About Andrew Hogan

I am a barrister practising in England and Wales and was called to the Bar in 1996. For most of the intervening thirty years I have worked in civil litigation, with a particular specialism in legal costs and litigation funding. I practise from Hailsham Chambers in the Temple in London, and my work has taken me through the County Court, High Court and Court of Appeal and into a fairly substantial quantity of paper along the way.

I have also written throughout my career. Most of that writing has concerned costs, litigation funding, civil procedure and the practical problems which arise when rules, money and litigation collide. I have always preferred writing which explains what something actually means in practice rather than merely describing it in increasingly elaborate terminology. Artificial intelligence rather invites the same treatment. It has generated an impressive quantity of jargon in a comparatively short period of time, some of it useful and some of it apparently designed to make relatively simple ideas sound expensive.

My interest in artificial intelligence began as a practical one. The important questions seemed to me to be less whether the technology was revolutionary than what it could actually do. Could it research properly? Could it analyse documents? Could it draft? Could it be trusted with confidential material? What happened when it was wrong? And, if machines became very much better at producing the mechanical parts of legal work, what would remain valuable in the lawyer?

Andrew and the Marvellous Analytical Engine grew out of trying to answer those questions. The second edition goes considerably further than the first, because the technology itself moved considerably further in the intervening year. It ranges from the history of computing and the development of large language models through to legal research, drafting, litigation workflows, specialist legal AI, professional regulation, confidentiality and synthetic evidence. Its underlying approach is practical: understand what the machinery can do, use it where it is useful, and do not confuse an impressively produced answer with professional judgment.

The book is also illustrated throughout. Sunny the Labrador and I consequently appear in laboratories, libraries, flying machines, courtrooms and various pieces of brass machinery which would almost certainly fail a modern health and safety inspection. The illustrations are deliberately fanciful. The problems considered in the book are not.

I live in Nottinghamshire with my family and animals. Away from law and artificial intelligence, my interests include writing, history, windsurfing and occasional ballooning. Sunny’s interests are less complicated.