Justice Needs More Than Intelligence with Yaa Dankwa Ampadu-Sackey
There’s no shortage of talk about what artificial intelligence can do for the legal profession, and much of it is justified. A technology that can summarise thousands of documents in seconds, spot patterns across vast amounts of information and take the grind out of routine tasks is genuinely transformative, and any lawyer who has lost an evening to disclosure will understand the appeal!
But family law has a way of exposing the limits of efficiency. The questions that matter most in this area of practice aren’t ones a machine can answer, however capable it becomes.
What does this particular family actually need? What is truly in a child’s best interests? Does someone sitting across the table feel they’ve genuinely been heard? These are questions of judgement, empathy and trust, and no algorithm has yet worked out how to hold a hand through the worst week of someone’s life.
That tension sits at the heart of the latest episode of the more than marketing Podcast, in which Laura Hearn, Content & Brand Manager at Consortium, is joined by Yaa Dankwa Ampadu-Sackey, family law barrister at Trinity Chambers, mediator, and cross-qualified in both England and Wales and Ghana.
Together they explore where AI can genuinely make legal practice better, and why, for all its promise, justice remains a profoundly human exercise.
Experience shapes judgement
Yaa is clear on one thing: the law itself doesn’t change depending on who applies it. Evidence, legislation and case law provide the framework, and that framework holds regardless of the lawyer standing in front of it. What changes, and what matters far more than we often acknowledge, is the perspective a lawyer brings to interpreting the facts in front of them.
Drawing on her own experiences as a first-generation immigrant, a parent and a barrister, Yaa explains how life has a way of teaching lawyers to recognise nuance that no statute or practice direction can capture. It’s the kind of understanding that only comes from having lived a little, and it can change the outcome of a case entirely.
She shares one example from her own practice that makes the point better than any theory could. An illiterate mother had been criticised for hand-feeding her eight-year-old son and for preparing food from her own cultural background rather than English meals. Stripped of context, those observations became concerns about her parenting. But once her circumstances, her culture and her intentions were properly understood, the picture looked very different: not a mother failing her child, but a mother caring for him in the way she knew.
It’s a story that lands on something important. Good legal judgement depends on curiosity, empathy and a willingness to listen before reaching conclusions. And those qualities, for now at least, remain stubbornly human.
AI can organise information. It cannot exercise wisdom.
Running through the whole discussion is a distinction Yaa returns to more than once: the difference between intelligence and wisdom. It sounds like a philosophical point, but it’s actually a deeply practical one.
Artificial intelligence is exceptionally good at processing information. It can analyse disclosure, identify themes, summarise evidence and dramatically cut the hours lawyers spend buried in documents. This isn’t speculation on Yaa’s part, either; she saw it first-hand working on the UK Covid Inquiry, where AI helped sift through thousands of emails to surface the material that actually mattered. Used well, it’s a genuinely powerful assistant.
But efficiency is not judgement, and confusing the two is where the danger lies. Understanding why a particular authority matters, assessing whether a witness is credible, weighing competing evidence and anticipating how a court might approach a unique set of facts – none of this can be delegated to a machine, however quickly it reads. These are acts of reasoning, shaped by experience and instinct, and they sit firmly on the human side of the line.
Yaa sums it up more neatly than most commentators manage: AI can organise information, but it cannot exercise wisdom.
The danger of removing people from the process
The conversation also turns to what may be the biggest risk hanging over AI in legal practice, and it isn’t the one most people expect. The technology itself isn’t a problem, but the overreliance on it is.
It’s a subtle but crucial distinction. Used properly, AI is simply another professional tool, no more threatening than a good precedent bank or a well-trained paralegal. Used carelessly, it becomes something more corrosive: a shortcut that quietly discourages the critical thinking the job depends on. The danger isn’t that AI gets things wrong; it’s that lawyers stop checking whether it has.
Yaa’s advice is refreshingly practical. Trust AI to complete the task it’s been given, but never rely on its output without scrutinising it carefully. Technology may produce the first draft, but responsibility always remains with the lawyer, and no amount of automation shifts that burden.
In family law, that principle carries even more weight. Every decision touches real people navigating some of the most difficult moments of their lives, and they deserve more than an unchecked answer generated in seconds… they deserve a lawyer who has thought it through.
Can AI ever understand people?
One of the most thought-provoking stretches of the conversation asks a question that goes right to the edge of what AI might ever be capable of: could it recognise cultural difference, emotion or trauma the way an experienced lawyer does?
Laura raises an intriguing possibility that technology might one day help educate professionals about cultural perspectives beyond their own. Yaa is open to the idea, up to a point. AI may well help organise that knowledge and make it easier to access, and there’s real value in that. But understanding people is a different exercise altogether, and it draws on things no dataset contains: judgement, empathy and lived experience.
Family law makes the point daily. It’s full of situations where two people respond in completely different ways to exactly the same circumstances, and neither response is necessarily irrational. One parent goes quiet under pressure; another becomes defensive. Neither tells you, on its own, who they really are. Understanding why people behave as they do is often just as important as understanding the law itself, and that understanding is built across a career, not retrieved from a database.
Technology can support that process. What it cannot do is replace it, and it’s hard to imagine a version of it that ever could!
Justice is more than applying rules
It’s towards the end of the episode that Yaa delivers what might be the strongest message of the whole conversation. Law provides a framework of rules; however, justice is something much richer.
Courts, after all, do far more than calculate outcomes. They weigh competing interests, assess credibility, consider vulnerability, and crucially, explain why difficult decisions have been reached. And people accept those decisions, even ones that go against them, for a reason that has nothing to do with processing power: they believe another human being has listened carefully, exercised judgement and accepted responsibility for the outcome.
Responsibility is the one thing that cannot be outsourced, automated or delegated to a system, however sophisticated. A judgment handed down by an algorithm might be fast, and it might even be technically correct, but who would stand behind it? Who would look a parent in the eye and own the decision?
AI will keep improving legal research, drafting and the administrative machinery of practice, and the profession should welcome that. But justice, in the end, rests on human responsibility, and that is exactly where it should stay.
Four practical takeaways
If there’s a single lesson to take from the episode (and others that we’ve published!), it’s this: use AI to improve efficiency, never to replace critical thinking. In practice, that means a few things worth pinning above every fee earner’s desk:
- Treat every AI-generated output as a starting point, not a finished answer.
- Recognise that cultural understanding, empathy and listening remain essential legal skills.
- Develop judgement alongside technical capability; one without the other is only half a lawyer.
- Remember that justice depends on accountability, and accountability remains human.
Technology will continue to transform legal practice, and rightly so; nobody should mourn the hours once lost to manual document review. But as this conversation so memorably reminds us, the legal profession has never really been about applying rules. It has always been about understanding people…
You can listen to the full episode on our website, YouTube, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.