The Ministry of Justice thinks it found a magic wand for the disaster area that is the English and Welsh court system. At London Tech Week, Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy announced a plan to trial artificial intelligence assistants in Crown Courts. The goal is simple. Use tech to slash a staggering backlog that recently topped 80,000 cases.
It sounds great on paper. The AI will group similar hearings, flag trial-ready cases, and handle routine casework. But tech cannot fix a house with a rotting foundation.
Lawyers are already pushing back, and they are right. Ian Jeffery, chief executive of the Law Society, issued a blunt warning following the announcement. Tech cannot replace human staff or actual money. If the government tries to use algorithms as a cheap alternative to proper funding, the justice system will collapse further.
The reality is grim. We have trials being listed for 2028 and 2030. Victims are waiting years for justice. Sending in bots to sort the paperwork is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
The Illusion of Efficiency in a Starved System
The government loves data points that look good in a press release. Lammy pointed out that an in-house tool called Justice Transcribe is already saving thousands of days of admin work for probation staff. It records and transcribes conversations with offenders, allegedly freeing up 18,750 calendar days of time every year.
Now they want to scale this thinking to the Crown Court.
But a court is not a call center. You can speed up the scheduling all you want, but if there is no physical judge available, no barristers in the room, and a leaking roof in the courtroom, the case stays stuck. The Criminal Bar Association has spent years warning about systemic underfunding. Barristers left the profession in droves because the legal aid rates were abysmal.
The logic of dropping AI assistants into this mess is deeply flawed. It assumes the bottleneck is administrative. It is not. The bottleneck is human.
When Algorithms Hallucinate in Court
Legal tech has a massive trust problem. It is prone to making things up.
Just days ago, the UK Human Rights Blog highlighted the case of Cork v Smith, a sobering reminder of what happens when lawyers trust software blindly. A junior associate used AI to research insolvency law. The AI simply invented text for an insolvency rule that did not exist. The law firm ended up facing public criticism, a referral to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA), and a bill for extra costs.
We saw an even worse example in a £89 million damages case against Qatar National Bank. The claimants submitted 45 case law citations. 18 of them were completely fabricated by an AI tool.
It is not just a corporate problem either. A recent review into the policing of a football match between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv found that Microsoft Copilot invented a non-existent match against West Ham. The police used that fake data to help justify banning fans.
Imagine those same errors creeping into Crown Court cases where someone's freedom is on the line.
Andrew Thomas KC, vice chair of the Criminal Bar Association, made a crucial point. Criminal law relies on human interaction. Software lacks the emotional and social intelligence to understand the nuances of evidence. A bot cannot read a witness's body language or spot the subtle inconsistencies that an experienced barrister notices during cross-examination.
What the Government Needs to Do Next
If this pilot is going to happen, the Ministry of Justice cannot treat it as a corporate rollout. The legal sector needs strict boundaries immediately.
- Mandatory Transparency: The Law Society is demanding that the evaluations of these trials be made completely public. We need to see exactly where the tech fails, not just the cherry-picked success stories.
- Human-in-the-Loop Verification: No AI-generated summary or scheduling decision should be final without human sign-off. The courts must treat AI output as a rough draft at best.
- Strict Sanctions for Hallucinations: Following the Elden v HMRC case earlier this year, tribunals started demanding that full judgments be annexed to any referenced case law. The Crown Courts must implement similar verification rules to stop fake precedents from polluting the system.
- Match Tech Investment with Staff Funding: For every pound spent on cloud computing and software licenses, the government needs to invest equally in court clerks, security staff, and legal aid.
The Ministry of Justice says it wants the tools up and running quickly but promises that rigorous testing takes priority. They need to stick to that promise. If they run this pilot as a shortcut to save cash on staffing, they will compromise the integrity of the entire justice system. Tech should support humans, not replace them.
