walker said: “Where it is at risk is where you take out the human element of decision-making, and people don’t have the choice. Sentencing is the classic example for me because so much of sentencing relies on intuition.”
Walker will share more on the future of law and AI in her keynote at the Women in Law Forum 2026 on Thursday, 12 November. More details can be found here.
