Workload has increased due to AI-generated claims by self-represented litigants, FWC president says
Fair Work Commission (FWC) president Adam Hatcher has cited heavy caseloads and limited funding as reasons why dispute settlement conferences have been shortened, reported The Australian.
The commission had announced that it would be restricting settlement conferences to one hour; previously, such conferences could exceed two hours. The legal profession had criticised the decision.
Hatcher said at an Australian Industry Group conference on Tuesday September 8 that the conferences were not avenues for parties to argue about the merits of cases; rather they were intended for the identification of settlement outcomes.
“It must be remembered that our statutory function is to make all reasonable attempts to resolve the dispute between the parties – we do not determine the merits of the case, so it is generally not necessary to hear submissions from parties as to why they think they will win their case”, Hatcher said in a statement published by The Australian. “A settlement conference is not your ‘day in court’ – you can go to court if you want that”.
He added that ideally, the FWC would conduct “a full-set-piece mediation for every general protections matter that came before us”; however, workload and budget issues prevented the implementation of such a process. The uptick in workload has been driven in part by the increase in self-represented litigants using AI to generate claims, Hatcher said. As a result, commission members and staff have been inundated with open cases.
Moreover, the FWC has forecast a $15m shortfall in funding by 2030, leading to the need to cut spending.
“In circumstances where the number of general protections dismissal applications has doubled in a short space of time, but our available conciliator resources have not grown commensurately, there were only two options available to us: either change nothing and let waiting times for conferences blow out, as in the UK, or conduct more time-efficient and settlement-focused conferences”, Hatcher said in a statement published by The Australian.
The FWC had determined that the waiting time from making a general protections dismissal application to the conciliation conference would rise to 3.5 months in 6 months and 4, 5 months in a year following an analysis of the effect of no action.
Hatcher highlighted the MyFWC portal as the core of a comprehensive internal program at the commission. The portal enables parties to file applications and receive directions, listings, notifications and rulings from one digital platform. He added that an AI tool for the preliminary assessments of enterprise agreements applications was being piloted; nonetheless, he stressed that no part of the decision-making process involved AI.
