In a few days, judge Geoffrey Vos will retire as Master of the Rolls, the most senior position in England’s civil justice system. As one of his final acts, he’s trying to stoke a debate about whether—and how—judges should be using artificial intelligence.

Under the latest guidance, judges in England are advised to confine their use of AI to administrative tasks, and Vos tells WIRED he uses Microsoft Copilot all the time to locate far-flung documents and summarize large bodies of text. But recently, he visited a court in Shenzhen, China, where civil disputes are already being decided by judges with heavy assistance from AI. Impressed by what he saw, Vos believes that courts across the globe should consider following.

That road is littered with pitfalls. Multiple lawyers have been caught citing case law hallucinated by AI, and in a first for the UK, somebody recently lost their license to practice in part because they misused the technology. Meanwhile, with chatbots as their legal counsel, litigants are flooding the courts with an unprecedented number of claims, some of them bogus.

Yet Vos remains convinced that AI will someday help resolve civil disputes more rapidly and in ways that cost far less. While complicated commercial disputes and sensitive family cases might require a human judge, he believes that personal injury claims, low-value professional negligence cases, and the like could easily be adjudicated by AI.

“What most people desperately want in civil disputes is resolution,” Vos tells WIRED.

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