Episode 2. Online Procedure Rules 2026 and the AI code for law firms.

0:08 A week ago today England and Wales acquired a set of procedure rules written for a screen rather than adapted from a paper file.

0:16 For the moment it reaches possession claims and nothing else.

0:19 What matters is the sentence the committee that wrote it has already published about its next piece of work.

0:25 Standards for the responsible and ethical use of AI.

0:30 Good morning, and welcome to The Legal AI Brief, the Monday round of the AI news that matters to smaller law firms.

0:37 I am Saqib Khan. My legal career began in large commercial law firms and includes fourteen years as an owner of a law firm and four years as a fee-paid county court judge.

0:49 I run Adliora, an AI consultancy that helps small and mid-sized firms adopt AI safely, profitably and within the rules.

0:59 Every Monday I take the developments from the past week, separate the noise from the parts that touch your practice, and set out in plain terms what a sensible firm does about them.

1:10 Let us get into the week.

1:12 Four things worth your attention. On the seventh of September the Online Procedure Rules twenty twenty six came into force, the first procedural code in this jurisdiction designed for digital litigation from the outset rather than carried across from paper.

1:29 It applies to specified possession proceedings, and the framework allows other categories of case to be brought in over time.

1:36 On the tenth of September the law reform charity JUSTICE warned that AI transcription tools, now in wide use by social workers, are affecting the integrity of written documents relied on in family proceedings.

1:49 Some tools fill the gaps left by poor audio with material nobody said, and the original recording is often deleted within thirty days, which leaves the court with a summary and no route back to the source.

2:02 On the tenth and again on the eleventh the S R A took criticism over its changes to who may hold the compliance officer roles, with practitioners saying the wording creates more questions than it settles.

2:15 The regulator's answer was that it is listening. And on the eighth of September a new venture fund called G C V C launched in the United States, backed by more than fifty sitting general counsel, with Wilson Sonsini the first law firm to put money in.

2:33 Both of its opening investments are AI businesses built for legal work.

2:38 The main story is the first of those, and not because possession claims are glamorous.

2:44 It is the first time anyone has set out to write AI standards into the machinery of civil justice rather than into guidance about your conduct.

2:53 The instrument is the Online Procedure, Rules and Practice Directions, Rules twenty twenty six, statutory instrument six hundred and ninety six of this year.

3:04 It was made on the twenty third of June, laid before Parliament on the twenty sixth, and it came into force a week ago today.

3:11 Take the description seriously, because it is doing more work than it looks.

3:15 Every set of civil procedure rules this country has used in living memory started life as a description of what happens to paper.

3:24 The Civil Procedure Rules were written in nineteen ninety eight around files, bundles, service and the post, and everything digital since has been fitted into that shape.

3:34 The Online Procedure Rules were drafted the other way round.

3:38 Digital working is the default position rather than the accommodation, and the rules describe a process that assumes a screen at both ends.

3:48 What they cover, for now, is narrow. Specified possession proceedings and nothing else, with further rules for possession expected later this year.

3:57 The rest of civil litigation carries on under the Civil Procedure Rules exactly as before.

4:03 If you do no housing work, nothing in the instrument itself changes your Monday morning.

4:09 The substance of the rules will read as familiar to anyone who has argued a case management application.

4:15 There is an overriding objective, and it asks the court to deal with disputes quickly, efficiently, fairly and at proportionate cost.

4:23 Parties are required to help the court meet it, to take reasonable steps to settle, to cooperate with case management, to identify the real issues and to act in good faith.

4:34 The court is required to manage actively, to enable full participation by every party and witness, to treat parties equally, to promote resolution, to keep everything proportionate to what the case is worth and to make its decisions accessible to the public.

4:52 An unrepresented party who prefers paper may still use paper.

4:57 Now the part that reaches every firm, whether or not you do possession work.

5:02 The committee behind the rules, the Online Procedure Rule Committee, published a statement of its future priorities on the thirtieth of July.

5:10 Its immediate priority, in its own words, is a voluntary code of practice, and the code sets three standards.

5:18 Inclusion standards, to protect and include vulnerable users.

5:23 Technology and data standards, so that systems work with one another.

5:28 And standards for the responsible and ethical use of AI across digital justice services.

5:34 The code is to be developed with the providers and the people who use those services, and published alongside the committee's response to last year's consultation on the pre-action model and the inclusion framework.

5:47 Read that against everything else this year and you see what is new.

5:51 The S R A warning notice of August speaks to you as a regulated individual.

5:56 The judiciary's guidance speaks to judges. The Bar Council's note speaks to barristers.

6:01 This is different in kind. This is a rule committee, chaired under the authority of the Lord Chancellor and the Master of the Rolls, proposing to describe how AI is used in the system through which your client's case will pass.

6:16 Not how you behave, but how the process behaves. And then there is the word voluntary, which is where practitioners tend to stop reading.

6:25 My advice is to read on. A voluntary code written by the body that makes the rules, in consultation with the organisations that build the systems, does not stay a suggestion for long.

6:38 It becomes the description of the expected standard. When a district judge asks in two years why a document was prepared the way it was, the code is the document that tells everybody what reasonable looked like at the time.

6:54 Firms that took it as optional will be explaining themselves against a yardstick they chose not to read.

7:07 A word about what I do. Adliora advises small and mid-sized law firms on adopting AI without falling foul of the rules that govern you. Where to begin, which tools earn their place, what your duties on supervision and confidentiality mean in practice, and how to write a policy your people will follow. If this subject sits on your desk and nobody in the firm owns it, that is the problem I am paid to solve.

7:41 Two consequences follow, and one observation that sits underneath both.

7:45 The first consequence belongs to the firms doing housing work, and it is practical.

7:50 You now have two procedural codes running at once, applying to different claims, with different assumptions about how a document reaches the court.

7:59 The risk in that period is not that anyone misunderstands the new rules.

8:03 It is that a busy fee earner applies the habits of the old code to a claim governed by the new one, or the reverse, and nobody notices until a deadline has gone.

8:13 This is the ordinary hazard of any transition, and it is answered by knowing which claims sit where before you file, not after.

8:22 The second consequence belongs to everyone. A code describing the responsible use of AI in digital justice services will, sooner or later, ask a question you should be able to answer today.

8:34 When a document reaches the court through one of these systems, what part of it did a machine produce, and who checked that part before it was signed.

8:43 Firms that keep no record of that are not breaking a rule this morning.

8:48 They are accumulating a gap that the code will one day describe, and at that point the gap becomes visible at exactly the moment it is least convenient.

8:57 The observation underneath both is about where the pressure now comes from.

9:02 Until this year the discipline around AI in legal work arrived through professional conduct, which is to say through the regulator, the tribunal and your insurer.

9:12 What is starting now is discipline arriving through procedure, and procedure is a harder master.

9:19 A conduct point is argued about culpability and intention. A procedural point is argued about whether you complied.

9:28 The second conversation is shorter and it goes worse.

9:32 If your firm issues possession claims, the first step is administrative and it takes an afternoon.

9:39 Put one named person in charge of the new code, have them read the instrument itself rather than a summary of it, and have them tell the rest of the team which of your claims are caught and which are not.

9:51 Do that before the next claim goes out rather than after. Second, and this applies to every firm, respond to the consultation when it comes.

10:02 The committee has said the code will be developed with providers and users, and small firms are the users least likely to be in the room.

10:11 The organisations building the systems will make their views known in detail.

10:16 If the only voices describing what is workable belong to software businesses, the standard that emerges will describe what suits software businesses.

10:26 A short, specific letter from a firm that runs twelve possession claims a month carries weight precisely because nobody else is sending one.

10:35 Third, start the record now rather than when you are asked for it.

10:39 This does not mean a new system. It means that where AI has touched a document that goes to court, the file says so and says who checked it.

10:48 A line on the attendance note is enough. The point is not the format.

10:52 The point is that in two years you can answer the question from the file rather than from memory.

10:58 Here is the one instruction to take from today. This week, take the last five sets of court documents your firm produced, and against each one write down which parts a machine had a hand in and who checked them.

11:11 If you cannot answer that from the file as it stands, you have found the gap before anybody else did, and you have a year or so to close it quietly.

11:21 The regulator's move of the week deserves a judge's reading, because it is about who answers for things.

11:28 The S R A has changed who may serve as compliance officer for legal practice or for finance and administration.

11:35 A manager with unilateral decision-making power is now barred from those roles in firms above six hundred thousand pounds of turnover, or holding more than two million pounds of client money, that second threshold having risen from five hundred thousand after consultation.

11:51 In the smallest owner-run firms the owner may hold the legal practice role but not the finance one.

11:58 The Legal Services Board approved the changes last month. The criticism, and it is fair, is that the drafting uses the idea of acting unilaterally in several different formulations without making clear whether they mean the same thing.

12:12 Stephen Nelson, formerly the S R A's head of legal, made the point that each carries distinct implications for how the rule works in practice.

12:22 Firms have come away from meetings with the regulator holding more questions than they arrived with.

12:27 From the bench the principle is simple enough. The reform exists so that the person who answers for compliance is not the same person who cannot be contradicted.

12:38 That is a sound instinct. It is also the instinct you should apply to AI inside your own firm, and nobody has to write you a rule to make it sound.

12:48 The person who decides which tools you buy should not be the only person who decides whether they are working.

13:01 And a word about my technological venture, so you know where I stand. Bracton is a case management system for firms in England and Wales with agentic AI designed in from the ground up, rather than bolted onto software written twenty years ago. Overnight it reads every live matter, so the morning list is waiting with the action drafted and the research carrying a source you can open. A person signs everything off. Bracton legal dot co dot uk.

13:32 That is the week. If you take one point from it, take this. A person in your firm has to own what these tools produce, and that will not change whatever the tools cost or how capable they become.

13:47 If you want an honest view of where your firm stands, there is a two-minute readiness check on the Adliora site, and you are welcome to send a short message and talk it through with me directly.

13:58 I am Saqib Khan. This has been The Legal AI Brief, and I will be back next Monday with the week that was.

14:05 Thank you for listening.

14:07 The transcript of this episode, with a timestamp on every line, sits beside the two minute readiness check at adliora dot com. Have a great week.