Judges across England and Wales now have access to AI software on their personal computers, new guidance has revealed. 

The HM Courts and Tribunals Judiciary released an update to judicial guidance on 14th April 2025, which focuses on the use of AI in relation to Judicial Office Holders. The original guidance was first published at the end of 2023.  

Now a page longer than its original version, the guidance includes an updated glossary of AI-related terms, including “hallucination” and “AI agent”. The guide also offers advice for spotting work that has been produced by AI, how the technology can be used responsibly in courts and tribunals and the potential risks that come with its use in the legal sector. 

How can AI be used in Courts and Tribunals? 

As AI tools' capabilities become more understoodr every day, thei uses within the legal sector have become more apparent.  

Summarising large bodies of text, writing presentations and administrative tasks like composing and prioritising emails, transcribing meetings and creating memoranda are all well within the technology's capabilities.  

The guidance still advises against the use of AI tools in some tasks, including legal research, as it is considered a poor way of conducting research to find new information that cannot be independently verified.  

The guidance also advises against the use of AI in legal analysis, as the current public AI chatbots do not produce convincing analysis or reasoning yet.  

AI-produced Work: 

Judges have also been warned that AI tools are being used to create “fake material, including text, images and video”.  

Some of the main indicators that submissions may have been AI-generated include: 

• References to cases that do not sound familiar, or have unfamiliar citations (sometimes from the US) 

• Parties citing different bodies of case law in relation to the same legal issues. 

• Submissions that do not accord with your general understanding of the law in the area 

• Submissions that use American spelling or refer to overseas cases. 

• Content that (superficially at least) appears to be highly persuasive and well written, but on closer inspection contains obvious substantive errors. 

The updated guidance still carries the same message – to use AI in a responsible manner and with particular caution for accuracy. They reinforce the same warning: 

“Do not enter any information into a public AI chatbot that is not already in the public domain… Any information that you input into a public AI chatbot should be seen as being published to all the world. 

“AI will inevitably reflect errors and biases in its training data, perhaps mitigated by any alignment strategies that may operate.”