Can AI help us deal with a litigant in person on the other side?

Yes, for the preparation around the correspondence rather than the decisions inside it. AI is useful for digesting long and unstructured letters, keeping a running list of what the other side has asked and what you have actually answered, checking dates, and producing a first draft of a reply in plain English. The judgement about what to say, what not to say, and how to say it to someone without a solicitor stays entirely with the fee earner.

What an unrepresented opponent changes about the work

Most of the extra burden is not legal. It is volume, format and repetition.

Correspondence tends to be longer, to mix several issues in one document, to return to points already dealt with, and to arrive in whatever form is to hand: emails, scanned handwriting, photographs of documents, long attachments without page numbers. None of it can be skimmed safely, because a new point or a concession may be buried in the middle of a paragraph about something else.

There is also a professional edge to it. You owe your client your full duty, and at the same time you cannot give the other side advice, cannot take unfair advantage of their lack of representation, and need a record that shows you behaved properly throughout. Courts expect reasonable allowance to be made for someone acting in person, without the rules being set aside for them.

That combination, high reading load and high care, is exactly where good preparation earns its keep.

Where AI genuinely helps

Useful tasks, all of them groundwork:

• Reducing a long letter to the points actually raised. A ten page letter may contain four questions, one allegation and one offer. Getting those out, with the page each came from, saves the fee earner reading time without losing the detail.
• Keeping a running list of what has been asked and answered. Over a year of correspondence, it is easy to lose track of which questions you have replied to. A list of their questions against your replies, with page references both ways, is both a work tool and a defence if you are later accused of ignoring them.
• Finding where something was said. Unrepresented opponents often shift position. Being able to locate the page where a date, figure or admission first appeared is worth more than a general impression of the file.
• Checking dates and figures. Deadlines, service dates and arithmetic in a schedule should be worked through rather than assumed, particularly where the other side has calculated something themselves.
• First drafts in plain English. Replies to a litigant in person should avoid jargon and unexplained abbreviations. A draft that states the position in ordinary language, which the fee earner then edits, is often faster than starting from a precedent written for another solicitor.
• Spotting what is missing. If they have promised a document, or referred to an attachment that never arrived, that should be captured rather than forgotten.

What must stay with the fee earner

Several decisions on these files are judgement calls that no tool should make.

First, the line between explaining and advising. Telling the other side what a hearing date means is not the same as telling them what to do about it. Where that line sits in a particular letter is a decision for a qualified person.

Second, tone. Correspondence with an unrepresented party is often read later by a judge, and sometimes published by the recipient. Firm is fine. Dismissive is not. A draft can be neutral; only a human can judge whether it reads the right way in this dispute, with this history.

Third, strategy. Whether to apply, whether to warn, whether to make an offer, whether to agree an extension: all unchanged by the presence of a tool.

Fourth, proportionality. It is easy to let a litigant in person file consume time the client is not getting value from. Decide what a reply needs to cover before drafting it, not after.

It is also worth remembering that the letters coming in may themselves have been produced with AI. Confident references to law that does not fit, or citations you cannot verify, should be checked at source before you respond to them, and dealt with calmly rather than triumphantly.

Keeping the file defensible

Treat this like any other AI-assisted work. The papers belong to your client, so they go into a tool your firm has approved for client information, not a consumer account. Nothing goes out unreviewed. Record on the file that the reply was prepared with assistance and checked by the fee earner who signed it, in the same way you would record a draft prepared by a paralegal.

Keep your deadline record in the firm's diary system, not in a conversation. And keep the running question and answer list up to date: on a file with a litigant in person, the most common complaint is that correspondence went unanswered, and a dated list with page references is the cleanest answer to that.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis answers questions about a matter from the matter's own papers and names the page each answer came from, and if 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. It prepares drafts for a qualified person to review and sign off; it does not file, serve or email anything. It assists qualified professionals and does not replace them, and it does not provide legal advice.