A Lawyer Talks

A report out this week says that artificial intelligence tools are weaponising disputes in the family justice system, sycophantically encouraging well-intentioned parents into becoming intransigent litigants. AI is accused of undermining efforts by lawyers to de-escalate conflict while overwhelming judges who themselves are using the judiciary’s AI service in ways that may be questionable.

The report was written for the Nuffield Family Justice Observatory, a research and collaboration body, by Dr Natalie Byrom (pictured), an independent researcher and policy adviser whose work focuses on how data and technology are reshaping access to justice.

You can read my assessment of Byrom’s findings in today’s Law Society Gazette. Just click here and then click anywhere on the left-hand page.

You can also hear the interview that I recorded for A Lawyer Talks immediately after she launched her findings at a panel event on Monday. I asked Byrom for her reaction to a somewhat unexpected comment by the justice minister Jake Richards MP.

My almost-weekly podcast is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Solicitors’ and barristers’ representatives have expressed concern at plans to increase the fees that lawyers have to pay the legal ombudsman — known as LeO — if complaints against them are upheld. Unless providers of legal services had taken all reasonable steps to resolve a complaint, they could be charged £200, £750 or £1,500 under the proposals — depending on the stage at which the complaint was resolved by the ombudsman.

Lawyers currently pay a flat fee of £400 after a finding of poor service or poor complaint handling and the remaining cost of running the complaints service is met by all regulated lawyers.

Responding last month to a consultation by the Office for Legal Complaints, which oversees the ombudsman’s work, the Bar Council argued that self-employed barristers might be denied the opportunity of a final decision in their favour if they could not take the risk of having to pay £1,500.

The Law Society also thought there was a real risk that the proposals would encourage law firms to settle complaints regardless of merit, simply because it would be cheaper than pursuing a legitimate defence. “This would be unfair to legal providers and would distort the purpose of the complaints system.”

For the latest of my series of podcast interviews about the bewildering number of institutions involved in regulating legal services, I went to see the chief legal ombudsman Phil Cain (on the right in the image) and his boss Ric Blakeway (left), who chairs the Office for Legal Complaints. They told me about their plans to speed up complaint handling and make the process more transparent for users of legal services.

As ever, A Lawyer Talks is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

The entire civil and administrative justice system needs to be integrated and reformed, according to a paper published by the Nuffield Foundation this morning. All eight frontline regulators and their oversight regulator should be replaced with a single independent regulator for legal professionals, it adds.

Access to civil justice should be through a “single, uncomplicated portal, readily identifiable to users”, says the paper, called Resolving Disputes: a Framework for Holistic Reform. Legal claims against the NHS for medical negligence should be replaced by a no-blame compensation scheme, in the author’s view.

How realistic are these proposals? What would they cost? What chance is there that they’ll be put into effect? Those were among the questions I put to Dr Christopher Hodges OBE, emeritus professor of justice systems at the University of Oxford, when I interviewed him about his proposals for this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks.

My weekly podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Our walls are festooned with pictures of old white men, the treasurer (elected head) of Gray’s Inn said last week. Sir Andrew McFarlane was about to redress the balance by unveiling a painting of Edith Hesling (1899-1971) the first woman to be called to the bar by Gray’s — one of the four inns of court that train and support barristers.

That was in 1923 and Hesling then established a busy and wide-ranging practice in Manchester. Her career-defining moment came in 1946 when she became the first woman to preside in the county court.

Hesling married in 1927 but continued to practise under her maiden name, an unconventional move at the time. When her daughter Anne became a barrister in 1951, they became the first mother-and-daughter at the English bar.

Helen Airey, one of Hesling’s granddaughters, practised as a solicitor. And she was at Gray’s Inn last Thursday to see her own daughter help McFarlane unveil Hesling’s portrait. Deborah Airey was called by Gray’s in 2024 and has recently joined 7BR chambers after completing her pupilage there.

To hear her great-grandmother’s advice to those who might follow her — and to watch the unveiling — click the ► symbol above.

The portrait was made by Keith Breeden RP, whose pictures of Lady Rose of Colmworth and Lord Etherton GBE are already on display at Gray’s. He also painted the lady chief justice for Inner Temple. Unlike them, of course, Hesling was not painted from life.

I should explain why Hesling’s gown appears in my recording to be decorated with ghostly green lights. Unusually, the frame is glazed and the glass has been coated to reduce reflections. But it was positioned on the easel at an angle that reflected the candle-shaped ceiling lights, rendered green by the glass coating. They are less intrusive now that the picture is safely up on the wall.

The Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal will hold case management hearings today in two cases arising from the Post Office scandal. One involves a former general counsel at the Post Office accused of failing to cooperate with the recent public inquiry. The other involves a solicitor who represented former postmasters wrongly accused of dishonesty.

These hearings are being held remotely and will be livestreamed to the public on Zoom. A third case management hearing today involves clients who faced unexpected costs orders after claiming compensation for faulty cavity wall insulation.

What do these hearings involve? Will Jane MacLeod, the former Post Office lawyer, be represented at the hearing? Does her failure to attend the public inquiry amount to disciplinary matter at all? And — given that the tribunal has no say in which cases are referred to it by the Solicitors Regulation Authority — how will the tribunal handle as many as 20 cases that may brought against lawyers accused of prosecuting innocent postmasters?

Those are among the questions I put to Alison Kellett yesterday in the first broadcast interview given by the tribunal’s president since it was created by parliament just over 50 years ago. Kellett (pictured) talks sympathetically on this week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks about the mistakes made by all solicitors — even her — and what happens when solicitors are told that their careers have just come to an end.

My weekly podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Sudan’s military leaders built a stockpile of chemical weapons that they tried to conceal after chlorine bombs had been used against rebel forces, the Washington Post reported on 5 September. Videos, documents and intercepted communications portray a secretive Sudanese military unit said to have produced chlorine-based munitions for use against the paramilitary group fighting the army for control of the country, the New York Times added on the same day.

The allegations, attributed to unnamed Middle Eastern security and intelligence officials, have been denied by Sudan but are regarded as credible by Western observers. Although they deal with events in 2024 and sanctions were subsequently imposed by the United States, no action appears to have been taken to enforce Sudan’s obligations under an international treaty on chemical weapons that came into force nearly 30 years ago.

That shows the weakness of international law and, in particular, the United Nations as it is currently constituted, I was told last week by Santiago Oñate Laborde OBE (hon), a former Mexican politician, former ambassador of Mexico to the United Kingdom and former legal adviser to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons — the international body responsible for implementing the chemical weapons convention.

Oñate (pictured above) was speaking on A Lawyer Talks. My weekly podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

We are not living in an era of change but a change of era, writes Professor Richard Susskind in the 30th anniversary edition of his classic book on the future of law. Describing the emergence of artificial general intelligence — AGI — as the single most significant technological advance in the history of humanity, he tells me we could rapidly, see the development of systems “that are unfathomably more capable than us”. Not planning for AGI now would, at the very least, amount to “a dereliction of duty” by senior lawyers.

As a lawyer who has been writing about artificial intelligence for 45 years, Susskind (pictured) is uniquely placed to take the long view. I had the advantage of having spoken to him when I wrote about the need for regulation at the beginning of last week and again at the end of last week.

He had recorded an interview with me shortly before concerns were expressed by researchers, by industry leaders and even by the King. Sir Ed Davey is to call today for a global non-proliferation treaty to halt the development of super-intelligent AI when he makes the leader’s speech at the Liberal Democrat conference, the Guardian reports.

But Susskind was, of course, ahead of the news — not just when recording A Lawyer Talks but in writing The Future of Law – Reflections and Predictions, to be published by OUP on Thursday. His interview can be heard now.

My weekly podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can listen to a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

New legislation is needed to regulate the use of artificial intelligence, a parliamentary committee recommends today. The joint committee on human rights says the law should prohibit the development and provision of very powerful AI systems known as artificial general intelligence and artificial superintelligence.

MPs and peers say these advanced systems — which I’ll be exploring in next week’s podcast — risk causing widespread and very serious harm, including the capacity to evade effective human control. In the meantime, says the committee’s well-timed report, legislation should ban the use of AI in ways that are inconsistent with respect for human rights, such as subliminal techniques, emotional inference and inappropriate use of profiling or biometric data.

No legislation has been introduced even though the party’s manifesto in 2024 promised that a Labour government would “ensure the safe development and use of AI models by introducing binding regulation on the handful of companies developing the most powerful AI models”. In the King’s speech that year, ministers said they would “seek to establish the appropriate legislation to place requirements on those working to develop the most powerful artificial intelligence models”.

The use of AI by lawyers will be on the agenda of a conference tomorrow being held by the City of London Law Society and the City of London Corporation at Guildhall. Though much of the meeting will be closed to reporters, Colin Passmore KC (hon), chair of the City of London Law Society, was happy to discuss the challenges facing corporate lawyers in an interview for A Lawyer Talks.

Passmore (pictured) told me last week of his concerns about AI, particularly what he regards as its current unreliability. He also responded to some of the ethical concerns emerging from the Post Office scandal that I raised with John Hyde in last week’s episode of A Lawyer Talks.

My regular podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

Who’s to blame for the Post Office scandal that saw innocent postmasters sent to prison for crimes which never happened? The lawyers accused of keeping Post Office executives in the dark? Or the Post Office executives accused of setting up lawyers to fail?

Why didn’t the regulators step in? Are they doing enough now? Or must we look again at the system of general counsel and in-house lawyers that seems to suit large corporations so well?

Those are among the issues explored in a new book by John Hyde, who covered the public inquiry into the multi-million-pound fiasco for the Law Society Gazette. Indefensible — how lawyers failed to stop the Post Office scandal will be published next Tuesday by Bristol University Press. This week, Hyde (pictured) agreed to share his insights with me on the latest episode of A Lawyer Talks.

My regular podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.

A criminal court built over the course of a weekend “worked absolutely perfectly”, according to inspectors who examined the UK’s military court service. Because courts martial may sit anywhere in the world, the service has a fully equipped “court in a box” that it can set up in any suitable building.

Anthony Rogers, chief inspector of HM Crown Prosecution Service Inspectorate, was invited by the military court service to assess its work. His inspectorate’s report is now published.

In an interview for A Lawyer Talks, Rogers (pictured) told me that there were lessons that the civilian courts could learn from how cases were tried by the military — though he stressed that the numbers of military trials was just a tiny fraction of those heard in the Crown Court. We discussed the differences between military trial and civilian trials — and how decisions were taken on which system should be used if both had jurisdiction.

Inspectors found the military court service to be an effective, well-led and highly regarded organisation that had a clear operational purpose, visible leadership and strong working relationships with other parts of the justice system. The inspectorate’s main recommendation was that it should adopt a single, secure digital court listing and case progression system in place of its current arrangements.

My regular podcast interview, as always, is a bonus for paying subscribers to A Lawyer Writes. Everyone else can hear a short taster by clicking the ► symbol on the graphic at the top of this page.