How AI is clogging the courtroom

Summary

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The Indicator from Planet Money

Episode Title: How AI is Clogging the Courtroom
Date: June 1, 2026
Hosts: Vito Emanuel, Darian Woods

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the recent surge of pro se (self-represented) lawsuits in U.S. courts propelled by the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT. The hosts and legal experts discuss the pros and cons of easier legal filing, how AI-generated documents are impacting court workloads, and whether increased access actually benefits those unable to afford traditional legal counsel—or simply causes new complications. The episode also provides real-life stories of litigants relying on AI, causing both hope and unintended consequences.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Real-Life Impact: A Family Law Disaster

• Laura McClain, family law attorney, describes a trial where the opposing party, representing herself with AI-generated guidance, struggled to present evidence, ultimately losing the case.

  • Quote: “It was an absolute disaster. She wasn't even able to present evidence just because she had relied so heavily on this outline.” — Laura McClain [01:14]

• Insight: AI assistance failed to compensate for the practical and procedural challenges of representing oneself in court, illustrating how these tools don't replace lived legal expertise.

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2. The Data: More Pro Se Filings than Ever

• Joshua Levy & Anand Shah, USC and MIT PhD students, studied federal court data and found a dramatic rise in pro se filings beginning in 2023, correlating directly with the mainstreaming of AI tools.

  • Quote: "We just saw these really dramatic results in filing numbers and our jaws just kind of collectively dropped." — Anand Shah [04:03]

• Key Stat: The spike occurs especially in “templatable” cases—those with forms or templates already suited to AI automation, such as foreclosures or small claims.

  • Quote: “For templatable types of cases, they've seen not only a rise in the number of cases filed, but the number of documents filed in each case.” — Vito Emanuel [05:31]

• Systemic Strain: Judicial resources (courtrooms, clerks, judges) are static, but filings are up, escalating backlogs.

  • Quote: “The supply of court services is not really changing.” — Anand Shah [05:50]

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3. Quality vs. Quantity: Are Outcomes Improving?

• Despite increased filings, the success rate for AI-assisted pro se litigants remains extremely low, with “unambiguous wins” for self-represented parties still nearly zero.

  • Quote: “The share of unambiguous wins for pro se litigants is still essentially zero.” — Satish Nouri [06:16]

• Serious risks: Some individuals incur steep penalties for citing AI-fabricated legal precedents.

  • Quote: “One pro se was ordered to pay over $60,000 in fees in part because he cited a bunch of bogus AI generated cases.” — Vito Emanuel [06:46]

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4. The Case for AI: Expanding Access to Justice

• Satish Nouri, former legal aid attorney and current NYU researcher, acknowledges AI is an imperfect tool but perhaps the best available for bridging the “justice gap."

• AI chatbots can offer legal information and procedural advice to those turned away for lack of legal aid, e.g., how to handle an eviction or organize tenants.

  • Quote: “Anyone and everyone should be able to file a lawsuit in the easiest way possible. There is so much unmet need. Right. So we should let everybody file.” — Satish Nouri [08:36]

• Ethical stance: Courts should treat pro se litigants using AI with leniency, since these tools may be their only option.

  • Quote: “If AI gets stuff wrong or makes stuff up, judges should take it even easier on people going pro se...” — Paraphrased, Satish Nouri [08:55]

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5. The Backlog and the Tension

• Judicial systems are not prepared for the rising caseload. Urgent cases (e.g., seeking protection from abuse) may face longer delays due to clogged dockets.

  • Quote: “A bigger backlog means people who need immediate relief, like say, who are asking for a protective order... might have to wait longer for that relief.” — Vito Emanuel [09:30]

• Expert reflection: The situation is an “irresistible force” (public need for access) meeting an “immovable object” (court capacity).

  • Quote: “This is a kind of irresistible force that's being met with an immovable object. The courts.” — Satish Nouri [09:13]

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6. Human Expertise vs. AI: A Stark Reminder

• Laura McClain recounts a client who left her counsel to represent himself with AI, losing custody as a result.

  • Quote: “He lost custody? Yes. He lost parenting time as a result because he wasn't willing to take advice...” — Laura McClain [10:10]

• Takeaway: Despite the democratizing potential of AI, sometimes “you should probably just stick with a real flesh and blood attorney.” — Laura McClain [10:16]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “It was an absolute disaster. She wasn't even able to present evidence just because she had relied so heavily on this outline.” — Laura McClain [01:14]
• “We just saw these really dramatic results in filing numbers and our jaws just kind of collectively dropped.” — Anand Shah [04:03]
• “The supply of court services is not really changing.” — Anand Shah [05:50]
• “The share of unambiguous wins for pro se litigants is still essentially zero.” — Satish Nouri [06:16]
• “One pro se was ordered to pay over $60,000 in fees in part because he cited a bunch of bogus AI generated cases.” — Vito Emanuel [06:46]
• “This is a kind of irresistible force that's being met with an immovable object. The courts.” — Satish Nouri [09:13]
• “He lost custody? Yes. He lost parenting time as a result because he wasn't willing to take advice...” — Laura McClain [10:10]

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Key Timestamps

• 00:30–01:25 — Laura McClain’s story: AI-dependent litigant struggles in court
• 03:34–05:54 — Data on the rise of pro se filings post-AI
• 06:01–06:46 — Success rates and risks for AI-assisted self-litigants
• 07:21–08:48 — Satish Nouri on AI and access to justice
• 09:13–09:50 — Satish Nouri on the clash between unmet legal needs and courtroom limits
• 09:54–10:16 — Laura McClain on clients foregoing traditional counsel for AI, with poignant outcome

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Summary

The episode provides a nuanced snapshot of an unfolding revolution in legal access fueled by AI. While the technology has lowered barriers for millions who previously could not afford a lawyer—leading to a significant increase in pro se filings—AI's limitations, the unchanged capacity of the justice system, and the potential for costly errors present serious concerns. Ultimately, the conversation urges listeners to weigh the promise of increased access against the very real risks of relying on technology to navigate complex legal terrain, often with high personal stakes. The hosts and guests convey a mixture of optimism and caution, underscoring that AI, while helpful to a point, is not a substitute for human expertise—especially when the stakes are high in the courtroom.

Transcript

[Vito Emanuel]

Okay, look, we know you haven't signed up for our brand new indicator newsletter yet, but it's fine. It's fine. It's not a big deal.

[Darian Woods]

Vito, it sounds like it is a big deal to you.

[Vito Emanuel]

Yeah, just look at the show. Notes to sign up. All right. It comes out every Friday morning.

[Anand Shah]

Npr.

[Vito Emanuel]

Like many attorneys, Laura McClain is a bit of a Luddite.

[Laura McClain]

I keep paper files. I'm kind of old fashioned, even though I'm not that old.

[Vito Emanuel]

Right. And Laura was at this trial earlier this year. She does family law, you know, divorces, custody disputes, heavy stuff. On the opposing side was a woman without an attorney representing herself.

[Darian Woods]

So going pro se, as it's called in the biz.

[Vito Emanuel]

Yeah. And it was a divorce case involving finance records and thousands of dollars at issue. And it's going really bad. The woman on the other side is forgetting to object to things. She doesn't have the right number of copies of documents for the court. She's getting flustered and things are just generally falling apart. By the second day of the trial, she can hardly speak.

[Laura McClain]

It was an absolute disaster. She wasn't even able to present evidence just because she had relied so heavily on this outline.

[Darian Woods]

At one point, Laura offered to help her find her documents from her outline and give it to the judge, just to move the trial along. She'd been rifling through boxes and boxes of loose documents.

[Vito Emanuel]

And then as Laura is helping, she catches a glimpse of the woman's outline, her blueprint for winning the case. It's all AI generated. Even the chatbot prompts were still in there. And in the end, she lost the case. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Vito Emanuel.

[Darian Woods]

And I'm Darian Woods. AI Is transforming the legal system. And today we're going to talk about the wider costs of making it much easier to file a case by yourself without a lawyer. But on the one hand, people who can't afford lawyers have a legal coach in their corner. On the other hand, it's not a very good coach and it's clogging up the courts.

[Liz Ann Saunders]

This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab with its original podcast on Investing. Each week you'll get thoughtful, in depth analysis of both the stock and the bond markets. Listen today and [e-mail] oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts. This message comes from Saatva. How you sleep shapes how you live. Restorative sleep can sharpen, focus, stabilize mood and support long term health. Voted best luxury mattress by Sleep Foundation. Saatva's handcrafted luxury mattresses are designed to help people sleep more deeply and recover more fully at prices below traditional retail. Save up to $625 this Memorial Day at saatva.com NPR this message comes from Capella University.

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[Vito Emanuel]

Edu Joshua Levy used to think AI wouldn't have that much of an effect on the legal system. But his friend Anand Shah thought, no way. Clearly, AI was gonna touch everything.

[Darian Woods]

Joshua and Anand are PhD students at the University of Southern California and MIT, respectively.

[Vito Emanuel]

So they decided to settle their debate with research, putting numbers to their reckons.

[Darian Woods]

I love it.

[Vito Emanuel]

And they pulled down a bunch of data from the federal courts on pro se court filings as one way to measure this.

[Anand Shah]

And we just saw these really dramatic results in filing numbers and our jaws just kind of collectively dropped.

[Vito Emanuel]

That's Anand relishing in his sweet victory. Pro se cases are up, way up. Starting in 2023, right around the release of ChatGPT, the share of pro se cases jumped. Now this is just for federal courts, where the data is easy to analyze. We don't know about state and local courts, but it might even more pronounced there.

[Darian Woods]

And there's this thing that's happening with the quality of lawsuits being filed since pretty much forever. It has been hard to file a lawsuit just knowing what to do, what paperwork to file, what claims to bring, and so on. So only certain people followed through.

[Anand Shah]

The people that were willing to climb all the hurdles before felt in some sense that, you know, their cases were especially strong or something like that.

[Vito Emanuel]

People file pro se cases for a bunch of reasons. Sometimes they can't afford an attorney. Sometimes something has gone really wrong in their lives, an attorney won't represent them, and they just want to have their day in court.

[Darian Woods]

AI is lowering the barriers for all those people. But certain types of cases are especially AI friendly.

[Vito Emanuel]

Anand and Joshua call them templatable. These are things like foreclosure cases or housing cases. And at local levels, it would also be disputes that wind up in small claims courts. Cases with relatively straightforward legal questions.

[Darian Woods]

Things a court might literally have a template for on its website.

[Vito Emanuel]

And our PhD students said for templatable types of cases, they've seen not only a rise in the number of cases filed, but the number of documents filed

[Darian Woods]

in each case, which of course means more work for the courts. And backlogs in the courts have been a problem for years now. Even before ChatGPT, judges still only have

[Anand Shah]

24 hours in a day. You need courtrooms, you need clerks, you need all these things to make a court really work. The supply of court services is not really changing.

[Vito Emanuel]

Not that people who go pro se are winning any more often with AI advice. Here's Joshua. Still extraordinarily hard for a pro se

[Satish Nouri]

litigant to bring a case against the

[Vito Emanuel]

government or against a private company.

[Satish Nouri]

The share of unambiguous wins for pro

[Darian Woods]

se litigants is still essentially zero.

[Vito Emanuel]

Remember Laura's story about the pro se litigant filing a lawsuit is just step one. It's a big step, but the steps really just get bigger from there.

[Darian Woods]

Like presenting evidence, making the case with your voice out loud in the courtroom. Historically, judges try really hard to be charitable to pro se litigants because the odds are so long. But recently, some of the litigants have been getting hit with thousands of dollars of penalties, thanks to AI.

[Vito Emanuel]

Yeah, one pro se was ordered to pay over $60,000 in fees in part because he cited a bunch of bogus AI generated cases.

[Darian Woods]

Right. So pro se AI lawsuits are starting to clog up court dockets. There are more cases filed, and the people filing them aren't doing much better than pro se litigants before AI. Some are getting fined. So those are some of the downsides.

[Vito Emanuel]

But there is this other argument, the case for AI help. By this view, AI is helping the people who are left out of the legal system have their day in court addressing an access issue.

[Darian Woods]

Right. So let's meet Satish Nouri.

[Satish Nouri]

This is an opportunity for the courts to say, we're going to do better. We're going to address these issues.

[Darian Woods]

Satish was an attorney at a legal aid organization in New York for many years and now researches AI applications in the law at nyu.

[Vito Emanuel]

And he remembers all the people he couldn't help at his old organization. There just weren't enough attorneys.

[Satish Nouri]

I saw hundreds and hundreds of people every year who are facing eviction, and yet we're turning away half the people who are facing eviction. So it hit me that, like, this is Sisyphean. We're never Going to meaningfully bridge this justice gap.

[Vito Emanuel]

AI might be an imperfect way to address this, but he says it's probably the best shot right now at doing so.

[Darian Woods]

Satish points to how AI can help out with all the legally things before filing a lawsuit that attorneys could help answer but don't have enough time in the day to right now. Like how to write a demand letter to your landlord. Or if your heat goes out in the winter and you don't know what to do, a chatbot could tell you

[Satish Nouri]

to call the city, contact your landlord in writing. Maybe you should contact your neighbors and organize your building, maybe help them contact a tenant organizer.

[Vito Emanuel]

But when it comes to actually filing a lawsuit, Satish says, open the floodgates.

[Satish Nouri]

Anyone and everyone should be able to file a lawsuit in the easiest way possible. There is so much unmet need. Right. So we should let everybody file.

[Vito Emanuel]

He's like the legal version of Mel Robbins. Let them parentheses sue.

[Darian Woods]

Yeah, self help for the AI legal age.

[Vito Emanuel]

And if AI gets stuff wrong or makes stuff up, Satish says judges should take it even easier on people going pro se who wouldn't otherwise be able to file a lawsuit without AI help. And as for courts grappling with new case volume as the result of that, Satish says, well, that's like their job.

[Satish Nouri]

This is a kind of irresistible force that's being met with an immovable object. The courts. Right. And the force is all the unmet needs of Americans who have legal claims. And it's run smack up against the courts.

[Vito Emanuel]

Still, right now, the courts don't seem like they have the resources to handle a flood of cases, nor do they seem like they're willing to. Lax AI related penalties. And a bigger backlog means people who need immediate relief, like say, who are asking for a protective order against an abusive partner, might have to wait longer for that relief.

[Darian Woods]

Right. This feels like there is a excess and deficiency trade off right now.

[Vito Emanuel]

Yeah. And Laura McLean, our family law attorney from earlier, she's watching this play out in real time right now. One client of hers kept second guessing her advice in a custody case with an AI chatbot. Eventually he decided to go pro se and use AI instead of Laura.

[Laura McClain]

He lost custody? Yes. He lost parenting time as a result because he wasn't willing to take advice

[Darian Woods]

in some cases, Laura says you should probably just stick with a real flesh and blood attorney.

[Vito Emanuel]

This episode was produced by Cooper Katz McKim and engineered by Sina Lofredo. It was fact checked by Cierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark edited this episode and Kate Concannon is our show's editor. The Indicator is a production of npr.

[Liz Ann Saunders]

This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab with its original podcast on Investing. It's hosted by Liz Ann Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab center for Financial Research. Each week, Liz, Ann, Colin and their guests analyze economic developments and bring context to conversations around stocks, fixed income, the economy and more. Download the latest episode and [e-mail] oninvesting or wherever you get your podcasts.

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