Are you about to become extinct?

If you are a litigator, how many of your cases boil down to a dispute over what did or didn’t happen? If the answer is ‘almost all of them’, then you may be about to become extinct.

Many of the factual issues that parties currently spend much time, energy and legal fees arguing about – details of a transaction, location of an accident, speed of a vehicle – will in future be indelibly recorded in the digital world. Personal injury cases in particular will be utterly transformed. There will be no more measuring of skid marks to calculate how fast cars were going, when every move that every vehicle makes is automatically recorded – and it may not even have been a human doing the driving, of course.

By 2040, every transaction we make will be recorded on the ‘blockchain’; and as the ‘internet of things’ develops, every device from a domestic fridge to a laptop, a smart television or a self-driving vehicle, will communicate and record its activities ‘on-chain’. As the master of the rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos pointed out last month, ‘we already think correctly that every aspect of our lives is recorded somewhere, but I suspect we are only at the beginning of that particular journey’.

So all in all, there will be far less for lawyers to argue about, because the underlying facts will be indisputable. But what does that mean for how we should be resolving disputes in future? This question was the main thrust of Vos’s speech last month, in which he lifted his eyes to 2040.

Vos predicts that in future, people will be more impatient than ever to have small disputes sorted out quickly, so speed will be all important. As human involvement slows things down, the big question for the next 20 years is to what extent we should rely on artificial intelligence to resolve these disputes. Vos accepts that for it to work, the public must be able to have confidence in decisions made by AI. But he believes people will gain that confidence as long as it is clear what is and is not being decided by a machine, and provided that AI-driven decisions can ultimately be questioned before a human judge.

From the lawyer’s perspective, the future may feel rather bleak – particularly for those firms that currently deal with bulk claims or lower-value, run-of-the-mill disputes. After all, an AI-driven justice system where speed is a top priority, and the relevant facts have been indisputably recorded in the metaverse, does not sound like a place where lawyers can serve much useful purpose.

But the profession should take some comfort from the recent Supreme Court success enjoyed by north-west firm Bott & Co against airline Ryanair (in Bott & Co Solicitors Ltd v Ryanair DAC [2022] UKSC 8). Even though passengers could have claimed their flight delay compensation directly through the airline’s own scheme, the Supreme Court recognised that Bott & Co was assisting access to justice by acting on behalf of clients. The success of Bott & Co’s business model is proof of one very basic point: that given the choice between going it alone, or having a lawyer to fight their corner, clients prefer to use a lawyer – and they are prepared to pay for that; although firms need to be innovative in keeping those costs as low as possible.

Conversely, it is all too easy for policymakers to assume that lawyers are not really needed, because people will fight their own battles if you set up a mechanism for them to do so. You only need to look at the low numbers of unrepresented people using the Official Injury Portal to see how wrong that assumption is. Without the aid of lawyers, people have simply not come forward in the numbers expected to claim against insurers for soft-tissue injuries.

So whatever the justice system of the future looks like, it needs to include space for innovative and cost-effective law firms to continue to play a role. The evidence suggests that is what people want.

Rachel Rothwell is editor of Gazette sister magazine Litigation Funding, the essential guide to finance and costs.

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