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EU AI Act for courts and dispute resolution bodies

*Engineering guidance, not legal advice. Your legal team decides how the Act applies to your products.*

Where this sector lands

Annex III point 8(a) covers AI systems intended to be used by a judicial authority or on its behalf to assist in researching and interpreting facts and the law and in applying the law to a concrete set of facts, or used in a similar way in alternative dispute resolution. This page is about the court side: judiciaries, tribunals, arbitration and mediation bodies, and the vendors building for them. Law-firm tools are on the legal tech page.

The recitals keep purely ancillary administrative activities out of the high-risk category: anonymising or pseudonymising judgments, communication between staff, and administrative tasks that do not affect the actual administration of justice. A tool that pseudonymises published decisions is not the same as one that drafts the reasoning section.

The recitals also state that AI may support the decision-making power of judges but should not replace it: the final decision stays a human activity.

The logging duties that follow

• Art. 12 (providers): automatic recording of events so the system's contribution to a case can be traced.
• Art. 19 (providers): keep logs under your control for at least six months.
• Art. 26 (deployers), the court or ADR body: competent human oversight (Art. 26(2)), logs kept for at least six months (Art. 26(6)), and for public authorities, use only of systems registered in the EU database (Art. 26(8)). Courts, as bodies governed by public law, also carry out a fundamental rights impact assessment.

Proceedings and appeals take years. Six months is a legal floor, not a sensible retention period for anything touching a judgment.

On timing: the Digital Omnibus agreement moves Annex III high-risk obligations to December 2027 (details and caveats).

What counts as evidence

A party challenging a judgment may ask whether an AI tool shaped the reasoning and which sources it surfaced. The log should show the research question, the sources returned, and what the chamber adopted.

Abbreviated ledger excerpt (prev, hash and sig omitted):

{"seq":1,"type":"llm.request","data":{"model":"juris-assist-3","params":{"max_tokens":1200},"case":"TRB-2026-0917"}}
{"seq":2,"type":"tool.call","data":{"name":"caselaw_search","input":{"query":"limitation period consumer credit","court":"supreme"}}}
{"seq":3,"type":"tool.result","data":{"name":"caselaw_search","output":{"hits":["ECLI:XX:2021:118","ECLI:XX:2023:044"]}}}
{"seq":4,"type":"tool.call","data":{"name":"clerk_accept","input":{"clerk":"clk_09","adopted":["ECLI:XX:2023:044"]}}}

A hash chain shows the research trail was not reshaped after the judgment was challenged.

How Vetro Attest fits

Vetro Attest accepts an OpenTelemetry GenAI trace (OTLP/JSON) or a native Vetro ledger, with nothing to install. Verification is free. For 29 USD per ledger, one-off:

• a full EU AI Act report (Markdown and HTML) mapping the run onto the logging obligations, with an explicit list of what the log cannot show;
• an ed25519 countersignature over the ledger digest, event count and timestamp, verifiable by anyone with our published public key.

A practical pattern: countersign research runs per case at the moment a draft leaves chambers, and keep the attestation in the case management system for the life of the case.

Limits, stated plainly: the countersignature proves the log verified clean at a time, not that the legal analysis was correct. The report supports a compliance conversation; it is not a conformity assessment. Paid ledgers are deleted after 7 days, and the report and attestation are emailed to you to keep.

Next steps

• Run the free EU AI Act Art. 12/14 checker against your current setup.
• Verify a trace free, then get the countersigned report for 29 USD.
• Compare approaches: vs. WORM storage, vs. RFC 3161 timestamping.

See a sample ledger verified in one click, check your own logs free or get the countersigned EU AI Act report.