// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Should AI Decide Your Court Case? This Judge Says Yes
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. “The question is, where is the line to be drawn?”
Given his impending retirement, the debate for Vos is largely a philosophical one. But for everyone else in the profession—and for coders, cybersecurity experts, math professors, and a whole host of others—the rules are changing fast.
In October, WIRED met with Vos at his office at the Royal Courts of Justice, London. We discussed the ways that AI is spilling into the courts, the practical and ethical issues it raises, and how the justice system might adapt to serve a new generation raised alongside the technology.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: You’re just a few days away from retirement. How do you feel about leaving the post at this particular juncture, as AI begins to reshape how law is practiced and justice administered?
GEOFFREY VOS: When I started as a lawyer, we had foolscap paper, typists, and Tipp-Ex. We moved rapidly into word processors, faxes, and eventually computers.