AI transcription has spread through social work faster than anyone set standards for it, and the family courts are now being warned about what that does to the evidence. JUSTICE, the law reform charity, said on 10 September 2026 that the use of these tools by social workers is affecting the integrity of the written documents that reach the court, and that the risks for family justice are significant.
Ellen Lefley, deputy legal director at the charity, put her finger on two design decisions rather than on any single mistake. Some tools fill the gaps left by poor audio or by silence instead of leaving them blank, which she describes as a hallucination risk integrated as a design choice. Others delete the original recording after thirty days as standard.
The deleted audio is the part that matters
A transcription slip is an ordinary thing and every practitioner has corrected one. Correcting it depends on being able to go back. Where the audio has gone, nobody can hold the words on the page against the words that were spoken, and a court exercising a fact-finding function has lost the best evidence of what a parent or a child said.
The Ada Lovelace Institute interviewed 39 social workers across 17 local authorities for its report of February 2026, and found a summary recording that a person had expressed suicidal ideation when they had not. A line of that kind in a care case shapes a threshold finding, a contact decision and a placement. It reads as a professional observation, because that is what the document around it is.
The opposite problem arrives at the same time. Once everyone in the room knows that no authoritative recording survives, a party who dislikes what a record says has an easy line of attack and nothing to contradict it. Police and prosecutors have already stressed the importance of keeping the original audio where AI transcribes in a criminal context, and JUSTICE wants the standard for family proceedings settled by discussion across the system rather than tool by tool.
What to do when the record came from a machine
If you act in care work, or in private children work where local authority material is filed, ask two questions of every statement and case note you receive. Was any part of this produced by an AI transcription tool, and does the underlying audio still exist. Ask early, because thirty days runs out while a case is still being prepared, and a request made after the deletion date gets you an apology rather than a recording. Put it in writing so the answer sits on the file.
Then turn the same questions on your own firm. Where your fee earners use a note-taker in client meetings, find the retention setting and decide what it should say, rather than accepting what the supplier chose. Where a matter may be challenged later, keep the original recording for as long as the challenge is live. The firm that can produce what was said is the firm that wins the argument about what was said.
The warning is reported by Legal Futures on 10 September 2026, which is open to read and asks nothing of you. The research behind it is the Ada Lovelace Institute report Scribe and prejudice of February 2026, which is also open.
If your firm has no settled practice for testing documents that a machine helped to produce, we work that through in an afternoon: start with a conversation.