SOME AI MATTERS

The Franco – British Lawyers Society (FBLS) had a recent low-key AI seminar in Edinburgh. We had a small number of excellent presentations. Outlined below are the main takeaway points from the event.

First, the presentation from M. Raphael Dana of the Paris Bar, who is one of the confirmed speakers at the FBLS 15/16 October 2026 event in Belfast.

• The existence of Bar professional Guidelines.
• The concept of sovereignty i.e. balancing local independence (which can of course be at a National level) with foreign infrastructure.
• The vital importance of professional secrecy / confidentiality.
• Competence- The lawyer's oath.
• Diligence and prudence.
• The imperative of independence, to counterbalance the biases of AI.
• Conflicts of interest.
• Intellectual property. In particular, who is the legal owner of the AI output?
• The disclaimers of AI providers
• The invention/falsification of data.
• The fact of less than absolute security.
• An anonymisation tool?
• The school which prefers confining AI to questions of a general nature.
• The concept of "closed" systems: large law firms are expending over £1 billion on AI systems and annual maintenance.
• The overarching aim: to establish a single, sovereign AI tool.

M. Dana then made an interesting connection with cyber security which, as you know, I have included as the second, inter-related subject in our October colloque. He spoke of the perils of raiding databases, stealing data and self-auditing by law firms. He emphasised the desirability of abandoning email addresses like Yahoo, Gmail etc. He also mentioned the relevant French national authority. Finally, there was a brief word from him on judgments.

The second main speaker was Lord Justice James Dingemans. James is a Lord Justice of Appeal in England & Wale and the Senior President of Tribunals of the United Kingdom.

By way of footnote, the number of tribunal judges and part-time/fee paid judges in the United Kingdom is around four times the number of full-time salaried judges ... so we are talking about two pretty enormous cohorts and, for that matter, cohorts who for essentially prosaic reasons may be more intensely interested in AI tools than their senior judicial counterparts. There has been a huge surge in employment tribunal litigation in England and Wales, over 15%, recently. A search will reveal lots of numbers for those further interested.

Here are my bullet points from Sir James's presentation:

1. Including generative AI, a useful working definition of AI is technology that is autonomous.
2. All leadership judges in England and Wales have been working on the copilot Pro.
3. All other judges have been working on standard pilots.
4. At a practical level, the two best uses at present have emerged as uploading E bundles for hearing and obtaining lists of issues.
5. In roughly hierarchical order, the tools of summarising a bundle and transcripts of hearings in real time follow.
6. Of course, utility is compromised by poor quality hearing bundles, particularly in cases in tribunals involving unrepresented litigants.
7. Judicial office holders must work in accordance with central guidance.
8. Actual judicial use of AI entails four fundamental requirements, namely understanding the DNA of AI, acute awareness of privacy and confidentiality, awareness of bias and other AI strengths and weaknesses and assumption of individual responsibility.
9. Sir James likened the judicial treatment of Copilot to having a good pupil or judicial assistant.
10. He emphasised that there is still no substitute for judges diligently scrolling through each page in an E bundle. Ditto reading the case papers. He emphasised also that Copilot is not a tool for legal analysis or reasoning.
11. Sir James then adverted to some of the burning issues: liability for the inadvertent misuse of AI? Liability for publishing AI Generated defamatory statements? Ownership of AI products?

Finally, we had a presentation from Lord Hugh Matthews, Scottish Court of Session, Inner House. Hugh is well known to many of us in the jurisdiction of Northern Ireland and beyond.  Hugh’s was, happily, an intensely pragmatic exposition. In the interests of brevity, I will short circuit this because you will readily find online the recent lecture given by the most senior judge in Scotland i.e. the Lord President, Lord Pentland, to the profession there, covering similar ground. This is linked here.  Suffice to say that the main themes were quicker access to justice, cheaper access to justice, swifter and more efficient dispute resolution, more efficient use of judicial time and resources (two concrete illustrations being the taking of evidence on commission and video recorded evidence), press summaries of judgments and cyber attacks on judicial information systems.

Conclusion

This was a valuable half day seminar. The presentations were both erudite and earthy. While we may have been small in numbers we were were big in quality. I was pleased to note the unanimous concurrence of all with two of my main personal concerns, namely the vital need for detailed procedural roles and professional ethical protocols in every court and tribunal: both sadly neglected to date in my view, particularly in the jurisdiction of Northern Ireland.

Thanks and congratulations to the Scottish FBLS Section.

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