Using Ai? Or engaging an advocate? Choose wisely.
October 2026
AI can help you make better decisions, give you details, or an initial understanding of the general information as it applies to everyone.
However, your injury, your claim, your circumstances are individual. AI should never convince you to ignore the professionals who provide individual assistance, tailored to your needs and special circumstances.
Would you trust a machine that gives generic, potentially dangerous answers because it lacks context you have taken for granted? Or do your life, injury, and ACC claim deserve your full commitment and the best advice and support available?
It is naïve to assume that AI has all the answers.
AI does not produce the best advice; AI reproduces what it has been fed. Thus, it is clear that AI cannot give you a clear answer to your individual case.
To get the right answer, one must ask the right questions.
Even if you knew the accident compensation law including the landmark cases inside out, you would perhaps ask AI better questions but there are no two cases which were the same. Individual are different, and so are the circumstances, your body, your injury, and the legal implications following from that for your individual case.
If you trust an AI bot more than a human, then where do you draw the line between asking AI and seeking professional advice?
At price point? AI might be free of charge (still), but the long-term costs can be immense when you lose your case at review or appeal. In the end, cheap can turn out to be more expensive – not only in financial terms (because you might end up funding all by yourself) but also in terms of your health and wellbeing (the toll an injury takes and the ramifications for your life).
At trust point? Do you trust a machine more than a human? This may be the new question in this era of the advent of AI but be aware that if you enter your personal data into an AI platform, the AI does not apply more expertise than your advocate; the AI only collects information, which may or may not be correct.
Does AI listen to you? Hear your story? Understand your need and identify the necessary steps in the proces like a human does? Does AI have relationship building capabilities to handle your case? Does it really have the experience and expertise exactly for your case? You decide.
My point of view on this is as follows:
We need to distinguish between using AI to obtain information or accepting AI generated information as actual legal advice, which could cost the chance of getting cover and treatment/weekly compensation etc or miss out.
Here is where I draw the line:
Use AI as a dictionary: Look up the terms and phrases used, for example what the diagnosis means, decipher a medical report, and find the questions you may want to ask your doctor to discuss treatment options.
Use a professional advocate to make your move when ACC has turned your claim down: diagnoses, available claims for cover and entitlements including treatments, weekly compensation and other rehabilitation means require qualified and experienced judgment, including an understanding of what a medical history means for your claim, when cover is available for an injury caused by an accident or medical treatment, subsequent needs and how this can be pursued through the statutory process of a review or appeal when ACC has declined your claim(s). What are the next steps? How to effectively communicate with the reviewer and ACC? What is important? And most of all:
Your representative or advocate does all those things for you – you can safely hand it over and don’t have to put up with the extra stress of communicating with ACC, you don’t have to become an expert, and you don’t have to face the difficult review process alone when you instruct an advocate to act on your behalf. Your advocate navigates the process for you and represents you effectively to help you achieve a successful outcome. Using an advocate gives you a strong guide and support, and the extra leverage which you don’t have if using AI. AI does not represent you at the review hearing but an advocate speaks on your behalf, presents your case, and rebuts ACC’s arguments. AI doesn’t. You can rely on your advocate. You cannot rely on AI.
Never let AI become your only source of truth. A chatbot might give you a certain piece of advice, but you may not notice the flaw in the AI answer and rely on it, but when tested, AI states that it gave you the wrong advice and apologises, entirely reverses the information, leaving you perplexed and even more vulnerable. AI is not reliable. If you rely on AI, you are gambling with your rights and your opportunity to get ACC’s decision overturned in your favour. Even worse, you are gambling with the chance to get the rehabilitation you need, and thus, you may end up with bearing the full impact of your injury – personally and financially.
Because one thing is for sure: ACC does not solely rely on AI. ACC has specialists representing ACC in a review. Sometimes, ACC even instructs a professional law firm to represent ACC. ACC spends that money to ensure the best protection of their interest. ACC never simply puts out an AI generated submission. So why would you?
Using an advocate is a smart choice. Relying solely on AI can create the illusion of a smarter choice while denying you the best available support. AI is new, but new does not necessarily mean better.
There is no AI in-built protection system or safeguard. For your protection, AI companies should design systems that recognise high-stakes situations, disclose uncertainty, and direct people to seek the assistance of qualified professionals because the consequences of an error will be irreversible and legally binding at the end of the process. However, this does not exist yet.
At this stage, be aware that there is little regulation around AI and no safeguards installed to protect from fatal results.
Relying on AI is gambling with your future and your ACC claim.
The cheapest solution is not necessarily the best solution. It is more efficient to invest in yourself rather than hoping that ‘it will be alright’. Hope is not a strategy!
The bigger question is not whether AI is intelligent enough to give you credible answers; the issue is that AI’s responses sound confident but can be utterly wrong.
When someone is vulnerable, anxious, stressed, or desperate for answers, it is easy that the confident sounding answer is mistaken for authority. But this is a ‘fake’ authority because AI has randomly collected information and presented it to you as the truth while in reality, it may not be so.
There is no doubt that AI will increasingly influence how we manage our life, health, injury claims and legal actions. As AI is available, AI will be used. But there is a ‘but’:
It is absolutely critical to understand what AI is good at, and where AI is flawed.
It is naïve to assume that AI has all the answers. AI has not all the answers, and most importantly, if only provides answers to the question it has been asked. If the question is general, the answer is generic; if the question misses important aspects because you don’t know that there is another important aspect, the AI answer will be wrong. Even if you believe you asked a specific question, you may not know that your question was flawed and then AI will bitterly fail you. AI is not the oracle of Delphi, and not a crystal ball. It is also not a Mr Spock in disguise (for those who love Star Trek). AI is a mechanism called algorithm, which is computer program that allows it to collect information available on the internet. That is all what it is. To feed AI the correct question requires legal expertise, especially in a highly prescriptive area like the accident compensation law.
AI does not know what is right in your case. Even if you feed AI with those details, there will be other flaws, which you may not even notice. For example, AI has made up court case decisions which did not even exist. This means that the ‘case law’ AI suggested to rely on was fake. No court and no reviewer will accept that. Case lost. It is that simple.
Human expertise must take precedence where your life, your wellbeing, even your future and the protection of your rights are at stake. You deserve that. And you should be your strongest supporter, and choose the best available support. The best support may cost more, but the cheapest option may leave you with a poor outcome.
Use AI to inform yourself, not to replace an advocate.
There is a fundamental difference between an impersonal tool that provides information and a trusted professional who listens to your story, understands your needs, and tailors the next steps to you.
We must never lose sight of that difference.
