Natalie Byrom explains how the Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA 2007) aimed to reform legal services in England and Wales to enhance consumer protection and access to justice. However, its focus on professional titles and reserved activities created complexity and hindered innovation, especially for low-income individuals. Public funding cuts in 2013 worsened the situation, leading to increased self-representation and strain on the judiciary. In response, the Ministry of Justice and Senior Judiciary launched a £1.3bn digital reform in 2014 to modernize court operations. However, by 2023, only twenty-four out of forty-four projects were completed, with key initiatives like the Online Solutions Court abandoned due to delays and COVID-19 disruptions. In November 2023, a new vision proposed a public–private partnership for digital justice, leveraging technology to streamline processes and support from private sector services. This raises questions about market readiness, incentives for data sharing, and necessary regulatory adjustments to ensure fair access to justice. Addressing these challenges is crucial for improving legal service delivery and access to justice.

David Engstrom and Jess Lu (both Stanford Law) first show that an otherwise fast-growing and dynamic “legal tech” industry has not generated significant “direct-to-consumer” technologies designed to help self-represented litigants navigate a complex legal system. They then interrogate that puzzle: Why is it that better consumer legal tech hasn’t flourished? They ultimately settle on the idea that rule reforms alone may not stimulate high-scale, direct-to-consumer technology. Instead, other policy interventions may be necessary, including standardizing what is currently a checkerboard of court technology and data infrastructures. Perhaps more importantly, direct-to-consumer legal tech may have trouble overcoming some of the problems that are inherent to markets that are attempting to serve individuals with episodic attachment to the civil justice system and limited ability to pay. The result is an important meditation on whether reforms to UPL, Rule 5.4, or something else entirely are necessary to unlock the potential of potent new technologies in order to narrow the justice gap.

Court-connected ODR has already shown itself capable of dramatically improving access to justice by eliminating barriers rooted in the fact that courts traditionally resolve disputes only during certain hours, in particular physical places, and only through face-to-face proceedings. Given the centrality of courthouses to our system of justice, too many Americans have discovered their rights are too difficult or costly to exercise. As court-connected ODR systems spread, offering more inclusive types of dispute resolution services, people will soon find themselves with the law and the courts at their fingertips. But robust access to justice requires more than just raw, low-cost opportunities to resolve disputes. Existing ODR platforms seek to replicate in-person procedures, simplifying and clarifying steps where possible, but litigants without representation still proceed without experience, expertise, guardrails, or the ability to gauge risk or likely outcomes. Injecting ODR with a dose of data science has the potential to address many of these shortfalls. Enhanced ODR is unlikely to render representation obsolete, but it can dramatically reduce the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” and, on some dimensions—where machines can outperform humans—next generation platforms may be a significant improvement.

Technology is often seen as having transformational capacity to improve societal institutions, and the judiciary has not been an exception to this trend. For a number of years, courts around the world have invested in digital uplift projects. Beyond the routine use of technology to improve judicial systems, which is widely accepted and largely self-explanatory, many jurisdictions are increasingly investigating more sophisticated applications. Governments and courts are asking whether and to what extent machine learning techniques and other artificial intelligence applications should play a role in assisting tribunals and judiciary in decision making. In this chapter, we ask how these new uses of technology might, in turn, impact judicial values and judges’ own sense of themselves, and even transform the judicial role in contemporary societies. We do this through a focused examination of core judicial values, namely transparency and accountability, independence, impartiality, diversity and efficiency and how they may be either supported or undermined by increasing technologization.