Years ago, some clients would show up at my office with a file filled with their legal research. It would include pages of decisions from myriad jurisdictions which bore headnotes tangentially touching upon the issues in their case, but reflected their near-total ignorance of how the law actually worked.

They would demand that I read their research, which I told them I would happily do provided they would pay me for the time spent. Or they could just let me do my job and pay for that instead. Most would pick the latter. Those who refused tended to not be the sort of clients I wanted to represent, or the sort of clients who wanted a lawyer like me. Rarely were they willing to pay me to read their work rather than merely accept their representation that it was an “easy” case and they had already done all the work. This was just as well, as I was disinclined to waste my time or charge clients for work that was unproductive.

Now it’s judges who find themselves in that position, as artificial intelligence has emboldened clients to go it alone. Who needs a lawyer when you have ChatGPT?

Using ChatGPT and Claude, Mr. Sauve filed a new complaint in federal court. This time, it was a neatly typed document accompanied by 50 additional filings including a “case law synthesis” of legal research he said backed up his claim. In an interview, Mr. Sauve said A.I. had provided “the only path forward” for his case.

“Knowledge is power,” he said.

Federal judges and legal experts said they are increasingly seeing filings like Mr. Sauve’s flooding court dockets and clogging an already overburdened system as A.I. supercharges pro se litigation — even as it opens up the legal system to people who might not otherwise be able to afford to bring a case.

The pro se plaintiff lost, as did 96% of pro se litigants between 1998 and 2017. But is this really a problem, or an outlier?

But judges, lawyers and academics say the volume of filings by pro se litigants has risen dramatically alongside A.I.’s widespread adoption. The proportion of pro se cases filed by non-prisoners increased from 11 percent of all civil cases five years ago to 16.8 percent in 2025, according to a new study by two doctoral candidates that has not yet been peer reviewed.

The study found that much of the increase comes from the use of A.I. by pro se plaintiffs. The number of pro se complaints flagged as likely containing A.I.-generated text rose from virtually zero in 2019 to more than 18 percent in 2026, the study found.

But that’s a study. What about the reality on the ground?

Steven Donohue, a staff attorney for the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota in charge of reviewing pro se filings, said he observed a roughly 50 percent uptick in filings from non-prisoners starting around March 2025.

The problem is that in the past, pro se filings ranged from the crazy, hand-written nonsense to the occasionally really funny effort. Judge Kopf loved to tell about the “motion to go fuck yourself” he got from a pro se litigant. It was a welcome break from the tedium of lawyer filings. But ChatGPT has changed the nature of these submissions, which can now be cranked out with the quasi-appearance of actual motions and briefs, case citations and quotes (some of which are accurate, though many are not) and arguments that give the appearance of being substantive even when they never quite satisfy any cause of action.

The problem is that a judge, not to mention her clerks and/or court attorneys, has to read through this dump of filings, as their duty demanded.

“Judges still only have 24 hours in a day,” said Anand V. Shah of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the study’s authors. “Something has to give at some point.”

For litigants, the power of generative A.I. lies in its ability to turn a few short prompts from a user into lengthy documents with headers, citations and other earmarks of a legitimate legal brief.

For lawyers, this means that our papers, our cases, are being edged out by pro se litigant filings. There were problems in the past with getting timely decisions from the courts (New York Supreme Court Justice Edward Greenfield took eight years to decide a motion, which was a record at the time), but what’s a judge to do when his docket is engorged with pro se litigants filing 50 docs at a time filled with AI generated tripe and it pushes a decision in a critical motion that would normally be made in a week off for a month. Or a year?

Do we need more judges, more courtrooms and more clerks? Probably, but nature abhors a vacuum and the time will likely fill with more litigation rather than address courts being overwhelmed with AI generated pro se cases. Should judges just stop bothering with pro se litigants, or limit their reading to the primary papers and put the rest in the shredder? That’s unfair to the litigant who has a legitimate cause for redress and deserves to have his case heard and fully considered.

But the problem is only going to get worse as litigants realize they can crank out pseudo-legal docs at huge volume without a lawyer, and believe that the worst they can do is lose, but they might win, just like ChatGPT tells them they will.

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