How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads each one carefully, mindful of how daunting it is to walk into the courtroom alone. Lately, like many judges across the US, she has seen a noticeable uptick in such filings. According to a new study that examined 4.5 million federal civil cases from 2005 to 2026, the share of lawsuits brought by self-represented people increased from 11% in 2022 to 16.8% in 2025. Within those cases, the number of filings made more than doubled compared to before 2023. Judge Braswell puts that jump down to AI. “I do correlate that to AI in part because I see AI use,” she says. As a tech-savvy judge who uses AI to vet court documents, she’s learned to recognize how large language models write. She can tell based on its prose and at times, hallucinated cases and fabricated quotes. “I’m also actually seeing better-drafted pleadings,” says Judge Braswell. But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn’t seem to be improving people’s chances of winning. Judges are starting to question what kinds of rights and responsibilities large language models should bear as they step into lawyers’ shoes, such as whether a chatbot has a duty to provide good advice, as a human lawyer does. And a growing number of lawmakers across the US are starting to grapple with who should pay the price when chatbots dish out bad legal advice. AI supercharges lawsuits To test whether AI was driving the increase in lawsuits filed by people without a lawyer, the authors of the study, Anand Shah at MIT and Joshua Levy at USC, ran 1,600 randomly sampled court documents through Pangram, a commercial AI-text detector. The share flagged as containing AI-generated writing rose from 1% in 2023 to 18% in 2026. To Judge Braswell, that’s n