In England and Wales, 60% of defendants in defended county court claims this year did not have a lawyer. In the US, more than nine in ten consumers sued for debt face the case without one.
AI may give some of them a new way to argue their case.
In Australia, Greg Baker, a computing academic, used AI to challenge his employer’s refusal to make his casual job permanent, and the Fair Work Commission ruled in his favor – an early example of a self-represented litigant winning with help from AI agents.
Around 0.6% of all Claude use in May was for lawyers’ tasks, ranking 38th of 718 occupations, ahead of accountants but well behind programmers and writers. Four-fifths of these queries were people asking about their rights or what the law means.
