Why the time has come to embrace AI - or explain why you’re not

It’s a scene that will be familiar to many. Offices laden with boxes of lever arch files full of documents provided during the course of disclosure, which need to be meticulously examined.

It’s a time-consuming and often tedious job but someone’s got to do it. Or have they? In the new era of AI, radical and rapid technological advancements mean that machines will, if predictions are right, soon be poised to take over tasks such as this.

We will soon find ourselves in a world where the court will no longer consider it reasonable or proportionate for lawyers to spend hours upon hours (or in some cases weeks) poring over disclosure, when the same could be achieved by AI in a matter of minutes. Once firmly adopted by the judiciary, those who resist or refuse to embrace the technology will have to justify why – not only to the courts on the question of budgeting and cost management but also to clients who will understandably want cases to be conducted in the most efficient and cost-effective way.

The practice of eDiscovery or eDisclosure – using software to identify, collect and review electronically stored information for legal proceedings – has been around for a while, but took a giant step forward in 2022 following the conclusion of the Disclosure Pilot Scheme. The pilot, which was initially intended to last two years but actually ran for more than three, ended with the practice being made permanent in the Business and Property Courts of England and Wales, making eDisclosure the default position and actively encouraging parties to use AI. This is now known as Practice Direction (PD) 57AD. Experts predict it is only a matter of time before similar disclosure rules are put in place across all civil courts and adoption by the legal profession becomes to all intents and purposes mandatory.

On the face of it, having a machine do in minutes what may take a lawyer, perhaps even a team of lawyers, countless hours to complete sounds too good to be true (or to some completely terrifying). The idea is that lawyers will be able to spend their time strategising and advising rather than analysing endless documents, with the ultimate aim being that cases will be run more efficiently, and clients will see the time saving reflected in their costs bill. There is no doubt that, once established, the use of eDiscovery will be factored in at the early costs budgeting stage with more consistency and confidence than it is at present.

These are many positives. However, concerns remain about a more extensive use of AI and disclosure platforms. Firms must be cautious about the security of such platforms and interrogate how and where client data is being stored and then used.

The widespread feeling amongst the profession appears to be that the process has not yet been tried and tested to a great enough degree for it to be entirely relied upon without sufficient human input. Not when justice (and professional reputations) are at stake. Lawyers, after all, do have a professional responsibility and ethical obligation to act honestly and present only information to the court that they believe to be true and accurate.

Technology must be validated, governed by the highest and clearest standards and frameworks, with appropriate safeguards in place to ensure the integrity of data and prevent misuse.

With 2025 tipped to be the watershed year where machines start to fill vacancies rather than humans, should we all be looking over our shoulder for a robot poised to take our job? No, or at least not yet. Whilst technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and increasingly useful in providing guidance and prompts, human lawyer intervention is also still very much needed in order to train the algorithms and check the accuracy of the output. It is only as good as its teacher, and its training days are far from over.

For a student entering the profession now, the future is likely to look very different from when I started work as a paralegal in 2008. The role of the junior fee earner will necessarily evolve away from the traditional paper-based tasks of old, such as bundle creation, manual pagination and disclosure review. Instead, the job will be understanding how to deploy technology to do that for them and, in doing so, allow them the precious time and scope to focus on what those documents actually mean for a client and their case, the strategy behind the use of those documents and where the case should go next.

Colleagues entering the industry today are likely to be significantly more tech-savvy than the 2008 me, but there is still much for us all to learn – not from a machine but from the more experienced lawyers around us. AI is, after all, only as good as the information we feed it. Judgement based on experience and the skills needed to negotiate or build relationships with clients, for example, are invaluable tools in the locker of any lawyer, and there’s no shortcut to download them just yet.

Anusheh Burcher is a partner in the commercial disputes team at Ashfords and also co-presents the firm’s podcast ‘Unlocking AI’