Can AI summarise a long judgment or ombudsman decision for us?

Yes. Summarising a long judgment or a long ombudsman decision is one of the tasks AI does most usefully, because the source is a single fixed document and the work is reading, not invention. The conditions are that the tool reads the whole thing rather than a headnote or an extract, that it tells you which passages each point came from, and that a fee earner reads those passages before anything goes into advice or submissions.

Decide what you are actually asking for

"Summarise this" is a weak instruction. It invites a flat retelling that gives equal weight to the background and the part you care about. Most of the time what you want is narrower.

• The outcome and the reasons for it, in sequence.
• The point the court or ombudsman actually decided, separated from observations made along the way.
• The treatment of one issue only, ignoring the rest.
• What the decision says about a particular argument you are running or facing.
• What the decision does not deal with.

Ask for one of those. A narrow question produces an answer you can check in a few minutes; a broad one produces three pages you will have to read the original to verify anyway.

The failure modes worth knowing

A summary can be wrong in ways that are harder to spot than an invented citation, because nothing about it looks odd.

Omission. The tool covers the first half properly and compresses the second. On a long decision, the passage that matters to you may be the one that got compressed.

Flattening. Reasoning that turns on a qualification loses the qualification. "The court held X" is offered where the document says X applied on those facts, or subject to a condition, or only because a concession had been made.

Wrong emphasis. A remark made in passing is presented with the same weight as the decision itself. This matters most when you intend to use the decision to support a proposition.

Partial reading. Some tools only take in as much of a document as they can handle and quietly work from that. You get a confident summary of a fraction of the text with no sign that the rest was never read.

Confident gap-filling. Asked what the decision says about a point it does not address, a tool may produce something plausible rather than saying the point is not addressed.

None of these are reasons to avoid the task. They are reasons to insist on a summary you can audit.

Ask for it in a shape you can check

The useful discipline is to require the summary to carry its own evidence. Ask for each point to name the paragraph or page it came from. Ask for short quotations where the wording matters, particularly where the summary states a test, a conclusion or a limit.

A structure that works for judgments and for ombudsman decisions alike:

1. What the dispute was about, in three or four lines.
2. The issues the decision had to resolve.
3. The outcome on each issue.
4. The reasoning, with references.
5. Anything the decision expressly declined to decide.
6. Anything relevant you asked about that the document does not cover.

That last item is the one that saves time. If the answer to "does this decision deal with delay?" is that it does not, you want to be told that in one line rather than given a paragraph that reads as though it does.

Who reads the original, and when

A summary is a way of finding your way around a document quickly. It is not a substitute for the document when the document is doing work.

Read the underlying passages yourself before you:

• cite the decision in correspondence, a pleading, a skeleton or submissions;
• advise a client that it determines or strongly affects their position;
• rely on a form of words from it in your own drafting;
• distinguish it in response to the other side.

Cite from the original text, not from the summary. If you cannot locate a proposition in the document, treat the proposition as unsupported and drop it, whatever the summary says. Check too that the decision is current: that it has not been overturned or departed from, and that any legislation it discusses has not since changed. A summary describes one document at one moment; it does not tell you where that document now stands.

For internal use, a lower bar is reasonable. Working out whether a decision is worth your time at all, or orienting yourself in a two hundred paragraph judgment before you read it properly, does not need the same verification as a quotation in a skeleton. Be clear with your team which of the two they are doing.

Where Alesis fits

Alesis reads official sources at the source: legislation section by section, official guidance, and Financial Ombudsman decisions in full. Every point names its source, and official sources open in one click, so you can go straight to the passage a summary rests on. Where it cannot find support for a point, it says what is missing rather than guessing, and where coverage is thinner, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, it says so in the answer. It assists qualified professionals and does not replace them, and it does not provide legal advice.