Geoffrey Vos, the Master of the Rolls, is retiring in a few days. Before he leaves the most senior role in England’s civil justice system, he wants to argue that judges should use artificial intelligence to decide cases.
Current guidance tells English judges to limit AI to administrative work. Vos says he uses Microsoft Copilot daily to find documents and summarise text. He recently visited a court in Shenzhen, China, where AI assists in deciding civil disputes. He believes other courts should follow that example.
There are risks. Lawyers have been caught citing case law that AI invented. In the UK, someone recently lost their law licence because they misused the technology. Chatbots acting as legal advice are also causing a flood of new claims, some of which are false.
Vos is still convinced AI will one day help settle disputes faster and cheaper. He thinks complex commercial cases and sensitive family matters need a human judge. But he believes personal injury claims and low-value professional negligence cases could easily be decided by a machine.
“What most people desperately want in civil disputes is resolution,” Vos says. “The question is, where is the line to be drawn?”
Because he is retiring, this debate is largely philosophical for him. But for other lawyers, coders, and cybersecurity experts, the rules are changing fast.
The conversation
WIRED met Vos at the Royal Courts of Justice in London in October. We discussed how AI is entering the courts, the practical and ethical issues it raises, and how the justice system might adapt for a new generation.
This account has been edited for length and clarity.
Adapting to change
WIRED: You are retiring soon. How do you feel about leaving the post now, as AI reshapes how law is practiced and justice is administered?
GEOFFREY VOS: When I started as a lawyer, we used foolscap paper, typists, and Tipp-Ex. We moved rapidly into word processors, faxes, and eventually computers.
Lawyers are conservative with a lowercase c. But that does not mean they should be backward-looking or retrogressive. It means they should adopt change cautiously, with their eyes open.
The legal system is for the people of this country. You cannot be effective in providing access to justice if you are not on the same technological wavelength. But it is time to leave it to a new generation of leadership judges.
Building AI into practice
WIRED: How have you built AI into your practice to date?
GEOFFREY VOS: I do not use it for writing judgments. I use it for finding things out, navigating large quantities of material, and checking things. It saves me time. I have 11 meetings a day. I know there is a document created years ago that is relevant to my meeting—and Copilot finds it in seconds. I do that every day.
WIRED: In law, isn’t the devil always in the details? Doesn’t confidence in the legal system depend on the understanding that a judge will review and consider every inch of every court submission?
GEOFFREY VOS: I am a little more cautious about using it to read papers for my cases. That is because I do the most important cases in the system.
People have confidence in our justice system because they believe that our judges have absolute integrity. In order not to lose that integrity, you have to explain how you are adopting technology and achieve a broad consensus that it is appropriate.
Flooding the courts
WIRED: How is AI spilling into the courts right now? Is it changing how litigants and legal professionals behave? What issues is it throwing up?
GEOFFREY VOS: It is changing everything remarkably quickly. We see a 10 percent rise in the number of county court cases started every year—and it looks as if this may increase. That is because everybody who has a legal problem now puts it into Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude. Ask it to create a particulars of claim, a case, a claim form—it can.
WIRED: What proportion of these claims are based on sound legal principles, though? How often are people led by a chatbot to mistakenly believe they have a claim?
GEOFFREY VOS: We do not have the data. But I think it is a mistake to assume that just because a claim is created by AI, it is totally frivolous.
In a way it is a good problem, because it shows there is greater access to justice because of technology. One of the problems with justice in the past is that it has only been available to rich people.
If people have a problem sufficient to bother ChatGPT, they probably genuinely think they have a claim. When you explore their problem in detail, you might find it is actually a bit different, but it may still be a legal problem and may still be reasonable for them to have wanted to bring it to attention.
People are not generally time wasters. They are not generally trying to make trouble.
The evidence problem
WIRED: What about the opportunity for AI to fabricate evidence on which judges have previously been able to rely—images, video, voice recordings? Where does that leave the courts?
GEOFFREY VOS: Often, judges have to decide whether a person is telling the truth. That is the most difficult thing to do, because humans are not bad at lying. But judges make these decisions every day. There is absolutely no difference—in scale or qualitatively—in somebody producing a false image created by AI.
The only reason we are all getting so excited about deepfakes is because they are so new. But actually, that is the stuff of judging.
WIRED: But we are talking about a whole category of evidence that is now somewhat compromised. Doesn’t that affect a judge’s ability to decide whether somebody is lying?
GEOFFREY VOS: It was always thus. We always had to decide whether wills were forged, because people used to do that. It is exactly the same with voice recordings, and video. It is just an extension of the type of false information that is produced to the court.
People will find out when they produce fake images to the court that they are committing perjury and they will go to prison, just as if they had forged a will.
I think we need to be cautious about predicting disaster. I am very optimistic.
Where the line is drawn
WIRED: You have previously described an “inevitable” future where simpler civil cases are adjudicated entirely by AI. Why are you confident that is where we are headed?
GEOFFREY VOS: You need to find a way to deliver justice that is within the cultural grain. That does not mean you just conduct all your cases on TikTok. But if you do not understand that people are asking LLMs for the answer to almost every question under the sun, including legal questions, you are likely to get it wrong when you try to devise a process fit for the 21st century.
It is all about consensus. It will only be possible to ask people to accept algorithmic decision-making if they consent to the process in a particular case, or if society decides through legislation.
When people go to court and get an adverse outcome, even if they regard the outcome as idiosyncratic or even wrong, when it is delivered in a human way, it can be accepted over time. With AI, we have to be careful; it may be less easy for people to accept an adverse machine-driven decision.
I very much want to see a very open, international discussion about how we should resolve disputes.
I suspect part of the reason people object to trial by AI is because we cannot know precisely how a model has arrived at a decision. What is to be done about this problem of explainability?
GEOFFREY VOS: I do not think it is about reasoning; it is about outcomes. The AI can produce very plausible reasoning. You cannot see how it produced that reasoning, but you can see the reasoning it produced, and you can judge the plausibility.
I do not think you will ever do away with human judges. There is something almost biblical about the human judge; it is in the human psyche to want to be judged by their fellow man. But that does not mean that in some situations people would rather have a quick outcome—even if it is not a human outcome.
WIRED: Where would you draw the line?
GEOFFREY VOS: I do not think judges are yet in the position to say. It is a question for society, politicians, and legislation to resolve. That debate is really important.
I think that custody and family cases are one of the areas where essentially human judgment is expected, even by the younger generation. In complex commercial cases, I think that is also the case. But I think we will whittle away at how commercial cases are decided by using AI to collate information to make the decision-making process better and easier.
We will allow more people access to justice more cheaply and more quickly using technology. That will be an overall good for the economy and for the people we serve.
