Justice in the Digital Era

The panel explored how AI is reshaping access to justice in the UK, highlighting both its clear potential to improve equal and effective access to justice (through tools that can streamline administrative tasks, support advisors, democratise legal information, and help more people reach the services they need) and the significant risks that could undermine human rights, fairness, privacy, and the rule of law.

Speakers emphasised the need to centre user needs, strengthen governance, ensure transparency, confront bias, invest in specialist provision, and recognise that AI is not a technology problem but a social, political and regulatory challenge, with real concerns about surveillance, automated decision-making, widening inequality, data protection, and the impacts on workers and marginalised communities.

The session concluded that neither progress nor harm is inevitable, that leadership, clarity and purpose are essential, and that if AI is to help narrow rather than entrench the justice gap, it must be…