TL;DR

Geoffrey Vos, who steps down within days as Master of the Rolls, the top post in England’s civil justice system, told WIRED in an interview published on 28 October that courts worldwide should consider following a court he visited in Shenzhen, where judges decide civil disputes with heavy AI help. He also links a rise in county court claims to people drafting cases with chatbots.

What Vos said

Judicial guidance in England currently limits judges to using AI for administrative work. Vos says he uses Microsoft Copilot daily to find old documents and summarise large volumes of material, but not to write judgments.

His most concrete claim concerns caseload. County court claims are growing by around 10% a year, he says, and may grow faster, because “everybody who has a legal problem now puts it into Gemini, ChatGPT, or Claude”. He admits there is no data on how many of those claims are sound, but says it is a mistake to assume a claim is frivolous because AI drafted it, describing the trend as greater access to justice.

On deepfakes, he is unworried. Judging whether evidence is genuine is, he argues, what judges have always done, as with forged wills, and people who submit fake images will face perjury charges.

Where the line falls

Vos repeats a view he has set out before, that low-value civil cases such as personal injury claims could one day be decided by AI, while family, custody and complex commercial cases would keep a human judge. We reported his earlier remarks on AI deciding small claims in August and on arbitration enforcement in October.

He makes consent the condition: people must either agree to machine decisions in their own case or society must decide through legislation. Judges, he adds, are not yet able to draw that line; it is for society, politicians and legislation.

WIRED notes the problems on the other side: lawyers caught citing invented case law, and, in a UK first, someone losing their licence to practise partly through misuse of AI.

Looking Forward

Vos’s departure takes a senior judicial voice for AI in courts out of the debate at a time when, on his account, demand on the courts is rising. In our view, his successor inherits both his open questions and the practical one he raises: if chatbots keep adding to county court volumes, the courts may need AI tools of their own simply to keep pace. For UK businesses, cheaper and faster resolution of low-value disputes is the prize; the safeguards around it are still undecided.