Can AI help a fee earner prepare for a court hearing?

Yes, for the parts of hearing preparation that are mechanical: assembling the facts from the papers, finding the page where each fact sits, checking dates and sums, and producing a first draft of a note or a chronology. It does not decide what your case is, what to concede, or how to answer the question the judge actually asks. Those are advocacy judgements, and they belong to the person on their feet.

Separate the mechanical from the tactical

Most hearing preparation splits fairly cleanly into two piles.

The mechanical pile is large and time-consuming: reading the bundle, working out which document says what, building a sequence of events, pulling out the figures, checking that the dates in the statements match the dates in the correspondence, identifying which documents the other side relies on, and listing the points you need to be able to find quickly.

The tactical pile is short and hard: what your best point is, which of your weaker points to drop, what the judge is likely to press you on, how much to concede, and how to put it. This pile is where experience shows and where AI is no help at all.

A tool that does the first pile well gives you more time for the second. That is the whole of the benefit. If you find yourself asking a tool to make the tactical decisions, you have crossed a line that your regulator, your insurer and your client all expect you to hold.

What AI can usefully do before a hearing

In practice, these tasks are worth handing over, on the understanding that everything comes back for checking:

• A chronology from the papers. Dates, events and the page each one came from, so you can verify each line rather than take it on trust.
• Finding the passage. Asking where in the bundle a particular admission, instruction or figure appears, and getting a page reference back instead of a vague recollection.
• Pulling the numbers together. Sums claimed, payments made, interest periods, time between events. The value lies in seeing the working, not just the total.
• Checking internal consistency. Whether the figure in the schedule matches the figure in the witness statement, whether the account in the letter matches the account in the statement of case.
• Reading the statutory wording at source. Where a provision or a piece of official guidance matters, going to the section itself rather than to a summary of it.
• A first draft note. A short outline of the facts and the issues, for a qualified person to rewrite in their own voice.

Notice what is common to all of these. Each one produces something you can check against a document, quickly, and either accept or correct. Tasks with that quality are the ones worth delegating.

What it cannot do, and why that matters more at a hearing

A hearing is an unforgiving place to discover an error. You cannot correct a misquoted date in front of the judge with the calm you would have had at your desk, and a wrong page reference in a note you are reading from is worse than no note at all.

So treat these as out of scope:

1. Authority. Do not put a case name or citation in front of a court unless you have read the source yourself. If a tool produces a reference you cannot open and verify, it does not go in the note. This is not a theoretical risk; courts have made their view of unverified citations very clear.
2. Prediction. No tool knows what a particular judge will do. Anything that sounds like a forecast is a guess dressed as an answer.
3. Tactics. What to run and what to drop is a judgement call that depends on your client's instructions, your feel for the case and your knowledge of the other side.
4. Anything with a signature on it. Nothing goes to the court without a qualified person reading it, standing behind it and signing it.

Checking the work before you stand up

Build the check into your preparation rather than bolting it on at the end.

Work backwards from the page reference. For each factual assertion in your note, open the page cited and confirm it says what the note says it says. This takes minutes and removes nearly all of the risk.

Recalculate anything that matters. If a date or a figure is going to be spoken aloud, do the arithmetic yourself once. A calculation shown step by step is easy to audit; a bare answer is not.

Watch for silence. If a tool cannot find something, that should be stated plainly. An answer that quietly fills a gap is the dangerous kind. When the papers do not address a point, that is itself useful information: it tells you where your evidence is thin.

Keep the diary separate. Whatever a tool says about a deadline, the firm's diary system governs the date.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis is an AI assistant for UK law firms, made by L25 Limited, used through the web browser, with one conversation for a matter. It answers questions about a matter from the matter's own papers and names the page each answer came from, and where the papers do not say, it says so. It counts key dates and figures with the working shown, each step carrying the rule that allows it, and says the firm's diary system still governs. Drafts are prepared for a qualified person to review and sign off; Alesis assists qualified professionals rather than replacing them, and it does not provide legal advice.