Comment by jumploops
13 hours ago
The courts are about to overrun with AI-generated lawsuits (even more so than they have been[0]).
[0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...
13 hours ago
The courts are about to overrun with AI-generated lawsuits (even more so than they have been[0]).
[0]https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...
I find the idea that people can use LLMs to exercise their rights as citizens appealing however. Many people aren't aware of the rights they have, and LLMs are pretty good at surfacing some stuff without having to pay lawyers. Having to hire a lawyer is imo actually a huge way of gatekeeping people from exercising their rights. I heard a lot of local German public institutions are currently being flooded with people arguing their case with the help of LLM that they previously weren't really realistically able to do. So I don't see it all as bad.
>are pretty good at surfacing some stuff without having to pay lawyers
They are also really good at making stuff up as evidenced by the many, many, many examples you read in the news about actual lawyers using AI to write briefs that are full of errors and hallucinations.
In civil courts, you'd likely get more sympathy from a judge if you represented yourself and admitted your lack of understanding, rather than try to appear as someone you're not because you wrote some prompts and copied the output.
Current court systems around the world are just not built to handle the flooding of cases from the citizens.
The stupidest analogy is open source projects having a hard time accepting LLM generated PRs from the masses, because review process is the bottleneck.
No idea how to fix this, to be honest. In coding world, with some mental gymnastics, I can see code not being reviewed by people anymore. In courts, things generally have more consequences, and you can’t really roll back decisions that easily.
you could probably write a cool little gotcha of an SF short story about a barren wasteland of a planet that keeps broadcasting out legalese that's revealed to just be LLM chatbot lawyers pedantically arguing with one another about xeno legal doctrine
Relevant:
https://www.ftrain.com/nanolaw
JG Ballard could probably turn that into something darkly atmospheric, and even more dystopic than his usual depopulated worlds...
The legal system, which is a machine/technology by itself, will be eaten out. I wonder what will replace it. Botnet law arbitrage? – Personal assistants constantly negotiating with each other to avoid permanent civil lawsuits?
the cost of making a legal argument can collapse while the cost of reaching an enforceable, legitimate decision may go higher, which will gate the "justice" system even more.
The legal system is slow and inefficient by design.
It's really not. The legal system is slow and inefficient because it's a deeply pipelined system built to maximize the throughput of the bottleneck resource: judges. Judges are constitutional officers who exercise independent authority in meat space and thus are necessarily limited in number. The rest of the design flows from that.
If you got the judge, all the parties, and all the witnesses in a conference room together until the case was resolved, you could probably handle a lawsuit in a few months. But each judge has hundreds of cases pending before them, so that would never work. Instead, you get something like how a GPU works. You do some work on a case, submit the work to the court, then work on something else for a few months while you wait around to get the results back. Then you do some more work and submit it to the court, then go do something else for a few months while you wait to get the results back. A few months of actual work gets spread out over a few years that way.
2 replies →
The legal system is robust and deliberate by design. That winds up being necessarily slow. But it doesn't need to be inefficient.
You presented the concern from my adjacent comment perfectly (“LLM performance: common law vs civil law” essentially). So is AI possibly just growing the “Reverence for Professional Experience” factor that plays such a big role for legal compensation here in the US?
I am not sure "eaten out" was the correct phrase to use here.
Call it a Prediction Market
They seem unaccountable. Every other profession has increased their productivity.
justice doesn't have to be productive it has to be fair
It's completely failing at that too. Public trust in the courts is lower than it's ever been, and it was never all that high to begin with
You've never heard the phrase "justice delayed is justice denied"?
how so? delayed justice is denied justice
construction productivity is actually down since the 60s!
>Every other profession has increased their productivity.
You dropped this /s
Don’t you have fee when initiating a lawsuit ?
I don’t know in the USA but in France, if it’s deemed that you launched a lawsuit knowing very well it wouldn’t succeed, you are susceptible to get a 10k€ fine. Even jail in serious cases.
Yes. And you(r lawyer) can collect lawyer's fees and you can be made to pay the court fees, if you lose.
IME the American legal system is set-up to discourage litigation, though. A common tactic is to bury your opponent in the threat of heavy damages or jail-time to get them to settle for what you were originally after, which courts are perfectly happy to facilitate because it gets a potentially lengthy trial off their dockets. They'll punish (or be biased against) whichever party seems responsible for not accepting a "reasonable" settlement.
Algorithmic abuse of the system to extract payments already exists in the form of the debt collection industry.
The solution is obvious: AI judges! With complete immunity for model vendors of course, just in case some toddler is sentenced to death or something.
I wonder how many parties would prefer an AI judge over delayed justice.
Why the hell are they not fighting fire with fire? This is not sustainable. But it is annoying that the AI labs get to play arms dealer, selling to both sides.
Judges don't care if people have to wait months. What does it cost them?
How are we fighting it online? You cannot
It'll be like radar detector detector detectors, which were a thing for a while. Each side (cops, speeder) buying detectors to detect the detectors.
There's a Judas Priest joke in here somewhere.
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/