SIGNAL
A system designed for scarcity of representation is now confronting industrial-scale adjudication. Britain's employment tribunals used to handle about 20 interim-relief applications a year—applications under which a judge can reinstate a fired whistleblower or order their wages paid—rarely succeeding. It was the procedural equivalent of a country lane: quiet, obscure, rarely travelled.
That lane is now a motorway at rush hour. Free, AI-powered legal advice is flooding the system. Workers with genuine grievances face longer waits; employers face bigger bills responding to claims that range from well-founded to fantastical. The bottleneck migrates upstream—from "can this person afford a lawyer?" to "can the tribunal sort the meritorious from the slop?"
The deeper read is equilibrium, not capacity. Interim relief is acting as the canary for what happens when every worker effectively gets a top-flight lawyer in their pocket. The story is not that AI broke the courts. It is that AI exposed a design assumption baked into the original system: that scarcity of representation would keep the docket manageable. Remove that scarcity, and the system has to learn a new job—adjudication at industrial scale.
Britain's employment tribunals are the first, not the only, place this will play out.
Reported by Sky for Type0, from The tragedy of the commons, AI edition. Read the original: economist.com