Don’t play innocent. If you’re not a lawyer in the 2020s, you’ve at least thought in passing that you could use an LLM to help you build a killer lawsuit against someone who pissed you off.
Or at least now I know it’s not. fair me.
Thanks to AI, self-represented plaintiffs, also known as pro se plaintiffs, are making the legal landscape worse, report says new study by Anand Shah of MIT and Joshua Levy of USC, reported by the New York Times on Monday. The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.
It says that since the launch of widely available LLMs, 18 percent of pro se submissions now contain what authors have considered AI-generated text. Perhaps as a result, “the total volume of pro se docket entries per court in the first 180 days of a case has grown on average 64% during the post-AI period,” according to the study.
Typically, pro se filings come from inmates working on their cases behind bars, but the study notes that “the national percentage of pro se filings from non-inmates increased dramatically from its historically stable level of approximately 11% to 16.8% in fiscal year 2025, an increase that is unprecedented in 25 years of administrative records.”
According to the Times, pro se plaintiffs lost 96% of their cases between 1998 and 2017.
The Times is heavily highlighting frivolous AI-generated lawsuits, and what a waste of time it is for courts to pore over and process all these garbage-filled dockets. A federal judge in Minnesota named Patrick J. Schiltz called it “an existential threat to the federal courts.”
To illustrate its point, the Times interviewed a man who uses AI to generate lawsuits. This person gave his name to the newspaper and allowed himself to be photographed for the story. The courts have alleged some nasty things about this person and the Times says he lives in his car. He is, to use one of the president’s favorite termsstraight from the central cast, to the point that the Times story borders on, well, mean.
I can’t deny that AI lawsuits seem like a huge problem. At the same time, lawsuits are often the only weapon oppressed Americans have: a substitute for the institutions and politicians that actually help us heal when we are hurt and it is not our fault. Part of me can’t help but long to read a David and Goliath story about a Claude-wielding rando who fights his way to a life-changing ten-figure legal victory, presumably after using the LLM to figure out how to argue a case in court, too.
