Don’t play innocent. If you’re a non-lawyer in the 2020s, you’ve at least had the passing thought that you could use an LLM to help you generate a killer lawsuit against someone who pissed you off.
Or at least now I know it’s not just me.
Thanks to AI, plaintiffs representing themselves, also known as “pro se” plaintiffs, are changing the legal landscape for the worse, according to a new study by MIT’s Anand Shah and USC’s Joshua Levy, reported on by the New York Times on Monday. The study has not yet been peer reviewed.
It says that since the rollout of widely available LLMs, 18 percent of pro se filings now contain what the authors have deemed AI-generated text. Perhaps consequently, “the total volume of pro se docket entries per court in the first 180 days of a case has grown by 64% on average across the post-AI period,” the study finds.
Typically, pro se filings come from prisoners working on their cases from behind bars, but the study notes that “national non-prisoner pro se filing share rose sharply from its approximately 11% historical steady state to 16.8% in fiscal year 2025, a gain that has no precedent in 25 years of administrative records.”
According to the Times, pro se plaintiffs lost 96% of their cases from 1998-2017.
The Times is largely spotlighting frivolous lawsuits generated with AI—and what a waste of time it is for the courts to painstakingly read and process all these slop-filled filings. A Minnesota federal judge named Patrick J. Schiltz, called it “an existential threat to the federal courts.”
To illustrate their point, the Times interviewed a man who uses AI to generate lawsuits. This person gave the paper his name, and allowed himself to be photographed for the story. Courts have alleged some unsavory things about this person, and the Times says he lives in his car. He is, to use one of the president’s favorite terms, straight from central casting—so much so that the Times’ story borders on, well, mean.
I can’t dispute that AI lawsuits sound like a massive problem. At the same time, lawsuits are often the only weapon downtrodden Americans have—a substitute for institutions and politicians that actually help make us whole when we’re harmed and it’s not our fault. Part of me can’t help but long to read a David and Goliath story about a rando armed with Claude who bootstraps their way to some life-changing, ten-figure legal victory—presumably after using the LLM to figure out how to argue a case in a courtroom as well.
Read the full article here
