How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits

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 the prose and at times, hallucinated cases and fabricated quotes. “I’m also actually seeing better-drafted pleadings,” she says. But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn’t seem to be improving people’s chances of winning.

Judges are also 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. 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 not necessarily a cause for concern. While the surge of AI-assisted filings might be adding to their workloads, she and many other judges find the cases easier to rule on because AI is helping people without legal training better articulate their arguments.

The clearer filings let Judge Braswell hear them better. “If I understand an argument a little bit better, I’m probably going to be able to help a little bit more.” Online communities are springing up to trade self-help guides on using AI to sue. In December 2024, a viral Reddit post walked immigration applicants through suing the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services over delayed review of their applications: draft a writ of mandamus with Microsoft Copilot, pay a lawyer $150 to polish it, and file in the expedient District of Vermont.