From The Economist in Britain, we learn a sobering fact about AI and the law. Britain’s employment tribunals allow people to represent themselves. Because AI is making that much easier, the number of cases has ballooned.

For example, under British law, employees have “interim relief,” the right to appeal to the court to force an employer to reinstate them. The provision was formerly little known and little used. But now …

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Now, around 20 applications are lodged each month in each of the 12 regional offices of Britain’s employment-tribunal system—a more than 100-fold increase … Most of these efforts will eventually fail, but all properly filed ones are entitled to an emergency hearing and their day in court, causing delays to other cases.

“The tragedy of the commons, AI edition,” August 5, 2026

Britain is not an outlier here:

The impact on Britain’s employment tribunals (courts that resolve disputes between employers and workers) illustrates a phenomenon emerging everywhere. AI-induced demand is overwhelming bureaucracies built for the analogue age—from Dutch municipal-tax appeals to the Canadian privacy regulator to parking-ticket tribunals in every major city. In Britain workers now ask large language models, rather than human lawyers, to help them sue their bosses quickly and cheaply. Claims have surged and backlogs grown. A case filed today may not be heard until 2030. “AI edition”

The new rights and compensation that Britain’s current government is giving to workers who sue their employers incentivizes what The Economist sees as a “tragedy of the commons:” Everyone has the right to overuse the resource and no one has a responsibility to maintain it, so it starts, and continues, to degrade.

A people’s court?

Ironically, employment tribunals were intended as a sort of people’s court to resolve disputes quickly and cheaply. But, The Economist complains, “The tech is a productivity booster for pests.” Hope is pinned on the idea that AI brief-writing tech will become better, more concise, and less prone to hallucination. But it’s not clear why that will not lead to even more cases being filed…

Perhaps Britain will need to consider AI judges for non-criminal cases as well …

Note: As a matter of policy, articles in The Economist are generally unsigned.