Introducing Silkworm

A criminal justice system under strain

The criminal courts in England and Wales are under extreme pressure. At the end of March 2026, the Crown Court had more than 80,000 open cases—more than double the number before the pandemic. Over 22,000 had already been open for at least a year. For defendants whose cases concluded through a jury trial after a not-guilty plea, the median wait was 48 weeks; for those on bail, it was 66 weeks.

There are multiple reasons for this: insufficient capacity across the legal profession, constraints on court sitting days, increasingly complex cases and years of underinvestment. The system nevertheless continues to function, in large part, because the people within it absorb those pressures through hard work, long hours and considerable personal sacrifice.

When I began speaking to criminal barristers about their work, I was shocked by how poorly the system often sets them up for success.

Life-changing cases, prepared overnight

Cases which could alter the trajectory of someone’s life may only be given to the barrister at 6pm the night before the hearing. They may receive scores or hundreds of pages of dense material, with little time to prepare. The papers may be repetitive, poorly ordered or supplemented at the last minute. The seriousness and complexity of the case do not necessarily bear any relation to the amount of preparation time available.

Before the barrister can properly analyse the case, they first have to reconstruct it.

They must establish who everyone is, what is alleged, what each witness says, when the relevant events occurred, where accounts agree or conflict, which documents matter and where each important fact appears in the papers. They may have to build a chronology, compare several versions of the same account and repeatedly flick through the bundle to chase down references.

I sometimes describe this as “intern work”. That does not mean it is easy or unimportant. It is essential and often exacting work. But it is largely reconstructive: the work required to turn a large collection of documents into a usable understanding of the case.

The preparation bottleneck

The opportunity cost is the time it takes away from the work where barristers add truly irreplaceable value.

Ideally, you want your advocate spending as much of their preparation time as possible thinking about the case deeply: reflecting on the facts rather than finding them, testing competing interpretations, carefully developing their strategy and planning their examination-in-chief or cross-examination.

Every hour spent searching for a fact is an hour that cannot be spent thinking about what that fact means.

That was the problem from which Silkworm began. Barristers did not lack the skill or judgment needed to prepare their cases. Too much of their limited time was being consumed simply getting the papers into a form from which proper preparation could begin.

What Silkworm does

Silkworm is a case-preparation workspace for criminal barristers. It takes the papers in a case and organises them into a clearer, structured view of the material.

It can help identify the key people, allegations, events and documents; bring together different accounts of the same incident; construct chronologies; surface inconsistencies and gaps; and connect the information it presents back to the relevant source in the bundle.

The point is not to produce a single summary which the barrister is expected to accept. A case is rarely reducible to one definitive account, and a confident piece of prose is of little use if counsel cannot quickly inspect the evidence behind it.

Instead, Silkworm is designed to help the barrister explore the case, understand how its different parts fit together and return easily to the underlying papers. It addresses the mechanical layer of preparation so that the user can move sooner into analysis, strategy and advocacy.

More time for the work that matters

For the barrister, the immediate benefit is straightforward: less time spent flicking through bundles and chasing down facts, and more time available for the reflective side of their work.

It may also enable them to prepare more comprehensively for more cases by preventing the initial reconstruction of the papers from becoming such a severe bottleneck. The aim is not to squeeze yet more work from already overstretched practitioners. It is to make better use of the scarce preparation time they already have.

Silkworm cannot solve the criminal courts backlog. It cannot reopen courtrooms, recruit judges, restore lost capacity or reverse years of underinvestment. Technology should not be used to disguise structural problems or justify asking legal professionals to operate indefinitely under unreasonable conditions.

But the system is also dependent on the preparation capacity of the barristers who keep it functioning. Making that preparation faster, more systematic and less dominated by rote information processing can relieve one part of the pressure.

We built Silkworm because barristers should spend less of their limited preparation time reconstructing the papers, and more of it doing the work that only they can do.