Sir Geoffrey Vos, the Master of the Rolls, has urged lawyers to embrace technological change and the use of AI to ensure younger generations engage with the justice system.
Sir Geoffrey Vos, head of civil justice in England and Wales, said in a speech at The Judicial Institute for Scotland, Parliament Square, Edinburgh, last Thursday, he expects AI to “be used in every aspect of the work of lawyers and judges”.
He said legal professionals need to “persuade all the generations… of the relevance of our justice systems to them” and that judges and lawyers should “abandon the assumption that the TikTok generation will eventually become like us”.
His speech highlighted the “great responsibility” of the current generation of lawyers and judges. “We happen to be those operating our justice systems at a time of seismic change. It is therefore incumbent on us, in my view, to do the hard work necessary to lay the foundations for justice systems of the future that will use technology to a far greater extent than ever before, and, more importantly, will provide justice to generations of people and businesses, whose lives will have been transformed in all their aspects by the adoption of artificial intelligence,” he said.
He added that it was the responsibility of legal professionals “to understand how justice systems can and should change”, and “to understand the attitudes and expectations of those new generations of people who the justice systems of the future will serve”.
Sir Geoffrey called for the “essential and urgent” creation of justice systems “that are relevant and robust in the new technological environment”, although he acknowledged this “will not be easy” and that it will “challenge many of our deeply engrained analogue assumptions.”
He said: “There are essentially two strands: the first is to embrace technological change and to shape how it is used within justice systems alongside the generations who are most familiar with it. The second strand is communication, because there is a danger that the distinctive importance of justice systems and justice itself, as compared to the other arms of state, is not readily understood by those who obtain all their information online or on social media.
“If the importance of justice and the rule of law is not properly understood, there is an enhanced risk that inappropriate uses of AI will pass unnoticed under the radar without proper scrutiny.”
Understanding generational and communication differences was a key message in Sir Geoffrey’s speech.
He said: “The Facebook generation still uses Facebook and is cautious about Insta and TikTok. Likewise, the Instagram generation regards Facebook as old hat and is cautious about TikTok. The TikTok generation is unlikely to develop so as to embrace mainstream paid journalism, or even in all probability, the BBC.
“As lawyers and judges, we need to persuade all the generations I have spoken about of the relevance of our justice systems to them and to persuade them of the relevance of the rule of law to them. We will not do that successfully unless we engage with their methods of communication… AI and social media themselves provide good opportunities to engage younger generations in the development of an appropriate justice system for the new machine age.”
He added: “Lawyers and judges need to abandon the assumption that the TikTok generation will eventually become like us. They will not. Their expectations are and will remain quite different. But that does not mean that we should forsake them, nor does it mean that the members of the TikTok generation will not experience legal problems, civil, family and criminal.
“When they do, they will expect to find that their judges and elected politicians have created for them a justice system that is modern, technologically effective and can produce just and effective outcomes quickly and at proportionate cost. They will require those outcomes to be delivered in most cases online without needless attendances in court save in the most grave and important circumstances.”
He concluded that “justice and the rule of law will remain critical in the machine age” but that “ the practices and processes of the 19th century will need to be rapidly adapted to provide relevant digital justice systems fit for the 21st century”.
