The rapid rise of AI use in employment law disputes

Law Report

The episode explores the impact of artificial intelligence on employment law disputes, specifically focusing on a landmark case won by a sel

Key takeaways

• Greg Baker, a Macquarie University academic, successfully won an employment law dispute by relying entirely on AI tools.
• The Fair Work Commission has experienced a 40% growth in cases since AI became more accessible to self-represented litigants.

Main topics

• AI in legal litigation
• Fair Work Commission workload

Notable quotes

In the long term, it's going to be revolutionary.

Conclusion

AI presents a transformative opportunity for legal access but currentl

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Speaker 2 (0:06) We all have those books. Dog-eared with their first few pages still fanning, even when you try to lie them straight. They still inspire awe after the seventh reread. Which Australian books are your timeless favourites? ABC Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books Countdown. Speaker 2 (0:31) Head to abc.net.au slash top100books and have your say. Speaker 5 (0:45) More and more self-represented litigants in the Fair Work Commission are turning to artificial intelligence for help. Speaker 1 (0:52) It's swamping the Commission with, in some cases, very hopeless claims and that holds up all of the Commission's matters. Speaker 3 (1:02) It is something of a disaster in the Commission and in the courts and is serving up material that is often just wrong or entirely counterproductive for the case. Hi, Speaker 5 (1:14) Damien Carrick here. This is The Law Report on ABC Radio National. Before we look at concerns over the tidal wave of AI claims swamping the Fair Work Commission, there is another side of the coin that needs to be acknowledged. Speaker 4 (1:29) In the long term, it's going to be revolutionary. In the long term, we don't know what the legal system is going to look like at the other side of this. Speaker 5 (1:37) That's Macquarie University computing academic Greg Baker. who recently won a landmark employment law dispute, and he did so by relying entirely on AI. Greg, welcome to The Law Report. What was the legal dispute you had with your employer? Speaker 4 (1:54) So in 2024, Parliament established a new law around employee choice, and it lets employees who are casual by contract say that they're not really casual in reality. If the true nature of the relationship is no longer casual, then they can notify and become permanent. So in November last year, I had been teaching one particular unit for more than the statutory six months, and I was scheduled to teach it for the next year through to really February 2027 would be my end date. So I figured that was not really casual anymore. So you wanted Speaker 5 (2:32) to take advantage of changes to the Fair Work Act and apply to become an ongoing part-time employee, but Macquarie University rejected that, so you took them to the Fair Work Commission. Now, before this dispute, how much did you know about employment law? Speaker 4 (2:52) Nothing. And even one of my first sentences during cross-examination was, I'm not an employment lawyer, I have no idea how this works. So pretty amazing result. Speaker 5 (3:01) Giving you Speaker 4 (3:02) a Speaker 5 (3:02) complete lack of knowledge here. That's right. So this decision is significant in industrial relations or employment law terms. But the reason your case has captured so much attention is because you represented yourself in the Fair Work Commission. And when you were formulating your arguments and arguing your case, you relied entirely on AI. And AI even came up with the idea. for you to commence this case. Tell me how AI came up with the idea for you to commence this case. Speaker 4 (3:36) Well, for any listeners, I can thoroughly recommend do not have chats with ChatGPT about your career plans late at night when you're on your own. If you're going to make career plans, talk to your friends, talk to other people around you, because ChatGPT 5.2, I think it was, suggested that I... follow this path in order to get permanency and neglected to mention that no one had ever actually won a case around this. Speaker 5 (4:04) As I understand it, you were having a conversation around career planning with your AI tool and it suggested that you could use these new laws, these new amendments to the Fair Work Act to gain an ongoing position that would then allow you to apply for research grants, you know, part of your career development. So that's how this litigation got off the ground. Speaker 4 (4:24) Yes. I'm not sure how young your audience is, whether we need to translate I did it for the lulz. Lulz is like the plural of LOL. It's doing something like turning up to a triathlon using a penny-farthing bicycle and seeing what happens. It was, I thought, pretty funny to bring in, let's see what ChatGPT can do against some of Australia's top lawyers. Now, it wasn't quite as naive and simplistic as that might sound because... One of the things that I've been researching is looking at the progress of AI and what its capabilities are like. So it was also a bet that AI would improve enough that it would be very effective in the court case. And that certainly did play out. At the beginning, it was really kind of terrible and it required a lot of coaxing to come up with good answers. I still can't get Anthropic Claude to give me any legal advice other than shut up in public, don't say anything. But ChatGPT, with a bit of coaching, you could get sort of some sensible things out of it earlier this year. But by the time we got to some of the later filings in July, where we had GPT-5-4, it was bringing in precedents, finding cases that were highly relevant, answered subtle parts of the law and put together a very, very compelling argument that the Commissioner agreed with. Speaker 5 (5:45) So you spend Speaker 4 (5:46) $200 Speaker 5 (5:47) a month on ChatGPT Pro and you uploaded all your case materials, including emails, conversations, training records. So how did you actually harness and use AI to achieve the spectacular legal result that you did? Speaker 4 (6:03) AI is very good at doing software development. So if you can turn your problem into something that looks like a software development project, you'll get very good results. So I had a folder. In that folder, there was instructions and documentation about how I wanted things to proceed. And then there were subfolders that had the filings, the transcripts of conversations, the emails that I'd sent, any random scribbled notes that I'd made, put into one location so that we had a build process that automated taking answers and... fractional parts of a response and building it to make one document that we could then send off to the commission. Speaker 5 (6:45) And then you argued your case before the Fair Work Commission and you've won and you've now established a precedent. You're the first person to use these amendments to the Fair Work Act to