ABSTRACT
This article examines the benefits and risks of generative AI use in an important domain that is currently under-serviced by the civil justice system: small value consumer claims, where generative AI has been proposed as a means of closing the access to justice gap. In the field of online dispute resolution (‘ODR’), use has already been raised, and in some instances actioned, of digital tools such as expert systems and rules-based chatbots to assist potential litigants. Generative AI has considerable attractions in this context because of its adaptivity and flexibility in responding to prompts. The question is whether the risk of hallucinations apparently inherent in generative AI undermines these benefits. While strategies such as finetuning or retrieval augmented generation may improve the accuracy of generative AI in legal domains, it is currently unclear whether these techniques can usefully overcome the information asymmetries that typically characterise consumer disputes. Any resolution of these issues requires careful attention to ODR design and AI governance.
Paterson, Jeannie Marie and Tan, Vivi and Webb, Julian, Generative AI in Small Value Consumer Disputes: Reviving Not Resolving Challenges of Design and Governance in Online Dispute Resolution (May 30, 2025), (2025) 48(4) University of New South Wales Law Journal (Forthcoming).
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