05/26/2026
"The complaint Donald Sauve submitted in Minnesota last year was a familiar type in the nation’s federal courts.
In legal parlance, Mr. Sauve filed “pro se,” Latin for “for oneself,” meaning he had no lawyer as he sued his ex-wife, her lawyer and a state judge who had rejected one of his earlier legal challenges as “frivolous.”
In a handwritten scrawl, he previously filed a suit asking for $275,000 in damages, claiming he had been unlawfully deprived of his home. It took less than a month for Judge Jerry W. Blackwell to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction.
Three months later, Mr. Sauve was back. This time he had help.
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 eventual outcome for Mr. Sauve was the same. In September, two months after he filed, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, chief of Minnesota’s Federal District Court, dismissed his suit again, this time in a 14-page opinion that found he had failed to clearly state a claim.
But first, each one of Mr. Sauve’s filings had to be read, captioned by the clerk and entered on the public docket.
Judge Schiltz entered an order that any further filings would be “shredded without any additional notice.”
“A litigant cannot dump hundreds of pages of documents on a court and expect the court to sift through them to find facts or arguments that might support claims against a defendant,” Judge Schiltz wrote, as he dismissed the case.
In interviews, judges and experts said that the use of A.I. by pro se litigants also offers potential upsides. “A.I. presents great promise for enhancing access to justice for those without the resources to retain counsel or to represent themselves effectively,” wrote Judge Michael Y. Scudder of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit this year, when ruling on a pro se case.
And some federal judges are also discussing ways that A.I. could be used responsibly to help with workflow in their own chambers, noting that it’s possible that A.I. could someday be used to help clerks to read and assess a larger number of filings.
In the meantime, however, many judges emphasized the seriousness of the immediate workload problem created by A.I.-enabled pro se filings. Judge Schiltz, who declined to discuss any particular case, characterized the overall problem as “an existential threat to the federal courts.”
The arrival of A.I. has caused the number, length and complexity of pro se filings to “increase dramatically,” he said. “There’s just no end in sight, and no satisfactory solution in sight either.”
‘Something Has to Give’
Each year, federal district courts handle roughly 300,000 new civil lawsuits; another 42,000 new cases are filed in the courts of appeal. One third of that combined caseload comes from pro se litigants, according to data compiled by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which helps oversee the federal court system.
Many of them are prisoners using law libraries to assert their civil rights or otherwise challenge prison conditions. Others are ordinary people who either can’t afford a lawyer or believe themselves to be their own best advocate. Between 1998 and 2017, pro se plaintiffs lost 96 percent of the cases they brought.
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.
“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.
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.
All sorts of pro se cases have been on the rise, Mr. Donohue said, including lawsuits alleging false arrest, malicious prosecution and messy domestic disputes involving divorce. In some instances, the cases involved “the bread and butter of state court,” now filed in federal court with the help of A.I.-inspired applications of federal law.
“Every eviction action could turn into a Fair Housing Act violation,” he said.
With careful human oversight, the output of A.I. can sometimes rival the work of a legal professional, at least for simple matters like drawing up a lease. But in more complex cases, as well as matters that might not be appropriate for a lawsuit, A.I.’s well-established tendency to sometimes flatter and fabricate can cause it to churn out pages of quasi-legal boilerplate that lacks legal merit.
Judges “look for truth,” said Judge Joshua D. Wolson of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania at a judicial conference in May, speaking to the broader implications of A.I. “When the ability to make things that look like truth but aren’t — the cost goes down, the quality goes up — that’s a real challenge for us as courts.”
Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, did not respond to a request for comment. A spokeswoman for OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, declined to comment. Their product’s terms of use state that users own and bear the responsibility for its output, which should not be used as “a substitute for professional advice.”
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Fighting Alone
Despite the drawbacks, judges and advocates said A.I. could be democratizing for the legal system — opening the courts to people who might otherwise not be able to afford lawyers.
“Used appropriately, it could be an incredibly powerful tool for someone who believes themselves to have been wronged and has a good faith belief in entitlement to redress,” Mr. Donohue said.
Decades before A.I., pro se filings have led to monumental changes in the law. In 1963, a handwritten petition to the Supreme Court by Clarence Earl Gideon, a 52-year-old convict in a Florida state prison, established a constitutional right to counsel for felony cases in state courts.
Sateesh Nori, a legal aid lawyer in New York for 20 years, said he embraced A.I. two years ago after concluding that legal aid resources in New York were failing to meet the city’s needs.
Despite a landmark law in 2017 that guaranteed free legal representation to low-income tenants facing eviction, Mr. Nori noted city data showing that as many as 50 percent still go to court without representation.
“The real problem is: how come these people don’t have another way, other than using A.I.,” he said.
Experts said there is little the courts can do to stem pro se filings even if they wanted to. People have a right, after all, to file lawsuits if they believe they have a claim. Peter Kaplan, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, said his office was “aware of this issue” and “is gathering information” on its effects on the legal system.
In recent months, some courts have starting issuing standing orders warning prospective pro se filers that using generative A.I. could expose them to penalties.
When judges have run into filings with problematic hallmarks of A.I., such as citations to case law that look real but are in fact fictional, many have been lenient to filers who are not lawyers. But some have flashed exasperation, dismissed cases and even issued substantial fines.
In March, Judge Virginia Kendall, a federal judge in Illinois, fined a litigant $1,500 after concluding she had twice submitted a “fake case,” littered with hallucinated citations in violation of court rules.
“This wastes both the parties’ and the Court’s time attempting to locate nonexistent cases and unpack made up factual assertions,” she wrote.
States have also started to explore legislation that would make A.I. companies liable if their chatbots were found to have handed out legal advice in place of a lawyer or other licensed professional but such measures have not yet been adopted.
For some aggrieved litigants, pushback is unlikely to convince them to give up their A.I.-empowered legal arsenal. Mr. Sauve, the pro se filer from Minnesota, said he continues to pursue efforts to regain his old home. He lost possession it following a messy divorce, which included a finding from a judge that he abused his ex-wife and one of his children. He denies that allegation.
“They call me ‘frivolous.’ That appears to be a way that the court is protecting itself,” he said.
“OpenAI told me this, and I think Claude will confirm it as well,” he said of his belief that the law is on his side. “I did a lot of research into this whole situation.”
Mr. Sauve is 69 years old and currently living out of his car in Mora, Minn. He continues to pursue various forms of legal redress from a supermarket coffee shop.
With the help of A.I., he plans to soon make more “SCOTUS-grade filings,” he said, bringing new lawsuits to the state supreme court, a federal appeals court and a county court as well."
For years, courts have welcomed cases brought by self-represented litigants. Now those plaintiffs have A.I., and their filings are consuming more and more bandwidth.
