Top English judge says AI could decide some civil court cases

Geoffrey Vos, one of England's most senior judges, says artificial intelligence could decide many civil court cases. He thinks injury claims and low-value professional negligence claims are good candidates. He told Wired the real question is where to draw the line. Vos retires within days as Master of the Rolls, the top job in England's civil justice system.

What he saw and what he wants

Vos recently visited a court in Shenzhen, China, where judges decide civil disputes with heavy help from AI. He was impressed and thinks courts around the world should consider doing the same. His reasoning is simple. In his words, what most people desperately want in civil disputes is resolution. He believes AI could make that faster and far cheaper.

He would keep human judges for complicated commercial disputes and sensitive family cases. He also stressed that public trust depends on judges being open about how they use technology and reaching broad agreement that it is appropriate.

How judges use AI today

Current guidance advises judges in England to limit AI to administrative tasks. Vos says he uses Microsoft Copilot daily to find old documents and summarize large amounts of text. He does not use it to write judgments. He is more cautious about using it to read papers for his own cases, which are among the most important in the system.

The risks

• Several lawyers have been caught citing case law that AI made up.
• In a UK first, someone lost their license to practice partly because they misused AI.
• People using chatbots as legal help are filing more claims, and some are bogus.

Vos says county court cases are rising about 10 percent a year. He links that to people asking Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude to draft their legal papers. He says there is no data on how many of those claims are sound. Still, he does not assume an AI-written claim is frivolous, and he sees more access to justice as a good problem to have.

What to do

If you use a chatbot to understand a legal problem, treat its answer as a starting point. Chatbots can invent cases and rules that do not exist. Check anything important with a qualified lawyer or an official court source before you file or rely on it.

What happens next

Nothing has changed in the rules yet. Vos describes the debate as largely philosophical for him, since he is retiring. Whether English courts ever let AI decide cases, and which kinds, is still an open question for the next generation of judges.