England and Wales: the judiciary’s AI guidance

Who it binds

The guidance applies to all judicial office holders under the responsibility of the Lady Chief Justice and the Senior President of Tribunals, and to “their clerks, judicial assistants, legal advisers/officers and other support staff”. It is published online, in the judiciary’s words, “to promote transparency, open justice and public confidence”.

It is the third version. December 2023 was the first; April 2025 replaced it; 31 October 2025 replaced that. Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls and Head of Civil Justice, has described AI as an important, innovative and useful tool that must be treated with appropriate care.

What it tells judges about the tools

“Public AI chatbots do not provide answers from authoritative databases. They generate new text using an algorithm based on the prompts they receive and the data they have been trained upon.”

And the point that matters most to anyone practising outside the United States:

Their “view” of the law is “often based heavily on US and historic law, although some do purport to be able to distinguish between that and the law of England and Wales.”

Qatar’s practice direction makes the same observation at paragraph 10. Two judiciaries, independently, have identified the same failure: a model trained mostly on American material answering a question of local law with American confidence.

Confidentiality, stated as bluntly as it gets

“Do not enter any information into a public AI chatbot that is not already in the public domain. Do not enter information which is private or confidential. Any information that you input into a public AI chatbot should be seen as being published to all the world.”

The guidance adds that public chatbots remember every question asked and every input given, that the information is then available to answer other users’ queries, and that chat history should be disabled where the option exists. The October refresh also, for the first time, tells judicial office holders where to report an inadvertent disclosure as a data incident. That is a judiciary planning for the leak rather than forbidding it.

Deepfakes, and hidden white text

On forged material the guidance is calm: courts “have always had to handle forgeries, and allegations of forgery, involving varying levels of sophistication”, and judges should be aware of the new possibility deepfakes present. Then it names something no other judicial instrument in the world has:

“Another form of fake material of which you must be aware is so called ‘white text’, which consists of hidden prompts or concealed text inserted into a document so as to be visible to the computer or system but not to the human reader.”

The glossary defines it precisely: “Text formatted to be invisible to human readers (e.g. white font on a white background) but still detectable by computers. It can be used to manipulate search engines or large language models by embedding hidden instructions or keywords.”

This is prompt injection, arriving in a filed document, named by a judiciary. The guidance draws the right conclusion from it: the possibility “underscores the importance of judicial office holders’ personal responsibility for anything produced in their name.” The same logic applies to any lawyer who feeds an opponent’s document into a summarising tool.

The practitioner side: Ayinde

Guidance to judges is not a rule binding filers, so the enforcement route in England and Wales has been the court’s inherent supervisory jurisdiction. Ayinde v Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin) is the leading authority: twenty-three nonexistent citations across two matters, a £2,000 wasted costs order that stood against counsel, a Bar Standards Board referral and two Solicitors Regulation Authority referrals. The court named the sources that count: official government databases, The National Archives and the published Law Reports.

Scotland, Northern Ireland and Ireland

• ScotlandThe Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service uses natural language processing and generative AI for transcription, summarising and translation, and to support online civil forms. Lord Pentland, the Lord President, has said AI is entering the courtroom to stay. We have found no published practice note binding practitioners, and say so rather than assume one exists.
• Northern IrelandNo separate published instrument located.
• IrelandA different jurisdiction entirely, and it has moved. The Courts Service issued guidance on AI in court proceedings on 12 February 2026, and the Law Society of Ireland published Practice Guidance on Generative AI on 20 May 2025. Notably, the Courts Service reported in June 2026 that its judicial Case AI Assistant proof of concept was not considered fit for purpose.

Sources

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) Guidance for Judicial Office Holders, 31 October 2025 (PDF), read in full
• Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, guidance page
• Ayinde v Haringey and Al-Haroun v Qatar National Bank [2025] EWHC 1383 (Admin)
• Scotland and Ireland entries are from reporting and official statements, not from an instrument we have read in full, and are marked as such above.

Related

• AI rules for lawyers, country by country
• Europe: the EU AI Act, the CCBE guides and Germany
• Qatar, whose president is a former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales
• Australia

Checked 5 August 2026 against the judiciary’s own PDF. Information, not legal advice, and not advice on the law of England and Wales.