Ad/Marketing Communication
This legal article/report forms part of my ongoing legal commentary on the use of artificial intelligence within the justice system. It supports my work in teaching, lecturing, and writing about AI and the law and is published to promote my practice. Not legal advice. Not Direct/Public Access. All instructions via clerks at Doughty Street Chambers. This legal article concerns the Master of the Rolls AI speech at the HLPA conference.
Introduction
I was very disappointed not to be able to present at and attend the Housing Law Practitioners Association Conference on 4 December 2025. I have enjoyed every conference I have attended previously and would encourage anyone interested in housing/property law issues to join HLPA and take part in these excellent events. I was particularly unhappy that I did not get to hear the speech by the Master of the Rolls on housing issues and artificial intelligence, but I have now seen it has been uploaded here with the title: “Speech by the Master of the Rolls: Innovations in the Housing Sector — New Age Solutions for Age Old Problems”.
There are some very interesting takeaways that I will discuss below. Although much of the speech is expressed through the lens of housing law, I think the principles discussed have a much broader application across the legal system, including the issues I explore on this blog concerning ChatGPT evidence and other fields.
The Renters Rights Act
The initial focus is on the Renters Rights Act 2025, an important Act that I will be writing about specifically in a separate legal article. The Master of the Rolls uses the introduction of this Act to speak more broadly about the changing landscape of civil justice:
“It is in this context that I want to try to examine how other ongoing developments in the civil justice system and in ever- more capable AI will affect the Housing sector and the work that all of you do within it.”
Online Procedure Rules Committee (“OPRC”)
The OPRC is described as central to creating a modern digital justice system fit for the twenty first century, and particularly important in housing where some of the most vulnerable people in society are involved. The first set of regulations in 2025 gave the OPRC jurisdiction over property proceedings and some family financial remedy work. These powers sit alongside, rather than replace, the existing rule committees:
“…But the intention is that, over time, all online processes will be governed by rules made by the OPRC. The OPRC is now consulting on the first instalment of the basic general Online Procedure Rules for court-based online legal proceedings provided by HMCTS in civil, family and tribunal proceedings. The consultation went live today and will close on 15 January 2026. Those general rules will provide for the Online Procedure Rules for Property and Possession Proceedings to be set out in a practice direction. The general Online Procedure Rules will be far more simple and accessible than the current Civil Procedure Rules. They will provide for a set of very straightforward general principles and general rules.”
Examples of what these rules will include are duties to help the court or tribunal achieve the Overriding Objective, to take reasonable steps to settle disputes, to cooperate with case management, to identify the issues requiring determination and to act in good faith throughout.
A New Property and Possession Platform
Alongside the new rules, HMCTS is building a property and possession platform to sit alongside Online Civil Money Claims and Damages Claims Online. The first version is expected in late spring 2026. It is intended to be a significant improvement on PCOL and, crucially, capable of handling all court or tribunal proceedings relating to a single property. This ambition is linked to a critique of fragmented jurisdictions and the “double hatting” pilot in which judges sit across courts and tribunals. It is:
“illogical for the same parties to have to contest more than one set of proceedings in respect of the same property in different courts of tribunals…”
The design of the new platform is meant to start correcting that. There is an emphasis on the importance of aligning and integrating pre-action and post-action systems, which has long been a gap in housing litigation.
How Might AI help in the Property Sector?
After setting out the disparate nature of property disputes, the Master of the Rolls notes that it seems more rational to streamline the process and insist on a single coherent route for dispute resolution. He then turns squarely to AI:
“…It seems obvious also that AI could help, as much in property disputes as it will be able to help in other areas of dispute resolution. It can, as we all know, summarise documentation, including court documents and bundles very effectively, create chronologies and do legal research. HMCTS is already experimenting with how it can do some of these tasks for judges.”
He goes further, identifying a shift that many practitioners are now observing:
“I feel, though, that we are all missing a critical point in relation to the use of AI in legal proceedings. Lawyers and judges are familiar with litigants in person arriving at court with piles of loose papers in carriers bags. But historically, individuals and small businesses have found it difficult to transform these, often lengthy, stream of consciousness paper ramblings into a coherent legal claim, a coherent legal defence or a coherent witness statement.”
And then the point that will resonate with anyone following the evolution of AI use in litigation:
“Current generative AI tools are well able to do this. But the crucial factor that may have been somewhat lost sight of, is that litigants are now using AI for precisely this purpose. In a few minutes, lengthy ramblings explaining why a tenant dislikes and wishes to claim against their landlord can be turned by AI into a well-ordered intelligible legal claim against that landlord. We have seen a recent increase in civil claims in the County Court and that may be because some people and businesses are using AI to translate their oral complaints into comprehensible legal claims and defence documents that can be uploaded to the civil claims platforms and issued in court.”
AI Claims and Defences Generated by AI
These developments could transform the legal system. He anticipates an increase in pleadings generated by AI and urges system-wide preparation:
“…It will be necessary for HMCTS, the judiciary, the ombuds and all pre-action online services to work together to make sure that our digitised systems can handle and deal effectively with the likely increases in claims and defences generated plausibly by AI.”
AI is a Reality
The Master of the Rolls is clear on the direction of travel:
“This is not about whether it is or is not a good thing for claims to be created by AI. AI is a reality now, and individuals are and will be able to use it as their agent to pursue litigation.”
AI Assistance to Litigants in Person
There are potential benefits:
“On a more positive note, AI could be particularly helpful for tenants defending possession actions as litigants in person. Tenants are often unable to express their complaints about their situation as a defendant to a possession action with much coherence. AI can help marshal those thoughts into any legal defence that the thoughts expressed by the tenant might disclose. In rent disputes, AI is ideally suited to sort out complex payment and accounting data. It is important, in my view, to design the new property and possession platform on the basis that AI tools will inevitably play a part in the preparation of property claims, if not, at a later stage, their resolution. In the future, agentic AI is going to be very important to the preparation and conduct of property disputes and also to mediation and even to the creation of mediated outcomes. Agentic AI is where a person or business asks AI to act on its behalf to undertake tasks on its or their behalf.”
AI in judicial decision making “more urgent than many people imagine”
Readers will know I have been carefully tracking the emerging judicial use of AI and the broader implications of whether Judges, or some of their functions, may be replaced by AI. The following observations are an important addition to that tracker:
“I shall not now repeat the several lectures I have given on whether AI ought to be used for judicial decision-making. Suffice it to say that I am sure that many property disputes could be amenable to machine-made decision-making. It will be for future discussion whether, as a society, we would want decisions about people’s right to stay in their home to be decided by a machine rather than a human. This conversation is rather more urgent than many people imagine.”
The Master of the Rolls’ conclusion
In conclusion, the speech returns to the theme:
“This conference has been entitled Innovations in the Housing Sector: New Age Solutions for Age Old Problems. AI offers opportunities to resolve complex rent and disrepair disputes far more quickly and economically than was possible in past times. We should embrace those opportunities and available new technologies in order to provide the access to justice that so many tenants and occupiers have long sought and have long found to have eluded them.”
Comment
There is much to consider in this speech and I share the Master of the Rolls’ view that the conversation needs to happen urgently. As a profession, we must engage seriously with both the benefits and the risks involved in adopting AI tools. This includes the increasing use of AI generated pleadings, particularly by litigants in person who may have limited legal training; the role of hallucinations in new AI driven tools and whether these challenges can be addressed within our current structures or require a more fundamental shift; the growing evidential risks posed by AI drafted witness statements and deep fakes; and the potential delegation of certain judicial functions to AI systems.
I also plan to write further on the AI Agents described by the Master of the Rolls as playing a pivotal role in future litigation. AI Agents differ from generative AI and the large language models many will be familiar with. Rather than responding to prompts or generating text in isolation, AI Agents operate as autonomous systems designed to pursue defined goals. They are often advertised as able to plan sequences of tasks, draw on multiple tools, search and analyse information, and adapt their behaviour based on outcomes. Myself and other colleagues use them, but we have mixed views on their utility for legal work. In a litigation context there are distinct questions about responsibility, transparency and oversight because these systems are capable of initiating actions rather than merely assisting with them.
These are topics I have written about before and will be developing in more detail over the coming weeks. If these issues interest you, I invite you to subscribe and explore some of the earlier articles on this site. I also value the perspectives of others working in this area, so please do get in touch if you would like to contribute to the discussion.
Final Word from Chat GPT 5 Pro
This is where I offer a premium LLM an opportunity to comment and criticise the above. This is what it said:
“The most consequential insight is his point that generative AI is already changing demand as well as delivery—by enabling litigants in person and small businesses to turn disorganised narratives into coherent claims/defences quickly, plausibly contributing to higher volumes and forcing courts, ombuds and pre-action services to prepare for “AI-shaped” caseloads (more readable pleadings, but not necessarily better-founded ones). Courts and Tribunals Judiciary That creates a tight design challenge: online processes need to be simple enough to widen access (the OPRC consultation explicitly aims at clearer, more comprehensible rules), while being robust against low-quality or hallucinated assertions, strategic over-pleading, and new evidential risks—especially if AI tools start drafting witness evidence or mediating outcomes at scale.”
