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Anna Bond, legal director in the employment team at Lewis Silkin, used to receive grievances that were typically the length of an email. Now, the complaints she sees can run to about 30 pages and span a wide range of historical issues, many of which are repeated.
“I suspect that AI is behind it,” says Bond. The length of complaints about working conditions, colleagues and managers is the most pernicious problem. But some of the grievances also appeal to irrelevant laws — Canadian legislation, for example — or made-up legal precedents.
“There’s always been a trend for employees to bring up a range of concerns, but in the last year, I’ve seen more expansive ones.” Describing the breadth as “a smorgasbord”, Bond says typical complaints about issues such as discrimination and bullying are now joined by “a huge volume of information and historical detail” about issues such as holiday pay or personal injury “that might not be relevant” to the case.
David Palmer, employment legal director at Addleshaw Goddard, has also noted a sharp rise in complaints, often AI-generated. “Employees like the sound of the report; it sounds formal, but it often doesn’t reflect what happened. GenAI isn’t designed to produce legal documents.” Sinead Casey, employment partner at Linklaters, describes such complaints as “confidently incompetent”, superficially persuasive even to lawyers.
Louise Rudd, an adviser to workplace mediation service Acas, says employees can draw unrealistic expectations about the strength of their claims, and “in some cases, it appears that AI has provided incorrect or misleading information” including non-existent precedents. In others, individuals may ask for advice and will be given non-existent case law or incorrect interpretations by AI, which they may try to use to support their position against their employer.
Of course, it is not just employees who are using AI but also lawyers, as a number of high-profile cases have shown. Last year, the UK High Court highlighted two cases in which lawyers were thought to have used AI incorporating “a fake citation or quotation”.
Lawyers point out there are positive effects of generative AI: it can help staff understand their rights and, when used appropriately, embolden them to launch legitimate complaints against their bosses.
But the volume of AI-generated claims — and the additional time it takes to review their inaccuracies — may have a wider pernicious effect, slowing down responses from employers. Palmer says: “The complexity of the claims [is higher than] six or seven years ago.” In part, he attributes this to AI, which may also be affecting an already stretched employment tribunal system.
Ministry of Justice figures showed new employment tribunal cases brought by individuals increased by 33 per cent in the three months to September, while concluded cases decreased by 10 per cent, compared with a year earlier. The government expects cases to increase, due to the new Employment Rights Act.
Roy Magara, founder of employment specialists Magara Law, says this means “longer pleadings, wider issues being advanced and more complex case management demands landing in a system that is already operating at full stretch”. At scale, “cases sit unresolved for longer, memories fade, certainty is lost and the effectiveness of the tribunal process itself is undermined”.
The use of public AI tools to process confidential information also presents data protection issues, says Casey. “Employers should make sure their AI-usage policies are well drafted and set clear expectations for employees on what information should and should not be used on public tools.” She also suggests employers train managers and HR to spot AI-generated grievances to avoid becoming overwhelmed by lengthy, irrelevant, or overly legalistic arguments.
To really get ahead of slop grievances, however, employers should intervene in problems before employees start considering an AI complaint. “Line managers should consider speaking with the employee, ideally face to face, as soon as possible, to understand the core complaints in the employee’s own words rather than responding point by point to the lengthy arguments put forward in writing,” Casey says. “The employer could then summarise these back to the employee in writing” to focus complaints on substantive issues.
Face-to-face conversations can set the scene for a satisfactory resolution for everyone. “This part of the process is often overlooked and many employees jump straight to a formal process. It may be something that employers want to encourage or promote more within their businesses.”
And employees? “Look at facts, and review them, to make sure your complaint reflects what you truly intend,” Palmer advises. “It’s a legitimate use of the software, it’s just not how we’re seeing it used in practice.”
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