Law Society calls for public consultation on AI use in UK courts

TL;DR:

• The Law Society of England and Wales is calling for a public consultation on the use of AI in courts and tribunals, arguing that the stakes warrant explicit public debate beyond profession-internal rulemaking.
• The Society’s response to the Civil Justice Council consultation asks the Solicitors Regulation Authority to issue specific guidance on solicitor duties when AI prepares court documents and to review its code of conduct.
• HM Courts & Tribunals Service should also publish simple, accessible user guidance on AI use in court, and disclosure requirements should clearly state when AI is used.

The Society’s position is that AI offers “significant benefits” on efficiency, costs, delays, and access to justice, but that hallucinations, bias, confidentiality, and data protection require explicit guardrails before benefits can be banked. Chief executive Ian Jeffery framed the ask as a “balanced framework” with safeguards for accuracy and fairness that “build public trust in the system” — a notable choice of language given the GOV.UK Chat day-one accuracy controversy unfolding in parallel this week.

Three specific regulatory asks

The response sets out three layers of guidance the Society wants to see: SRA conduct-of-business guidance for solicitors using AI in court work; HMCTS user-facing guidance for litigants and court users; and Ministry of Justice review of AI use across the justice system. The disclosure ask — clear labelling when AI has prepared or contributed to court documents — sits alongside training and governance requirements as the practical levers the Society wants pulled.

UK angle: AI regulation by sector, again

The Law Society’s intervention is another datapoint in the UK’s context-based AI regulation pattern. Rather than waiting for a horizontal AI Act, individual sectoral regulators and professional bodies are setting the terms for their domains. The intervention reinforces that for UK solicitors, AI-assisted document preparation is a professional-conduct issue first and a technology decision second — and the bar for disclosure and oversight will be set by SRA guidance, not by suppliers’ marketing.

Looking forward

The CJC consultation response is the first move; the SRA’s response on solicitor-conduct guidance, and HMCTS’s on user-facing guidance, are the next decisions to watch. UK law firms running AI pilots on document drafting, contract review, and litigation support should expect formal disclosure obligations to materialise inside 12 to 18 months, and should be building audit trails of AI involvement now — retroactive reconstruction of who-prompted-what is the procedural risk that disclosure rules will expose.