Can AI help us fill in court forms?

Yes, for the parts of a form that involve finding and restating information the file already contains. An AI assistant can pull the parties' full names, addresses, claim numbers, dates and figures out of the papers and draft the free text sections, which is usually where the time goes. What it cannot do is confirm you are using the current version of the form, sign a statement of truth, or file anything.

Most court forms are not difficult. They are tedious, and they punish small errors: a misspelled party name, a figure that does not match the schedule, an address taken from correspondence two years out of date. Those are exactly the errors that come from copying between documents at speed, and exactly the kind of checking an AI assistant can take a first pass at.

What is worth handing over

Split the form into three kinds of box.

Facts already on the file. Party names as they appear on the claim form, the claim number, dates of key events, the sum claimed, the hearing date if one is listed. An assistant that reads the matter's papers and names the page each answer came from can produce all of this with a reference you can check in seconds. If the file is inconsistent, say the defendant's name appears in two forms, you want that flagged rather than resolved silently.

Free text explanation. Boxes asking what order you want and why, or setting out the background, are drafting tasks. A first draft built from the file, with page references, is quicker to correct than a blank box is to fill. You will rewrite it. That is fine: you are editing rather than reconstructing the history of the matter from memory.

Judgement calls. Which order to ask for, whether to apply at all, what to concede, how to put the point. These stay with the fee earner. An AI assistant is not deciding your application strategy, and you should not let a draft's confident tone talk you into a position you had not actually chosen.

The version of the form is your problem, not the tool's

Court forms change. Boxes are added, wording is revised, and a superseded version may be rejected or simply cause confusion. Never let an AI assistant reproduce a form from its own description of what the form contains. Download the current form from the official source yourself, every time, and paste the drafted content into it.

The same applies to accompanying requirements: what must be filed with the form, how many copies, where it goes, whether a fee is payable and how it is paid. Treat anything an AI tells you about those as a prompt to check the official guidance, not as the answer. A tool that reads official sources at the source and lets you open them in one click makes that check short. A tool that summarises from memory does not.

Statements of truth and who signs

A statement of truth is a personal assertion by the person signing. It is not an administrative box. If AI drafted the content, the person signing still has to believe the facts stated are true, which means reading the draft properly and satisfying themselves about each factual assertion, including the ones that came from the papers.

That has a practical consequence. Drafts that paraphrase the file fluently can smooth over a gap: a date that is approximate, a sum that was an estimate, an event described in correspondence but not evidenced. Before signing, check each factual assertion against the page it came from. Where a draft asserts something the file does not support, it should say so rather than fill the gap. If your tool does not behave that way, you are checking for invented detail as well as for accuracy, which is slower work.

A process that holds up

1. Download the current form from the official source.
2. Ask the assistant for the factual details the form needs, each with a page reference, and check the references.
3. Ask for a draft of the free text boxes, then edit it as your own work.
4. Verify fee, deadline, required attachments and filing method against official guidance yourself.
5. Have the person who will sign read the completed form against the file, not against the draft.
6. Save the final form and a note of how it was prepared to the matter file.

For deadlines, do the arithmetic properly and keep the diary system as the source of truth. A tool that shows each step of a date calculation and names the rule allowing it is useful for checking your own count. It is not a substitute for the diary, and it should say so.

For a high volume of similar applications, the gain compounds. The same process, run thirty times, turns a day of copying into a few hours of checking. But resist the temptation to drop the checking step because the last twenty were right.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis is an AI assistant for UK law firms, used through the 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; if the papers do not say, it says so, and when it cannot find support for a point it says what is missing instead of guessing. It counts key dates 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, and it does not file, serve or email anything.