Welcome to 2025. I hope you had a good Christmas and are set fair for the New Year. One of my Christmas presents, was the fascinating book “Dice Men”. It is the story of the foundation and early years of Games Workshop, now one of Nottinghamshire’s most famous companies.
There is a huge amount of money being generated by a company whose chief activity appears to be the manufacture and sale of miniature soldiers, under the nomenclature of Warhammer. Indeed, I was intrigued to learn that the area where I live, is within the so-called “Lead Belt”, the world centre for the manufacture of miniature figures.
The company’s real value is in the loyalty of its customer base, which is global, and encompasses such numinaries as Henry Cavill and James Cleverly, and in its intellectual property, which has found its way into many games, computer games, films, books and more.
Games Workshop last year entered the FTSE 100, and had I had the good fortune to invest £10,000 in the company’s shares in, say, October 2015, my shareholding would now be worth £278,000. Oh well, not as bad as my Bitcoin fiasco, and everyone has their Decca-and-the-Beatles story after all. But if I lost out on Games Workshop and Bitcoin, I am determined not to be left behind when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (AI).
What I am going to do, over the coming year, is look to ensure this blog maintains a distinctive tone, and to discuss topics of interest to me, and which I think will be of wider interest, to those who have business with legal costs and litigation funding matters, although they may not necessarily be in the legal press the next day.
Themes that I intend to explore in a little more depth over the coming months are costs budgeting, litigation funding, commercial costs, artificial intelligence (AI), as well as alternative dispute resolution (ADR) including costs in arbitration proceedings, costs mediation and the scope for arbitration of costs disputes themselves.
Of all these topics artificial intelligence is going to run like a golden thread through this blog, as I experiment with it, test out use cases, and post details of the results here.
In particular, although I have enjoyed playing with AI, over the last year, the time has now arrived to devise practical applications for it, and to integrate it into my practice, with the goal of increasing efficiency and saving time.
Of course this will go hand in hand with the data protection considerations, and client confidentiality warnings, that the regulators have been emphasising. But a lot of the potential uses of AI, simply don’t involve client data.
So what do I want to achieve? In order of progression, I would suggest using DALL-E and potentially similar applications such as MidJourney and Canva, to create images for use on this blog and social media, as a picture can be used in place of a thousand words to generate attention.
Secondly, I want to use an AI application in conjunction with Teams and Zoom, to create transcripts of the client conferences I have, which can then also be used to create summaries of advice. For many years my practice has been to produce typed conference notes, for my use, and the benefit of those who instruct me, but this practice can be streamlined.
Thirdly, I want to be able to dictate opinions, pleadings and skeleton arguments, into an AI application such as ChatGPT, or a custom GPT, and create formatted text in a way that is far faster and more accurate than the current options such as dictating directly into Word, or using Dragon Naturally Speaking. I am highly struck by how dictation into my Iphone is virtually flawless, compared with the Yeti microphone I have for my desktop PC.
Fourthly, I want to be able to use AI to create articles, blogs and presentations more quickly: looking at Powerpoint in Copilot and Beautiful.ai, to see if these can be used to create slides with reduced effort, and assisting in for example the generation of tables and graphs, to show data.
Next, I want AI applications which will facilitate fact management, extracting information or data, and creating chronologies, and schedules of facts, or sumarising expert reports, and tabulating the opposing opinions of experts on issues in the case. The step beyond this will be analysis of each side’s position and summaries of strong arguments and weaknesses in the arguments of each side’s expert.
Sixthly, as is well known to costs lawyers, you cannot read an electronic bill, instead you interrogate it. What is the potential for Copilot in Excel to process and analyse data, perform calculations, summarise key points and present information in graphical form, or summaries I can cut and paste into submissions or skeleton arguments?
And, will AI stretch to analysis of trial bundles and detailed assessment bundles, by the use of AI applications which can handle large volumes of documents, identify key information and flag inconsistencies?
If all of or even some of these use cases work, then I can spend more of my time focusing on strategy and advocacy, thus becoming more efficient, and effective in the work I do. I shall report my findings over the course of 2025, and look to end the year, with a summary of how the experiment went.
I will however make one prediction though, which I promise to revisit in December 2025. That is, that the pace of change, and the evolution of AI will be so swift, that the wish list I posit above, will look positively antique in 12 months time, and many more powerful uses for AI will be apparent by then.