Litigation Trending - ChatGPT is 'jolly useful', according to Court of Appeal judge

Earlier this year, we reported on Sir Geoffrey Vos' lecture to commercial litigators in which he addressed the opportunities to embrace digital innovation and generative AI within the dispute resolution process. While we predicted that delegating judicial decision-making to AI was a rather remote possibility (although not one that Sir Geoffrey ruled out), the prospect of judicial decision making through AI came a little closer to reality this month. In a recent speech, Court of Appeal judge Lord Justice Birss explained that he had used ChatGPT to help draft part of a judgment. His conclusion was that "it's jolly useful".

Lord Justice Birss praised the large language model's "real potential" during his speech at a Law Society event, confirming that he had asked ChatGPT to summarise a particular area of law. Upon reviewing the paragraph it produced and being satisfied with its content, he decided to include it in his judgment. Lord Justice Birss was quick to point out that he was "taking full personal responsibility" for what was in his judgment, but confirmed he used the software to automate some of the drafting, explaining that "All it did was a task which I was about to do and which I knew the answer and could recognise an answer as being acceptable".

As far as we know, this is the first known instance of a British judge using AI software to assist with writing a judgment, perhaps indicating how far we've come already and that a delegation of decision making isn't as far away as it might have seemed to us back in May when Sir Geoffrey spoke.

It remains to be seen how these new tools will be regulated and how we might fit them in to our existing legal frameworks and the judicial system in England and Wales. Radical transformation won't take place overnight but incremental change is already happening. 

Author: Harriet Martin, Associate