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AI tech ambition to deliver smarter justice for victims

ended 09. June 2026

A raft of new technology projects is being developed which will aim to deliver improvements across the justice system and tackle the court backlog, the Government has announced - including AI legal assistants to support legal professionals and staff, and streamlined case management processes to get cases moving faster.

The new AI legal assistants will be developed in partnership with the UK’s top legal experts and leading AI developers to support legal professionals with routine casework, including research and case analysis. The purpose of the technology will be to drive productivity, boost efficiency in the Crown Court, and cut the time victims have to wait for their day in court.

Before being used in the Crown Court, the new technology will first be trialled in highly controlled environments that set clear standards for safe and ethical use. This will ensure any new software meets the high bar required by judges and lawyers before being considered for rollout in the courts system.

Judges are already planning to use a new AI tool to help identify trial-ready cases and group similar hearings together – helping maximise judicial, prosecutorial and court resources to resolve cases sooner and deliver swifter justice for victims.

The announcement will be made by the Deputy Prime Minister at London Tech Week (Tuesday 09 June), where he will outline how AI can drive criminal justice system modernisation.

Any thoughts on the upsides, and potential risks, send them across ASAP.

2 responses from the Newspage community

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Katrina Young
Futurist | Chief Technology Officer CTO/CDO Ethical AI & Digital Transformation Strategist at KYC Digital
Tackling the backlog and supporting legal research are two different problems. An assistant that helps with research sits under a professional who checks the output. A tool that identifies “trial-ready” cases or groups “similar” hearings could affect how court resources are allocated, and allocation influences who waits and who doesn’t. That distinction matters most under pressure. A highly controlled pilot is not a backlogged Crown Court. The conditions that make the technology attractive are the same conditions that can weaken human oversight. The greater governance risk is not inaccurate research. It is unaccountable allocation: a case moved up or down a list following an AI-generated classification, with no clear record of why and no single person answerable for it. The pilots should therefore test more than speed. They should test whether allocation decisions can be reconstructed, challenged and audited. That is the standard that will ultimately determine trust.
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Colette Mason
AI Ethics Consultant at Clever Clogs AI
Crown Court cases contain witness statements, victim testimony, and defence strategy, all subject to legal privilege. Whose servers will that data hit?

If these AI legal assistants run through third-party infrastructure, sensitive criminal case material is being processed outside government control. A US federal court ruled in February 2026 that material processed through AI may lose the confidentiality required to sustain privilege, and that AI-generated advice may never attract privilege at all.

A self-hosted model on MoJ infrastructure would change this gambit: sovereign data, no third-party access, privilege preserved by design. That takes longer and costs more upfront. If the Government is serious about AI in Crown Courts, the right first move is publishing the data architecture before the product roadmap. Where the data lives, who processes it, and how privilege is maintained are not simple implementation details, but the secure foundation on which everything else depends.