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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
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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
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Episode Title: How AI is Clogging the Courtroom
Date: June 1, 2026
Hosts: Vito Emanuel, Darian Woods
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Systemic Strain: Judicial resources (courtrooms, clerks, judges) are static, but filings are up, escalating backlogs.
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.
Serious risks: Some individuals incur steep penalties for citing AI-fabricated legal precedents.
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.
Ethical stance: Courts should treat pro se litigants using AI with leniency, since these tools may be their only option.
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.
Expert reflection: The situation is an “irresistible force” (public need for access) meeting an “immovable object” (court capacity).
Laura McClain recounts a client who left her counsel to represent himself with AI, losing custody as a result.
Takeaway: Despite the democratizing potential of AI, sometimes “you should probably just stick with a real flesh and blood attorney.” — Laura McClain [10:16]
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.