Lawyers to survive AI

And judges too — but they’ll have to adapt, says master of the rolls

Lawyers will be needed in the machine age as much as they are now, the master of the rolls said yesterday — if not more so. But they should not expect to be doing exactly the same things in exactly the same way.

Sir Geoffrey Vos MR

Addressing the Association of Law Teachers’ annual conference at Exeter university yesterday, Sir Geoffrey Vos said clients would no longer value lawyers in the same way as before because they would have their own access to the “previously forbidden land” of laws and legal precedents.

“All that will be available, much of it free of charge, by the use of AI-driven tools,” he explained. Instead, clients would value the guidance and insight of trained lawyers to explain what machines had advised and, perhaps also, decided.

Vos, the second most senior judge in England and Wales, said the one of the many hidden trends in our rapidly changing society was the accelerating complexity of all our lives:

Even the Tik-Tok generation do not find that complexity easy to navigate and understand. Lawyers will still comprise a section of society with a better grasp of the rules and the ways in which those rules operate to affect everyone’s daily lives. The ability to understand, martial and explain complexity in a world of ever more capable machines will be crucial to the survival of the legal community.

Vos pointed to recent research by French academics to support his view that the level of damages to be awarded in a personal injury claim would be “informed or provided by machines” within 15 or 20 years’ time. But that did not make human judges superfluous.

“Humans will remain crucial to the development of legal principles as human culture and human society change,” he said. “Machines will probably not be able to develop the law for the benefit of humanity in the way that human judges can do.”

Lawyers were not becoming redundant either:

The clients still come to lawyers. But instead of coming to seek legal advice, they come to seek a lawyer’s confirmation of the correctness of what AI has told them is the legal position. And, of course, they do not want to pay their lawyer the same fee as they would have paid before they had access to AI-driven legal advice.

This phenomenon is already leading to reduced law firm recruitment. And, where the law firms are recruiting, they are looking for different skill sets. Of course, they are looking for tech-savvy young lawyers, paralegals and tech-savvy non-lawyers. But that is not all, they need a very particular kind of client-facing lawyers to lead and guide both tech-savvy and tech-sceptic clients through the minefield of AI-driven justice.

Meanwhile, the use of AI was already resulting in a noticeable increase in county court claims, as well as a spike in claims that had been created wholly or partly by AI. And this had advantages:

“Many of my judicial colleagues report that the use of AI by litigants in person has noticeably enhanced the quality of both the written and the oral submissions that they are able to make to the court,” he said.

Vos was not suggesting that lawyers would be unnecessary in the future — far from it. “But lawyers will need to adapt quickly to the changing expectations of young people brought up with the ability to find out anything by tapping a portable screen.”

Palestine Action

On 28 April, the Court of Appeal is expected to begin hearing the home secretary’s appeal against a High Court ruling in February that her predecessor’s ban on Palestine Action was unlawful.

There will be considerable interest in the appeal, not least from some 3,300 people who were arrested by the police for displaying signs supporting the banned terrorist group.

In today’s Law Society Gazette, I look ahead to the issues and explain why ministers have now reversed a well-meaning but risky compromise introduced by the House of Lords.