Welcome to 2025. I hope you all had a good Christmas. One of my Christmas presents this year, was the book “You are the hero” by Jonathan Green, an engaging history of the Fighting Fantasy hobby of the 1980s.
Growing up in a decrepit seaside resort in southern England, there was precious little to do when you were 10 years old and it rained, with no internet, no computers, and only 4 channels on the television. So a world of books beckoned. And not just any books: when the local library had been plundered, there remained the growing trade in Fighting Fantasy, well thumbed copies being passed from friend to friend.
Fighting Fantasy books were interactive fiction: in 400 numbered paragraphs, you assumed the role of the protagonist, and took part in a book that was part story, part game. With the aid of a pencil, eraser, and two six sided dice, you could venture through the cold damp tunnels of Firetop Mountain, wander the gloomy paths of the Forest of Doom, or pilot the Starship Traveller through the Seltsian Void.
The stories were great then, and the story of the stories, I found engrossing, as it dealt with a part of my childhood, and brought back to life memories, long since buried by the passage of the years, and the demands of adult life. The creators of Fighting Fantasy, also founded Games Workshop, Eidos (the creators of Tomb Raider) and undertook many further adventures, after Fighting Fantasy was gently superseded by the arrival of computer games.
In recent months, as I have been engrossed in other areas of work, and professional responsibilities, this blog has been sadly neglected. What I am going to do, over the coming year, is look to ensure this blog maintains a distinctive tone, and to discuss topics of interest to me, and which I think will be of wider interest, to those who have business with credit hire matters, although they may not necessarily be in the legal press the next day.
Of all these topics artificial intelligence is going to run like a golden thread through this blog, as I experiment with it, test out use cases, and post details of the results here.
In particular, although I have enjoyed playing with AI, over the last year, the time has now arrived to devise practical applications for it, and to integrate it into my practice, with the goal of increasing efficiency and saving time.
Of course this will go hand in hand with the data protection considerations, and client confidentiality warnings, that the regulators have been emphasising. But a lot of the potential uses of AI, simply don’t involve client data.
So what do I want to achieve? In order of progression, I would suggest using DALL-E and potentially similar applications such as MidJourney and Canva, to create images for use on this blog and social media, as a picture can be used in place of a thousand words to generate attention.
Secondly, I want to use an AI application in conjunction with Teams and Zoom, to create transcripts of the client conferences I have, which can then also be used to create summaries of advice. For many years my practice has been to produce typed conference notes, for my use, and the benefit of those who instruct me, but this practice can be streamlined.
Thirdly, I want to be able to dictate opinions, pleadings and skeleton arguments, into an AI application such as ChatGPT, or a custom GPT, and create formatted text in a way that is far faster and more accurate than the current options such as dictating directly into Word, or using Dragon Naturally Speaking. I am highly struck by how dictation into my Iphone is virtually flawless, compared with the Yeti microphone I have for my desktop PC.
Fourthly, I want to be able to use AI to create articles, blogs and presentations more quickly: looking at Powerpoint in Copilot and Beautiful.ai, to see if these can be used to create slides with reduced effort, and assisting in for example the generation of tables and graphs, to show data.
Next, I want AI applications which will facilitate fact management, extracting information or data, and creating chronologies, and schedules of facts, or sumarising expert reports, and tabulating the opposing opinions of experts on issues in the case. The step beyond this will be analysis of each side’s position and summaries of strong arguments and weaknesses in the arguments of each side’s expert.
Sixthly, what is the potential for Copilot in Excel to process and analyse data, perform calculations, summarise key points and present information in graphical form, or summaries I can cut and paste into submissions or skeleton arguments? Can it make bank statements readily digestible? Although the current fashion for open banking, and production of financial statements derived from open banking, means that AI is already there….
And, will AI stretch to analysis of trial bundles , by the use of AI applications which can handle large volumes of documents, identify key information and flag inconsistencies?
If all of or even some of these use cases work, then I can spend more of my time focusing on strategy and advocacy, thus becoming more efficient, and effective in the work I do. I shall report my findings over the course of 2025, and look to end the year, with a summary of how the experiment went.
I will however make one prediction though, which I promise to revisit in December 2025. That is, that the pace of change, and the evolution of AI will be so swift, that the wish list I posit above, will look positively antique in 12 months time, and many more powerful uses for AI will be apparent by then.