Episode 8. Civil Justice Council AI report, what law firms change.

0:08 On Thursday the Civil Justice Council recommended a new sentence for every witness statement of fact in the civil courts.

0:15 The witness, not the solicitor, would declare that AI used in preparing the statement has not generated or influenced its substance.

0:25 If your firm takes witness statements, the person who signs at the foot of the page would be vouching for what your tools did to their words.

0:36 Good morning, and welcome to The Legal AI Brief, the Monday round of the AI news that matters to smaller law firms.

0:43 I am Saqib Khan. My legal career began in large commercial law firms and includes fourteen years as an owner of a law firm and four years as a fee-paid county court judge.

0:56 I run Adliora, an AI consultancy that helps small and mid-sized firms adopt AI safely, profitably and within the rules.

1:06 Every Monday I take the developments from the past week, separate the noise from the parts that touch your practice, and set out in plain terms what a sensible firm does about them.

1:17 Let us get into the week.

1:20 Four stories this week, and only one of them comes from a technology company.

1:24 On Thursday the twenty ninth of October the Civil Justice Council published the final report of its working group on the use of AI for preparing court documents.

1:35 It runs to fifty pages and makes fifteen recommendations. That is the main story.

1:42 The same day the Lady Chief Justice held a valedictory hearing for Sir Geoffrey Vos after nearly six years as Master of the Rolls.

1:51 In a speech written for the Law Society of Scotland's annual conference, held in Edinburgh that morning without him, he said that human lawyers will not become a thing of the past.

2:02 His successor from the first of November is Sir Colin Birss, who chaired the working group behind Thursday's report.

2:10 On Wednesday Artificial Lawyer reported that Anthropic, the company behind the Claude models, has added a set of ready-made legal workflows it calls Artifacts.

2:21 One is a cite check that compares a document with its sources and flags quotations and page references that do not match.

2:30 Adliora uses Claude in its own work, so you know where I stand, and the point holds for any vendor's tool: treat it as something to test rather than a safeguard to lean on.

2:42 And on Friday the Law Society Gazette reported that Lord Foster of Bath, who chairs the House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee, has written to the courts minister, Sarah Sackman, about the delay in making electronic wills valid.

2:58 The Law Commission recommended that reform eighteen months ago, and he has asked for a reply within two weeks.

3:05 Start with where the report places responsibility, because everything else follows from it.

3:10 The working group concluded that the regulation of AI in court documents begins with legal representatives and their regulators, which for most of you means the SRA, and not with the rules of court.

3:22 It asks the regulators and the Legal Services Board to work together, to consider issuing joint guidance, and to build responsible use of AI into professional training.

3:32 It wants one new instrument. The Civil Procedure Rule Committee, which writes the civil rules, should prepare a practice direction in plain language that gathers in one place what the courts have said about AI and the sanctions for misusing it.

3:47 Now the documents you sign yourself. For statements of case, skeleton arguments and other written advocacy, the report recommends no AI declaration of any kind.

3:58 You would not have to name the tools you used, and no new rule would make you ask the court's permission to use one.

4:04 The working group gave its reasons plainly. A declaration about the tool tells the court nothing about whether the content is accurate, it invites argument over what counts as AI, and naming a tool risks becoming, in the report's words, an inappropriate proxy for reliability.

4:22 Your duty stays where it was, and so does your name on the document.

4:26 That last point carries one change. The current practice direction lets a statement of case be signed in the name of the firm.

4:34 The report asks the new practice direction to make clear that, at least where AI is concerned, the specific legal professional who takes responsibility for the document must be identified.

4:45 A firm name on its own will not do. The witness statement is where the report moves furthest.

4:52 In February the interim report proposed that the legal representative should declare that AI had not been used to generate or influence a trial witness statement.

5:03 The final report moves that declaration onto the witness and widens it to every statement of fact, whether or not it is for trial, and whether the party has a lawyer or acts in person.

5:16 Each witness of fact would state that AI used in preparing the statement has not generated or influenced its substantive content.

5:25 The report defines both verbs. To generate content means to produce or modify it, whether or not anyone intended the tool to do so.

5:35 To influence content means to affect how it is selected, analysed, developed or evaluated, without producing it.

5:43 And the working group said that AI which embellishes, strengthens or otherwise alters the evidence can be viewed as analogous to witness coaching, which the courts do not permit.

5:55 It bans no tool. The test looks at the result. A statement that a solicitor prepares and signs for a procedural or interim purpose, rather than as a witness of fact, needs no declaration, and the solicitor answers for it.

6:11 There is a passage on transcription that every litigation team should read.

6:15 A transcription that reproduces what the witness said accurately raises no concern.

6:21 The report warns, though, that an AI transcription tool can produce words that nobody said, or invent content outright, even though it can be filed as an administrative tool.

6:33 That is why the working group refuses to sort tools into categories at all.

6:38 The risk lies in what the tool does to the content, not in the label on the box.

6:45 Experts are treated differently. An expert whose use of AI generated or influenced the substance of a report would have to declare it.

6:55 The revised guidance on instructing experts is to put three questions to them.

7:00 Did AI generate or influence the substance of your evidence?

7:05 If so, what must you disclose so that your method can be scrutinised?

7:10 And does that disclosure need to name the tool? Translations stay with a professional human translator who certifies them, and an AI translation should travel with the original text so that it can be checked.

7:25 Disclosure is left alone for now, pending a separate review of the disclosure rules.

7:31 And the council itself is to consider, as a matter of urgency, guidance for litigants in person who use AI.

7:39 All of this is a set of recommendations. The rule committee has to draft the practice direction and amend the rules, and the report gives no date for either.

7:48 Sir Geoffrey Vos, welcoming it as chair of the council two days before he stepped down, said the use of AI must not compromise the accuracy, reliability or integrity of material placed before the court.

8:08 A word about what I do. Adliora advises small and mid-sized law firms on adopting AI without falling foul of the rules that govern you. Where to begin, which tools earn their place, what your duties on supervision and confidentiality mean in practice, and how to write a policy your people will follow. If this subject sits on your desk and nobody in the firm owns it, that is the problem I am paid to solve.

8:42 For a firm of five to fifty people with a civil litigation team, the report reaches the way you take witness statements, the way you instruct experts and the name you put on your pleadings.

8:54 Take the statement first. In my experience a trainee or a paralegal often takes the account, works from interview notes or a recording, produces a draft and then tidies it.

9:06 Every step at which a tool touches the words would be a step the witness vouches for.

9:12 Suppose the paralegal pastes rough notes into a general assistant and asks for a cleaner statement.

9:18 The tool has produced and modified content, and on the report's definition the witness cannot honestly make the declaration.

9:27 The witness signs, but your firm wrote the process, and it is your process that the cross-examiner will reach for.

9:34 None of this is new in principle. Practice Direction 32 has long required a witness statement to be in the witness's own words where practicable, and for trial statements in the Business and Property Courts Practice Direction 57AC has the witness confirm it in terms.

9:52 What changes is that the witness would sign a sentence about AI in particular, and that sentence turns an internal habit into a question anyone can ask at trial.

10:04 Transcription deserves its own rule. If you use a tool to transcribe interviews, keep the recording or your notes, and have someone check the transcript against them before it becomes the base of a statement.

10:17 The interim report made the same point, and the final report's warning about invented content explains why.

10:25 Then there is the client who arrives having already run their account through a chatbot.

10:30 You cannot unwind that, but you can find out about it at the first meeting, before the draft exists, rather than in the witness box.

10:39 Experts come next. If you instruct a medical or valuation expert, ask in the letter of instruction whether and how they use AI.

10:49 An expert who has to declare that AI shaped the report has handed the other side a line of cross-examination, and you want to know that before you serve it.

10:59 Translations matter to any firm with clients who work in more than one language.

11:04 A document run through a free translation tool needs a professional translator's certificate and the original alongside it, and a free tool raises its own questions about confidentiality.

11:17 And the name on the document. Where your statements of case go out signed in the firm's name alone, the report asks the new practice direction to require a named individual, at least where AI has been used.

11:31 Decide now who that is for each matter.

11:35 Here is the order in which I would take it. This week, sit down with whoever runs your litigation team and write out how a witness statement moves through the firm, from first contact to signature.

11:49 At each step, note which tool touches the words. Then set the rule in writing.

11:56 No general assistant drafts, polishes, strengthens or reorders a witness's evidence, even where the result reads better.

12:05 Transcription is permitted, provided the recording or the notes are kept and the transcript is checked against them.

12:12 Add one question to your first interview checklist, asking whether the client or witness has used AI to prepare or rehearse their account.

12:21 Add another to your standard letter of instruction to experts.

12:25 Settle which named solicitor signs each statement of case, and record it on the file.

12:30 Finally, note the report in your AI policy, with its date, so that the policy shows the firm has read it ahead of any rule change.

12:39 Here is the one instruction to take from today. Before your next witness statement goes out for signature, go through it with the witness against your own notes or recording, so that you can show where every paragraph came from.

12:52 The bench note comes from the Administrative Court. On Thursday, the same day as the council's report, Lord Justice Holgate and Mr Justice Wall handed down judgment in a judicial review of a decision by the Crown Prosecution Service to continue a prosecution.

13:10 The written record of that decision relied three times on an authority called R v J.

13:17 It is agreed that the case does not exist. In a witness statement the senior prosecutor said the citation was an error and that she had meant a House of Lords decision from 2009.

13:32 The court called the explanation of how the non-existent case came to be relied on unsatisfactory, then asked whether it mattered to the outcome, and answered that it did not.

13:44 The claim failed on its merits. Legal Futures, reporting the case, recalled that in July the CPS had admitted putting hallucinated cases produced by AI before the High Court in an extradition appeal.

14:01 This judgment makes no finding of that kind. It records the prosecutor's explanation, says nothing about AI, and I make no such suggestion.

14:12 Read it as a judge reads it. The authority sat in an internal decision record, not a skeleton argument, and it came to light after the record was disclosed to the other side.

14:26 Every citation your firm writes down is a citation someone will one day open.

14:39 And a word about my technological venture, so you know where I stand. Bracton is a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the ground up, rather than bolted onto software written twenty years ago. Overnight it reads every live matter, so the morning list is waiting with the action drafted and the research carrying a source you can open. A person signs everything off. Bracton legal dot co dot uk.

15:10 That is the week. If you take one point from it, take this. A person in your firm has to own what these tools produce, and that will not change whatever the tools cost or how capable they become.

15:23 If you want an honest view of where your firm stands, there is a two-minute readiness check on the Adliora site, and you are welcome to send a short message and talk it through with me directly.

15:35 I am Saqib Khan. This has been The Legal AI Brief, and I will be back next Monday with the week that was.

15:42 Thank you for listening.

15:44 The transcript of this episode, with a timestamp on every line, sits beside the two minute readiness check at adliora dot com. Have a great week.