Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice in England and Wales, Sir Geoffrey Vos, has made it clear that the discussion about the role of artificial intelligence in judicial decision-making in England and Wales must begin in earnest immediately. Speaking at the Legal Geek networking event 2025, he said that the legal profession is moving from scepticism about AI to “piling in” to find uses for the technology.
What A Difference A Year Makes
In his speech, Sir Geoffrey noted that just a year ago, many lawyers and judges dismissed the idea of AI in their work. Now, he says, they are actively exploring its potential:
“Last year, lawyers were generally in denial about the value of AI to their treasured profession. Now, they are piling into using Harvey, Legora, ChatGPT 5, CoPilot, Claude and Gemini and everything else they can find for every purpose under the sun”.
Lawyers are awakening to the use of AI technology to perform work functions as they would any other tool. He told the conference that AI is:
“It’s just a tool like so many other tech tools we use every day. True, it is an important, innovative and useful tool, but, just like a chainsaw, a helicopter or a slicing machine, in the right hands it can be very useful, and in the wrong hands, it can be super-dangerous.
Three Core Rules Of AI Use By Lawyers
During his speech, Sir Geoffrey reminded the audience of his three core rules of AI use, namely the need to:
- Understand what an LLM is doing before you use it
- Avoid putting private data into a public LLM, and
- Check what comes out of an LLM before you use it for any purpose at all.
This reminder is timely as, as good as the technology may be, diligence and professional oversight are still necessary.
What AI Can Do For The Law Profession?
Sir Geoffrey takes the view that there is no fundamental objection to using AI for tasks such as drafting contracts or researching legal questions, provided that lawyers and judges check results carefully. He believes, however, that the main ethical question centres on what AI should be used for in the realm of judicial decision-making. He asked whether it would be acceptable for a machine to assess, for example, personal-injury damages; “That task would take an AI a couple of minutes, whilst the wait for a judicial hearing and determination might be more like two years”.
He said the idea that AI can be used to make judicial decisions raises three core concerns:
- Judicial decisions represent the last resort for citizens. In most cases, an appeal is the only remedy, and changes to the law by Parliament are unlikely to reverse a machine-generated decision
- Machines may struggle to replicate what humans bring to judging: empathy, insight, discretion, idiosyncrasy, and
- AI-based decisions produce outcomes based on the current state of machine intelligence, without the ongoing evolution of human thought and jurisprudence. As he explains, “In that situation, it might be very difficult for human thought processes to influence the law of the future in the way that many people might think remained appropriate”.
What Should Happen Next?
The key message from Sir Geoffrey is that the conversation about AI in law needs to start without any further delay to understand what:
- Human rights people should have in the light of ever more capable AI, and
- Humans want, as a matter of consensus, human judges rather than machines, to decide in the future.
On this second point, Sir Geoffrey asked the audience:
“Ought a criminal, before being sentenced, be able to say that they want to be sentenced by a machine rather than a human or vice versa? In China, judges already routinely use AI in that process. Do we want judges to feed the facts of our cases into an AI tool, to see what an AI tool, or even a range of AI tools, think the answer should be? Or would we rather stick with the grumpy old judge – or even – the vibrant young judge – whose experiences may differ one from another, and whose idiosyncrasies we cannot predict, and only the Court of Appeal can correct”.
Final Words
Sir Geoffrey’s message was clear: the justice system in England and Wales needs to ensure that AI is used responsibly, effectively and safely. As he stated during his speech, there is a need for a serious debate now, before it is too late, regarding human rights in the light of increasingly capable AI and whether we want “human judges rather than machines”.
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