Access to justice through artificial intelligence

This project will develop a portal to provide predictive feedback for self-representing individuals involved in summary judgement proceedings.

Why this research is important

Summary judgements are a common procedure where the courts can rule on a clear case without a trial. They were designed to reduce costs and lessen the strain on the judicial system.

However, summary judgements are frequently used to obtain quick judgements against self-representing individuals who cannot afford legal representation. Summary judgement applications brought by represented parties have high success rates, but those brought by self-representing individuals have very low success rates.

Researchers can use artificial intelligence to assess the probability of success in court. This project will use machine learning technologies to create a dataset of summary judgements and develop a new publicly accessible online portal which predicts the outcome of a summary judgement application.

Project aims

The project aims to:

• Improve access to justice.
• Reduce unnecessary legal costs for self-representing individuals.
• Achieve equality of resources in summary judgement applications.
• Facilitate analysis of the needs of litigants and defendants to inform debates and policy development relating to legal aid.

What will the research involve?

The research will be completed in three stages:

1. Collating and labelling a dataset of summary judgement cases.
2. Analysing the dataset to better understand the distinction between rejected and successful summary judgement cases. Based on these insights, language models will be trained and their results compared.
3. Developing an online portal, which will be tested with 50 self-representing individuals in collaboration with Support through Court.

Outcomes of the research

• After the research is completed, the portal will be made freely available for individuals, charities, and NGOs.
• Two workshops will be held with stakeholders from within the UK government, NGOs, the judicial system, and law firms.
• The results of this project will allow similar work to be done in more general court cases.