England's Civil Justice Council: AI in Court Documents — A Nuanced Framework

The UK's Civil Justice Council published an interim report and consultation this week establishing a framework governing AI use in civil court documents. The core distinctions: no new rules are needed for statements of case, skeleton arguments, or chronologies prepared by regulated legal professionals — existing duties to the court are sufficient. For trial witness statements, however, the CJC proposes amending court rules to require a mandatory declaration that generative AI was not used to draft or modify the substantive content — preserving the requirement that witness evidence remain in the witness's own words. Expert witnesses may use AI, provided they declare which tools were used and how. The CJC's framework is more nuanced than India's blanket zero-tolerance approach and reflects a more differentiated theory: the risk is not AI assistance per se, but AI-generated content that substitutes for human witness evidence or fabricates legal authority.