I have been thinking about the relationship between technology, law and human judgement for a long time.
Way back in 2017, I gave a speech called Does Your Machine Mind?, exploring some of the ethical questions raised by increasingly sophisticated technology and automated decision-making. In my 2020 TEDx talk, The Future is Biased?, I looked particularly at the risk that the biases we carry as a society could become embedded in the technology we create- and then amplified by it.
Since then, technology has moved at extraordinary speed. What seemed futuristic then is now becoming part of everyday legal practice.
But the fundamental question remains the same: What are we actually trying to achieve?
There is a danger that we become so fascinated by what AI can do that we forget to ask what it should do.
For me, the most exciting opportunity is not simply to make lawyers faster. It is to make legal services more accessible, more affordable and, ultimately, perhaps surprisingly, more human.
The biggest opportunity may be for people who struggle to access legal help
There is enormous potential for AI to make a meaningful difference to people who currently find the legal system difficult, expensive or intimidating to navigate.
AI could help someone recognise that they have a legal problem in the first place. It could explain complicated legal concepts in plain English, help organise documents and chronologies, identify questions to ask a lawyer and point towards appropriate sources of assistance.
That alone could be transformative.
But we need to distinguish between legal information and legal advice and achieving justice.
Someone facing eviction, discrimination, domestic abuse, an employment dispute or family breakdown doesn’t simply need to know what the law says. They need to understand how it applies to their circumstances, what their options are and what the consequences might be.
Sometimes they also need another human being to listen. Sometimes, that’s the most important thing.
That is why I don’t see the future as being about AI replacing lawyers. I see it as an opportunity to redesign legal services around the person who needs help.
I chair the LawtechUK Panel, and our Ecosystem Tracker provides an interesting insight into where innovation is currently focused. The 2025 tracker showed that 66% of lawtech businesses were B2B, while just 8% were B2C, with the remainder operating hybrid models.
That is understandable. There are obvious commercial opportunities in helping law firms and in-house legal teams become more efficient.
But it also raises a question: are we innovating sufficiently for the people who actually need legal help?
The current tracker now covers 438 companies, including 71 in Consumer Services. That suggests the consumer market is developing, and I think it is an area we should watch closely.
The investment picture is encouraging too. LawtechUK’s 2025 figures show £188.8 million invested in UK legal technology during the year, 35% more than in 2024.
But investment and unmet legal need are not necessarily the same thing.
The market will naturally follow commercial opportunity. Access to justice requires us to ask a slightly different question: Where could technology make the greatest difference to people’s lives?
We shouldn’t simply digitise yesterday’s legal system
Technology alone will not solve the access-to-justice problem.
If AI can reduce the cost of routine work, lawyers should be able to spend more time where professional judgement really matters. It may allow firms to offer different pricing models and make some services economically viable that currently aren’t.
It could also enable much more preventative law: helping people understand their rights before a dispute escalates, checking documents before they sign them and directing them towards the right source of help.
But we need to think about the whole system.
Digital exclusion is real. So are poor-quality data, cybersecurity risks, unreliable systems and the danger that people put too much confidence in an apparently authoritative machine-generated answer.
And there is a bigger question: who is responsible for designing the system?
If we genuinely want technology to improve justice, lawyers, technologists, regulators, government and consumers all need a voice in its design.
We shouldn’t simply digitise yesterday’s legal system and assume that we have created tomorrow’s.
Indeed, one of the things I have become increasingly convinced of is that we may need to think about regulating legal systems as well as regulating legal professionals.
People are already using AI to navigate the law
This isn’t theoretical.
People are already using generative AI to understand legal problems, draft documents and navigate disputes without professional assistance.
That can be empowering. But empowerment and false confidence are very different things.
We are already seeing cases where AI-generated material has been put before courts containing fabricated authorities or inaccurate legal propositions. The Civil Justice Council is also examining the use of AI in preparing court documents, including the particular challenges presented by litigants in person.
The problem is not simply that AI gets things wrong. Lawyers get things wrong too.
The problem is that AI can be wrong with extraordinary confidence- and someone without legal knowledge may well be misguided with potentially disastrous consequences.
That creates an interesting paradox. AI could make legal information much more accessible, but the easier it becomes to obtain an apparently authoritative answer, the more important it becomes to understand its limitations.
AI literacy needs to become part of legal and also public literacy.
Don’t assume AI is only for the biggest firms
Much of the discussion about AI understandably focuses on the largest firms, with their technology budgets, innovation teams and specialist expertise.
But AI could be particularly significant for small and medium-sized firms.
A good smaller firm has something technology cannot manufacture- trusted relationships, local knowledge, professional judgement and a deep understanding of its clients.
AI could take away some of the administrative and repetitive work that consumes valuable time, supporting document production, research, knowledge management, client communication and workflow.
That could be genuinely liberating.
But there is a risk of creating a new digital divide within the profession.
If the largest firms can invest heavily in sophisticated AI systems and data infrastructure while smaller firms struggle to understand which tools are safe, effective and worth paying for, technology could reinforce existing inequalities.
The answer isn’t for every small firm to build its own AI laboratory.
It is about making good technology accessible and affordable, and ensuring firms have the skills and governance to use it safely.
I would much rather see a firm asking, “What problem are we trying to solve?” than buying an AI product because everyone else appears to have one.
The technology should follow the strategy, not the other way around.
Efficiency must not come at the expense of humanity
This is where my concerns about AI and automated decision-making become particularly relevant.
When I gave my TEDx talk, The Future is Biased?, I was interested in what happens when the assumptions and biases of the people who create technology become embedded in the systems we subsequently rely upon.
That concern has become more relevant, not less.
We already know about automation bias- the tendency to give excessive weight to a computer-generated answer because it appears objective, sophisticated or mathematically derived.
AI systems can be wrong. They can hallucinate. They can reproduce biases in their training data. They can produce an answer which sounds convincing but is inappropriate to the circumstances of an individual client.
And, crucially, the technology does not carry professional responsibility in the way a lawyer does.
I don’t want a future in which a lawyer says:
“The AI said this was the answer.”
I want a future in which the lawyer says:
“The AI helped me get here, but I have challenged it, applied my judgement and I am prepared to stand behind my advice.”
That distinction matters enormously.
Efficiency is valuable. But legal work isn’t simply a production line.
A client may remember the technical quality of the advice, but they will also remember whether their lawyer listened to them, understood their circumstances and helped them navigate something difficult or frightening.
Technology should give us more capacity for that human relationship, not less.
The lawyer of the future may be more of a thinker
AI will inevitably change the skills we value in lawyers.
Information retrieval, research, summarising and first-draft production will increasingly be supported by machines.
That isn’t necessarily bad news. But it does raise a serious question about how lawyers learn.
For generations, junior lawyers have developed expertise by doing the work: reading, researching, drafting, making mistakes, receiving feedback and gradually developing professional judgement.
If AI does much of that work from day one, we need to be much more deliberate about how the next generation acquires expertise.
I think judgement, critical thinking, curiosity, creativity, empathy, communication, strategic thinking and professional scepticism will become increasingly important.
And perhaps above all, the confidence to say: “I don’t agree with the machine.”
We shouldn’t teach young lawyers simply to prompt better. We should teach them to think better.
What would success look like?
I don’t think success is a legal sector in which every lawyer has an AI assistant.
It is one in which we have redesigned legal services around the needs of the people who use them.
Where routine work is increasingly automated, but lawyers have more time for judgement, strategy and human interaction.
Where people can get reliable legal information and early help without first having to understand the structure of the legal profession or system.
Where consumer-facing innovation becomes a stronger part of the lawtech ecosystem.
Where technology makes smaller firms more competitive rather than creating a two-tier profession.
Where clients understand how significant AI is being used in their matters and know who remains accountable.
And where we measure success not only by productivity and profitability, but by outcomes for clients and the extent to which unmet legal need has been reduced.
Because ultimately, this isn’t really a story about artificial intelligence. It is a story about human intelligence.
As machines become better at producing answers, will humans remain sufficiently curious, sceptical and courageous to question them?
That, to me, is the real test of an AI-enabled legal profession.
The best future isn’t one where the machine replaces the lawyer.
It is one where technology enables the lawyer to be more human, more accessible and more useful to the people who need them.
Christina Blacklaws, Chair of LawtechUK, former President of The Law Society of England and Wales
