Growing access to artificial intelligence (AI) tools capable of drafting ‘legal’ complaints has resulted in a surge of complex grievances and claims from employees against their employers.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the availability of free to use large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots is encouraging employees to formally raise matters with employers that might previously have been dealt with via informal channels, adding time and cost pressures to employers’ dispute resolution processes.
AI allows lengthy – often amounting to tens of pages – highly-detailed complaints to be documented in seconds. What would normally begin as a simple grievance (a formal internal procedure for raising complaints) may now be a very detailed, lengthy submission containing multiple points.
These submissions frequently include points that would not normally feature at the grievance stage, which have been suggested to the complainant by the chatbot but sit outside the main subject of the grievance and are often based on an incorrect understanding of the law.
Common examples are allegations of breaches of employment legislation, references to case law and requests for compensation, which ordinarily would not appear outside tribunal claims, if at all.
This incendiary approach tends to escalate matters very quickly, regardless of the complexity of the underlying complaint, and pushes the employee towards a tribunal claim early in the complaint process, rather than internal resolution of the dispute.
Instead of enlisting legal advice, a higher proportion of claimants are approaching tribunals relying on AI chatbot-generated information to substantiate and argue their case.
Once tribunal proceedings are underway, claimants are also using AI to raise procedural issues at all stages.
For example, applications for interim relief (which can keep an employee in their role or require an employer to pay an employee their wages in full, despite dismissal) and appeals against tribunal decisions are on the rise.
The challenge for employers
Employers are legally obliged to respond to grievances from employees, but the volume, speed of generation and level of detail contained in AI-produced grievances is proving challenging for employers and their already stretched HR teams.
While AI can draft correspondence in seconds, chatbots – unlike employers, employees and lawyers – have no interest in resolving disputes. This means the arguments AI generates are often circular and couched in inflammatory language designed to entrench claimants in their position, which ultimately lengthens the dispute resolution process.
While this problem is not unique to any one type of employer, companies with large workforces are unsurprisingly experiencing this trend most acutely.
The nature of complaints varies from relatively sophisticated, coherent submissions to very basic and confused efforts littered with errors.
Because AI often draws in references that are irrelevant to the issue in dispute – and sometimes flatly incorrect – these have to be identified and corrected, which can be very time-consuming for employers and their legal counsel.
Claimants often assume that adding more AI-suggested issues into their claim will strengthen their case, when in fact this approach merely means the dispute takes longer to resolve than if they had stuck to their core complaint – especially where the issues are unrelated to the complaint or inaccurate.
AI also creates an adversarial barrier between the claimant and the employer or its legal team, which presents practical obstacles to dispute resolution.
Ordinarily, where AI is not involved and claimants are represented by legal advisers, such cases tend to involve a significant amount of collaboration between the parties on both sides on how the case will progress and any settlement discussions.
For some claimants, the edifice of legal competence created by AI rapidly crumbles at the hearing stage because the individuals struggle to articulate their case in person without the use of a chatbot.
This uses up valuable tribunal time without furthering the dispute resolution process.
Solving the problem
While HR teams often struggle to deal with the increased volume of claims they receive, experienced employment lawyers can generally quickly spot where an LLM has been used in drafting.
AI-generated claims frequently include telltale signs in their formatting, font and use of language, which are recognisable even before errors and irrelevances in their legal arguments become apparent.
Employment lawyers may also have specialist AI tools at their disposal, which have been trained for legal purposes and are designed to be deployed strategically by legal experts in ways that can match the speed and complexity of claimant submissions, rooting out inaccuracies and analysing the strength of the claim.
As of October 2025, tribunal judges have also been equipped with guidance from the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary that allows the tribunal to intervene where there is reason to believe a claimant has used an AI chatbot.
Judges are permitted to enquire about AI usage and whether the claimant understands they are responsible for the accuracy of information put before the tribunal.
There are no penalties at present for introducing AI-generated inaccuracies into claims and it remains to be seen whether tribunals will take any steps within their normal powers to penalise the practice.
Is AI a time-saver?
Regardless of the enhanced speed AI offers both claimants and employment lawyers, both sides are ultimately pinned to the Employment Tribunal schedules.
According to the latest tribunal statistics published by His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service at the end of 2025, there were 515,000 open employment tribunal claims across single and multiple cases at the end of the second quarter of 2025, with cases being listed as far ahead as 2029.
The growing volume of AI-generated claims is only adding to this backlog, and the nature of these claims means they are taking longer to resolve than ‘traditional’ claims involving legal representation on both sides.
If AI fails to generate more satisfactory outcomes for claimants, it may be that this relatively recent trend burns itself out quite quickly.
In the meantime, employers and their legal advisers should be prepared to fight fire with fire and deploy specially trained AI tools wielded by employment law experts to help manage the volume of grievances and complaints.
