AI legal assistants to be trialled in crown courts

TL;DR:

  • David Lammy will announce AI legal assistants and case-listing tools to be trialled in crown courts in England and Wales.
  • The Law Society warns the technology must not replace “vital funding and additional court staff” and demands published evaluations.
  • Crown court backlogs hit a record 80,000-plus cases this year, with some trials not listed until 2030.

The government will trial AI legal assistants in crown courts in an attempt to clear a record backlog, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy is set to announce at London Tech Week. The tools, developed with legal experts and AI firms, would handle routine research and case analysis, while a separate AI system helps judges identify trial-ready cases and group similar hearings. Software will first be tested in controlled environments before any courtroom use.

Efficiency against a backdrop of caution

The Ministry of Justice frames this as freeing staff from admin: every probation officer in England and Wales now has “Justice Transcribe”, an AI tool that records and transcribes offender meetings, projected to save the equivalent of 18,750 days a year. A similar tool is being trialled in immigration and asylum tribunals.

But the Law Society, representing more than 200,000 solicitors, cautioned that AI “cannot replace vital funding and additional court staff” and that pilots must be thoroughly and publicly evaluated. The warning is grounded in recent failures: in an £89m case against Qatar National Bank, 18 of 45 cited authorities were fictitious after a claimant used public AI tools, and a Haringey housing case cited phantom case law five times. A separate review found a Microsoft Copilot “hallucination” — a non-existent match — had helped justify a football policing decision, an episode that prompted guidance pausing AI use in police court statements.

Looking forward

The numbers explain the urgency: crown court cases awaiting hearing topped 80,000, more than double the 2019 figure, with 2,600 trials not listed until at least 2028. AI that triages listings could genuinely move that dial. The risk the profession is flagging is substitution — using software to paper over staffing gaps rather than augment them. With the government also scaling back jury trials, the courtroom is becoming an unusually candid test of whether AI complements public services or quietly hollows them out.

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