MoJ Pilots Justice Transcribe for Family Courts as Lawyers Call for Child Safeguards
TL;DR: HM Courts & Tribunals Service is testing Justice Transcribe, an in-house AI transcription tool, against accuracy and cost thresholds that could inform nationwide rollout. Family law specialists have welcomed the access-to-justice goal but warn that anonymisation alone will not prevent children being identified through contextual detail in small or complex cases.
What the Pilot Is Actually Testing
The Ministry of Justice is running the study to see whether Justice Transcribe can meet accuracy standards while cutting the time and cost of producing court transcripts. Today, Crown Court transcripts are produced by contracted providers at fees reaching into the thousands, and family court transcripts require a court application plus payment to a contractual transcription company. Courts minister Sarah Sackman KC framed the initiative around victim access: transcripts give victims clarity on proceedings without forcing them to face perpetrators again to recall what was said.
The Safeguarding Concerns Are Specific
Robert Webster, a partner at Maguire Family Law, told Today’s Family Lawyer that increased volume and accessibility of anonymised transcripts still carries real identification risk through contextual detail — particularly in smaller communities or unusual family structures. Alex Verdan KC of Stewarts, who leads the firm’s children practice, added that family proceedings depend on careful evaluation of nuanced evidence where subtle transcription errors in language, tone or attribution can carry disproportionate consequences.
Both lawyers support the broad direction. Their objection is that AI transcription in family law cannot rely on the safeguards that were designed for a paper-and-human-transcriber process. They ask instead that storage, access controls and data retention be designed for AI’s error modes.
What the Law Society and Ada Lovelace Institute Are Pushing For
The Law Society welcomed the pilot and pointed to Sir Brian Leveson’s earlier recommendations on affordable court records. Vice-president Brett Dixon referenced a recent Ada Lovelace Institute report on AI transcription challenges and asked that government-commissioned research formally include evaluation of accuracy, fairness and confidentiality, plus assessment of staff training needs. Crucially, Dixon called for audio recordings to be retained so accuracy can be independently verified — a design decision that maps directly onto the bias-mitigation approach the Department for Transport has just published for its own AI consultation tool.
Looking Forward
The MoJ pilot joins a growing UK pattern: public-sector AI deployments designed around explicit human-in-the-loop verification rather than fully autonomous processing. Expect the first evaluation outputs to be scrutinised against three tests — transcription accuracy for diverse accents and non-standard English, child identification risk in anonymised family-court outputs, and the full cost-per-transcript once human review time is counted. UK legal tech suppliers should watch the accuracy benchmarks closely: the thresholds set here will shape private-sector court technology procurement for years.