Generative AI may lower one of the traditional barriers to enforcing legal rights: the cost of producing legal material. But judicial attention remains scarce. JSH Law examines what happens if AI scales legal drafting faster than the court system can scale its capacity.
Agentic AI can plan, select tools and take actions across legal workflows. That creates a new set of risks around authority, confidentiality, supervision and accountability. JSH Law asks what responsible delegation should look like.
Artificial intelligence is automating many of the tasks traditionally used to train junior lawyers. If clients will no longer pay for repetitive processing, the profession must become much more deliberate about teaching judgment, ethics, strategy and client counselling.
A child can love an abusive parent, miss them and want contact with them. That does not, by itself, establish that contact is emotionally safe. Re C [2026] EWCA Civ 1216 exposes the difficult safeguarding question of how courts should understand children’s wishes when domestic abuse has shaped their understanding of family life.
The Government has abandoned its wider plan for judge-alone Crown Court trials — but the Courts and Tribunals Bill is far from dead. JSH Law examines what still changes, including jury-trial election, magistrates’ powers, criminal appeals, AI-assisted court administration and the proposed repeal of the Family Court’s parental-involvement presumption.
AI can produce 50 pages in seconds, but somebody still has to read, check and answer them. JSH Law examines Sir Robert Buckland KC’s call for courts to use existing costs powers against irresponsible AI-generated litigation — and why the answer must protect litigants in person who use AI responsibly to access justice.
Could an autonomous AI hold legal rights, owe legal duties or become responsible when things go wrong? Drawing on Imogen Rivers’ Oxford research, JSH Law examines robot rights, lethal autonomous weapons, responsibility gaps and the danger of allowing artificial personhood to become a liability shield for humans.
AI can generate a factually correct sentence. But can it truthfully speak in the human sense — with knowledge, belief and responsibility behind the words? Drawing on Kim and Jo’s work on Heidegger and Foucault, JSH Law asks what the distinction means for witness statements, Family Court evidence and responsible legal AI.
A child’s behaviour may be the most visible part of a case without explaining what that child actually needs. Prompted by Adelle Banks’ call for “professional curiosity without professional trespass”, JSH Law examines what family lawyers can learn from social work, Cafcass, youth justice and deprivation-of-liberty assessment frameworks.
In Re E [2026] EWCA Civ 1167, the Court of Appeal held that a Special Guardianship Order placing a child permanently outside the birth family could not be approached as a simple welfare choice. JSH Law explains why threshold, factual findings, necessity and proportionality matter.