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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
by jumploops 16d 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-coping-ai-lawsuits/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/06/04/1138391/courts-c...
- pampas 16d agoThey seem unaccountable. Every other profession has increased their productivity.
- diegolas 16d agojustice doesn't have to be productive it has to be fair
- MiSeRyDeee 16d agohow so? delayed justice is denied justice
- RugnirViking 16d agoIt'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
- pampas 16d agoYou've never heard the phrase "justice delayed is justice denied"?
- officeplant 16d ago>Every other profession has increased their productivity. You dropped this /s
- kart23 16d agoconstruction productivity is actually down since the 60s!
- deleted 15d ago[deleted]
- a3w 15d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox GDP does not grow with computers, why should it grow with new software, i.e. genAI? Creating virtual products get cheaper, so shouldn't it even decrease if everyone vibe codes their app for less than a dollar instead of hiring a dev team for 50k or ordering a white label app or spending 3 dollars to buy an existing app?
- toomuchtodo 16d agohttps://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/ https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
- ngruhn 16d agoWhy 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.
- toasty228 16d agoHow are we fighting it online? You cannot
- b112 16d agoIt'll be like radar detector detector detectors, which were a thing for a while. Each side (cops, speeder) buying detectors to detect the detectors.
- underlipton 16d agoThere's a Judas Priest joke in here somewhere.
- pampas 16d agoJudges don't care if people have to wait months. What does it cost them?
- alansaber 15d agoThey don't have a choice. If you're a firm and you work with IE a bank, the bank uses AI, their whole supply chain uses AI- your counterparty uses AI- it's a classic arms race with even more social pressure involved (since daily news keeps banging on about AI).
- paimapi 16d agoyou 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
- notahacker 16d agoJG Ballard could probably turn that into something darkly atmospheric, and even more dystopic than his usual depopulated worlds...
- Jordan-117 16d agoRelevant: https://www.ftrain.com/nanolaw https://www.ftrain.com/nanolaw
- mt_ 16d agoThe 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.
- pbkompasz 16d agoCall it a Prediction Market
- alexfringes 16d agoYou 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?
- WolfeReader 16d agoI am not sure "eaten out" was the correct phrase to use here.
- iphonecorridor 16d agoThe legal system is slow and inefficient by design.
- JumpCrisscross 16d agoThe legal system is robust and deliberate by design. That winds up being necessarily slow. But it doesn't need to be inefficient.
- rayiner 16d agoIt'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.
- sva_ 16d agoI 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.
- giarc 16d ago>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.
- tokioyoyo 16d agoCurrent 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.
- soco 12d agoThen the solution is to add AI to the courts as well. Or something else, if you don't like AI. But definitely not limiting the right of the people to sue.
- aucisson_masque 16d agoDon’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.
- underlipton 16d agoYes. 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.
- gamblor956 15d agoA 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. That's not how litigation actually works in this country. Unless the plaintiff can actually prove damages, there's no threat of "heavy" damages. The primary economic concern is spending a lot of money on legal fees, which is the primary trigger for getting businesses to settle instead of litigate. It doesn't work so well against people though. They'll punish (or be biased against) whichever party seems responsible for not accepting a "reasonable" settlement. That is false and any judge caught doing that would be removed from the bench, immediately. The judge does not exercise any judgement over what a "reasonable" settlement is as they don't and wouldn't know what is reasonable until the facts have been presented...at trial. Algorithmic abuse of the system to extract payments already exists in the form of the debt collection industry The debt collection system doesn't use the court system at all. Assuming you are referring to individual debts, not corporate debts, debt collectors have a very low success rate in court since (a) they have to prove the debt is valid, (b) that they now own the debt contract, and (c) they did not violate any laws in the pursuit of collecting on that debt. A and C are actually really hard for a third-party debt collector to prove.
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- Revanche1367 16d agoThe solution is obvious: AI judges! With complete immunity for model vendors of course, just in case some toddler is sentenced to death or something.