The British government will expand the use of AI in courts in England and Wales as part of plans to make them work faster, justice minister David Lammy has told a Microsoft AI event.
Lammy, who is also deputy prime minister, said the technology will be used to support processes including transcribing speech, summarizing judgments, and scheduling cases.
"We are of course already using AI to unleash the potential of our staff, including through Microsoft's AI assistant, Copilot, of which the Ministry of Justice has been one of the fastest growing users across government," he told the Microsoft AI tour event at Excel London on 24 February.
Lammy said that courts and tribunals are testing technology already used by the Probation Service to transcribe meetings between offenders and officers, which he claimed has saved more than 25,000 hours because officers no longer need to type up notes.
He added that some immigration and asylum judges are using AI to help write notes and remarks while legal advisers and district judges in magistrates' courts are piloting its use in transcription and summarizing judgments. HM Courts and Tribunals Service will introduce an AI-assisted listing tool to support case scheduling while the system's Justice AI Unit will get more than £12 million extra funding in the next financial year.
In his speech, Lammy described the Ontario Court of Justice in Toronto as "digital by design, purposefully paperless," saying he "felt less like a visitor from another country and more like one from another time catching a glimpse of what could be."
The Ontario court has also experienced problems with AI. Last year, one of its judges ordered a criminal defense lawyer to refile submissions that included a made-up case and other unrelated ones. Justice Joseph Kenkel described the errors as "numerous and substantial," adding that generative AI should not be used for legal research for such documents.
Lammy's plans to speed up courts and reduce the backlog of cases also involve funding for more court sessions, the use of "blitz courts" that bundle similar cases together, and physical upgrades to courts and tribunals. Some of the ideas, including greater use of AI and more video appearances, came from a review by Sir Brian Leveson published earlier this month.
The justice minister also wants to halve the number of jury trials by removing defendants' rights to choose these for offences with sentences of less than three years. This expansion of judge-only trials is opposed by many backbench Labour MPs and the government may struggle to get a bill enabling it through Parliament. ®
Source: The register