A great development from BabelCite is their semantic search across Hong Kong judgments, including the Family Court. This is a genuine contribution to access to justice.
One note of caution from years of hands on practice: parsing judgments for parties is a sound foundation, but there must be a deliberate human review before any retrieved case finds its way into a pleading or advice. A case that is similar on its facts may have been distinguished, may have been decided on a point that does not assist, or may actively go against the very point that you are relying on.
This is the first principle I teach in my AI trainings for lawyers and professional teams; namely, the Tool that finds the authority and the Lawyer who reads it are doing two different jobs, and the second job, the hard part, the lawyering, cannot be circumvented.
If your chambers, firm, or organisation is rolling out AI or already experimenting with it, my Copilot training and AI risk and ethics courses focus on exactly this point of how to brief AI well, verify its output, and build simple, written workflows that keep judgment where it belongs ... with the human decision maker.
Caroline Langley is a barrister and HKMAAL accredited mediator at Justice Chambers, Admiralty, with more than thirty years at the Bar across four jurisdictions, and the founder of Just Law Education. Read more about Caroline.
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This article first appeared on LinkedIn.