Random People Armed with AI and No Lawyer Are Reportedly Filling Judicial Dockets with Lawsuits

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 The study has not yet been peer reviewed.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 s