As of 13 August 2026, AI can only partly prepare a small claims case in England.

What to actually do

1. Hand it to a person

   The route this page recommends

   Someone with a licence or accountable authority has to sign this before it counts.

2. Use a tool built for this

   Second choice

3. Do it yourself

   The distant third

   A chat interface, chat-fluent skill, and roughly 1 hour until you can act on the result.

   How to actually do it

   1. Open the current small claims guidance and relevant forms on GOV.UK, and note the court, claim stage and procedural questions the guidance says you must answer.
   2. Gather the contract or agreement, invoices, payment records, photographs, messages, letters, emails and any witness details, keeping the original filenames and dates.
   3. Write a factual account of what happened in order, separating what you personally know from what another person told you, and record the remedy or amount you seek.
   4. Paste the prompt and your account into a chatbot, then add the documents or paste relevant extracts with clear filenames and ask it to produce the chronology, evidence map, questions and draft.
   5. Compare every factual sentence in the draft against the original documents and remove any statement, quotation, date or amount that cannot be supported.
   6. Check the proposed procedure, forms, deadlines and wording against the current GOV.UK guidance and the court correspondence, rather than relying on the chatbot's legal explanation.
   7. Ask a solicitor or other appropriately qualified legal adviser to check the finished statement of case and evidence plan if the amount, facts or legal issues are serious or disputed.

   Prompt

   Help me prepare, but do not file or present this as legal advice, for a small claims case in England. Use only the facts and documents I provide, and label anything missing, uncertain or inferred. Do not invent facts, legal authorities, deadlines, losses or evidence. First produce: 1) a neutral chronology, 2) the issues that appear to be agreed and disputed, 3) a list of evidence with each item linked to the fact it supports, 4) questions I must answer before drafting, and 5) procedural points I must verify against current GOV.UK or HM Courts and Tribunals Service guidance. Then draft a concise statement of case and a witness statement structure using plain English, separating facts from legal points. Identify weaknesses in my position, possible responses from the other side, missing documents, unclear wording and any allegation that needs evidence. Do not decide whether I will win. Keep every quotation exact and mark documents by the filenames I give you. Case type: [brief description]. My role: [claimant or defendant]. Other party: [name or description]. Court or claim stage, if known: [stage]. Facts and timeline: [paste facts]. Documents and evidence: [paste or describe documents]. Amount or remedy sought: [details].

   Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.