A free drafting tool makes it easy to allege twenty things. The test rewards alleging one and proving it

Consider what a person does the week after they are dismissed for raising a concern.

They are angry, they are frightened about money, and they have seven days. They have no lawyer, because that is who this court was designed for. And they now have a tool that will produce a structured legal document from whatever they type into it, at no cost, in minutes.

The tool has one obvious property: asked to make a case, it makes the case. It does not ordinarily open by telling you that your strongest complaint is your third one and the other nineteen are weakening it. So the natural output is complete rather than selective, and it grows to fit whatever is put in.

Now read what the presidents say arrives. Applications accompanied by a significant increase in documentation. Submissions that are too long and too complex, that contain irrelevant material, and that fail to focus on the key points in the case.

And then read what the same guidance says about winning. Cases which are complex because they rely on a large number of disclosures may make it more difficult for a claimant to succeed, because there may be no clear link between any specific disclosure and the decision to dismiss. Cases which are strong, the presidents write, are generally easily identified and explained.

Put those two passages next to each other and the problem is not that people are using a machine badly. It is that the machine is doing what it is for. It converts a grievance into volume, and volume is the single property this particular test punishes hardest.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. A claimant who files twenty allegations has not only weakened the causal link. They have also spent their hour. The judge reads for sixty minutes and then decides, so the more that is filed, the smaller the share of it that is read, and the claimant has no control over which share.

We are careful here, because there is a version of this that blames the person, and we do not think the evidence supports it. The behaviour is entirely rational from where they are standing. Given a week, no money, no lawyer and a tool that produces something that looks like what a lawyer produces, filing everything is what a reasonable person does.

The mismatch is between a tool that optimises for completeness and a legal test that was designed, in 1978, on the assumption that anyone bringing an emergency application would have had to work quite hard to bring it at all. The effort used to do the filtering. Nothing does it now.