The Civil Justice Council's working group consulted on whether procedural rules are needed to govern AI use by legal representatives in preparing pleadings, witness statements and expert reports, publishing an update on responses at the end of June. For pleadings, advocacy documents and skeleton arguments, respondents broadly agreed no AI-specific formal requirements are currently necessary because professional responsibility frameworks are sufficient. Witness statements are the contested area: respondents split on whether extra safeguards or disclosure are needed, with a consistent concern about preserving authenticity and personal recollection. A final report is expected later in 2026.
In Ayinde v London Borough of Haringey [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin), Dame Victoria Sharp warned that guidance alone is insufficient to address misuse of AI in court. Misleading the court through AI-generated material, even inadvertently, can amount to serious professional misconduct. The duty runs to the output, not the intent.
The October 2025 refresh of the AI guidance for judicial office holders points judges at a private tool deployed on judicial devices, while treating public chatbots as insecure: anything entered into them is regarded as published to the world. That public-versus-private distinction is the architectural principle behind offline legal AI, now written down by the Lady Chief Justice's office.
The Digital Omnibus on AI was adopted in June and entered into force in July. Article 50 transparency obligations still apply from 2 August 2026. Article 50(2) for legacy systems and the new prohibited practices apply from 2 December 2026. Annex III high-risk obligations move to 2 December 2027 and Annex I embedded systems to 2 August 2028.
Open-weight AI split into two tiers. The frontier tier now needs data-centre hardware. The deployable tier, models in the 10 to 30 billion parameter range, runs on ordinary consumer hardware, and the emerging pattern is small-model-first routing where a compact local model handles most steps. The compliance argument: on-device inference means no data transfer, so no data-processing agreement and no cross-border transfer analysis.
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