Sir Geoffrey Vos told a court in Sydney this week that AI judges will arrive in small disputes, and that the argument carrying them there will be money rather than principle. The Master of the Rolls, who retires this autumn, gave the John Lehane Memorial Lecture at the Supreme Court of New South Wales on 18 August 2026. His prediction was that humans will come to accept, on economic grounds, machine-enabled resolution of small disputes at first instance. He was addressing an Australian audience, and he holds the most senior civil justice post in England and Wales, so the prediction bears on our courts as much as theirs.
He drew a boundary around it. A machine-made decision, in his account, needs the free and fully informed consent of the parties, because the right to an independent and impartial human judicial decision sits deep in the constitutions he surveyed. Machine-assisted decisions are a different matter, and he expects pressure on every justice system to let machines at least advise judges. Private dispute resolution shows how far the economic logic already runs, since eBay decides sixty million disputes on its platform each year within twenty-four hours, ninety per cent of them without any human involvement. The pressure on the bottom of the county court list will arrive as a cost argument rather than a philosophical one.
The pressure on the bottom of the county court list will arrive as a cost argument rather than a philosophical one.
Assisted and made sit closer than they sound
Vos said plainly that the line between the two is hard to draw, and his reason was practical. A system that produces a reasoned recommendation in seconds stays on the assisted side of that line only while a judge has the hours to test what it has told them. He pointed to the American Arbitration Association, which has put an AI arbitrator to work on two-party document-only construction disputes with a human arbitrator reviewing the reasoning afterwards to protect trust and due process. Whether that review is genuine or a formality decides everything, and it is the question your supervisors already face when a fee earner brings them an AI draft to approve.
What it changes for your low-value work
Nothing changes in your hearings this year. What changes is an assumption sitting underneath the way small practices price the bottom of the caseload. Where first-instance resolution of a modest dispute becomes faster and cheaper, the volume work you run at a fixed fee stops paying in the way it pays now. Open your list, find the small claims, the modest debt recovery and the low-value disputes you take at a fixed price, and ask what your fee buys the client that a quick machine decision would not.
The consent point belongs in the same conversation. If a client can agree to a machine deciding their case, somebody has to explain what it saves, what it costs and which right it gives up. That explanation is advice, and it lands on you rather than on the court.
Sir Geoffrey sets out the whole argument in his lecture, The implications of the development of artificial intelligence on the judiciary and the legal profession, published in full by the judiciary and open to read.
If you want to know which parts of your caseload a cheaper way of deciding the same dispute reaches first, that is the kind of question we work through with firms: talk it through with us.