The Bar Standards Board (BSB) has said that it is has not been able to meet its commitments on the time it takes to review complaints against barristers due to a significant increase in the volume and complexity of reports, with AI-generated reports a “contributing factor.”
In the introduction to the BSB’s annual business plan published yesterday (8 April), interim director general Steven Haines says: “In the last year, the Bar Standards Board (BSB) has come under pressure as the volume and complexity of reports about barristers have increased. The use of AI is now a contributing factor in driving reports. A consequence has been that while the quality of our decision-making remains consistently high, our efficiency and timeliness targets have not been fully met.”
A spokesperson for the BSB further clarified to Legal IT Insider: “We are receiving complaints about barristers where the reporter has used AI to generate the report. They can be more time consuming to assess and this is contributing to an approximate 25 per cent increase in the volume of annual complaints the BSB is receiving.”
Haines says that the BSB is putting renewed focus on operational delivery through the appointment of a chief operations officer with accountability for all regulatory operational functions. He says: “We will increase our resilience in the face of fluctuating volumes of work across all our front-line services, bringing organisational improvements in effectiveness and efficiency. By the end of the year, we expect to have hit new timeliness targets in our assessment, investigations and enforcement of cases and in our authorisations work. We will do this by investing in people and resources, changes to our ways of working, outsourcing some of our work on our less complex investigations and by building better processes and systems to handle and manage capacity in casework.”
This issue is not particular to the BSB: there has, for example, been a sharp increase in GDPR complaints thanks to AI tools, with regulators across Europe reporting a dramatic rise in complaints.
While there is widespread optimism about AI expanding access to justice, there will need to be much-improved infrastructure in order to keep pace.
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