How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits
How courts are coping with a flood of AI-generated lawsuits
法院如何应对人工智能生成的诉讼浪潮
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 执行摘要
Most days in her chambers, Judge Maritza Braswell, a federal magistrate judge in Colorado, sifts through stacks of documents written by people without a lawyer. Many of them can’t afford to hire a lawyer, and others have cases too weak or too small to interest one. She reads each one carefully, mindful of how daunting it is to walk into the courtroom alone. 在科罗拉多州担任联邦治安法官的玛丽莎·布拉斯韦尔（Maritza Braswell）法官，大部分时间都在办公室里翻阅由非律师人士撰写的堆积如山的文件。这些人中，许多人负担不起聘请律师的费用，另一些人的案件则因证据不足或标的额太小而无法吸引律师代理。她仔细阅读每一份文件，深知独自走进法庭是多么令人望而生畏。
Lately, like many judges across the US, she has seen a noticeable uptick in such filings. According to a new study that examined 4.5 million federal civil cases from 2005 to 2026, the share of lawsuits brought by self-represented people increased from 11% in 2022 to 16.8% in 2025. Within those cases, the number of filings made more than doubled from pre-2023 levels. 最近，像美国各地的许多法官一样，她注意到此类诉讼案件明显增加。一项研究考察了2005年至2026年间的450万起联邦民事案件，结果显示，由当事人本人代理（self-represented）的诉讼比例从2022年的11%上升至2025年的16.8%。在这些案件中，提交的文件数量比2023年之前翻了一番多。
Judge Braswell puts that jump down to AI. “I do correlate that to AI in part because I see AI use,” she says. As a tech-savvy judge who uses AI to vet court documents, she’s learned to recognize how large language models write. She can tell from the prose and at times, hallucinated cases and fabricated quotes. “I’m also actually seeing better-drafted pleadings,” she says. But while AI appears to be expanding access to justice, it doesn’t seem to be improving people’s chances of winning. 布拉斯韦尔法官将这一激增归因于人工智能。“我确实将其部分归因于人工智能，因为我看到了人工智能的使用，”她说。作为一名精通技术的法官，她会使用人工智能来审查法庭文件，因此学会了识别大语言模型的写作方式。她能从文风中辨别出来，有时还能发现虚构的案例和伪造的引语。“我实际上也看到了起草得更好的诉状，”她说。然而，虽然人工智能似乎扩大了司法获取渠道，但它似乎并没有提高人们胜诉的几率。
Judges are also starting to question what kinds of rights and responsibilities large language models should bear as they step into lawyers’ shoes. For example, they ask whether a chatbot has a duty to provide good advice, as a human lawyer does. And a growing number of lawmakers across the US are starting to grapple with who should pay the price when chatbots dish out bad legal advice. 法官们也开始质疑，当大语言模型扮演律师角色时，它们应该承担什么样的权利和责任。例如，他们会问，聊天机器人是否像人类律师一样有义务提供优质建议。美国各地越来越多的立法者也开始探讨，当聊天机器人提供糟糕的法律建议时，谁应该为此付出代价。
AI supercharges lawsuits 人工智能助推诉讼
To test whether AI was driving the increase in lawsuits filed by people without a lawyer, the authors of the study, Anand Shah at MIT and Joshua Levy at the University of Southern California, ran 1,600 randomly sampled court documents through Pangram, a commercial AI-text detector. The share flagged as containing AI-generated writing rose from 1% in 2023 to 18% in 2026. 为了验证人工智能是否是导致非律师人士诉讼增加的原因，该研究的作者——麻省理工学院的阿南德·沙阿（Anand Shah）和南加州大学的约书亚·利维（Joshua Levy）——通过商业人工智能文本检测工具Pangram，对1600份随机抽取的法庭文件进行了检测。结果显示，被标记为包含人工智能生成内容的比例从2023年的1%上升到了2026年的18%。
To Judge Braswell, that’s not necessarily a cause for concern. While the surge of AI-assisted filings might be adding to their workloads, she and many other judges find the cases easier to rule on because AI is helping people without legal training better articulate their arguments. Court documents written by people without lawyers are notoriously hard to decipher. Some arrive as handwritten scrawls bordering on gibberish that judges take a while to decode. However cryptic, judges are required to read them charitably. 对布拉斯韦尔法官来说，这未必值得担忧。虽然人工智能辅助提交的文件激增可能会增加工作量，但她和许多其他法官发现这些案件更容易裁决，因为人工智能正在帮助没有法律背景的人更好地阐述他们的论点。非律师人士撰写的法庭文件向来以难以解读著称。有些文件甚至是潦草的手写体，近乎胡言乱语，法官需要花很长时间才能破译。无论多么晦涩难懂，法官都有义务宽容地阅读它们。
These days, Judge Braswell has been churning through motions drafted by AI faster than the ones written by the litigants. “I have to be really careful because some of them contain hallucinations and errors, but I can generally understand what they’re arguing better with AI assistance from them than without it,” she says. The clearer filings let Judge Braswell hear them better. “If I understand an argument a little bit better, I’m probably going to be able to help a little bit more,” she says. 如今，布拉斯韦尔法官处理人工智能起草的动议的速度，比处理当事人自己撰写的动议要快。“我必须非常小心，因为其中一些包含幻觉和错误，但总的来说，在人工智能的辅助下，我比没有辅助时更能理解他们的论点，”她说。更清晰的文件让布拉斯韦尔法官能更好地倾听他们的诉求。“如果我能更好地理解一个论点，我可能就能提供更多的帮助，”她说。
Online communities are springing up to trade self-help guides on using AI to sue. In December 2024, a viral Reddit post walked immigration applicants through suing the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services over delayed review of their applications: draft a writ of mandamus with Microsoft Copilot, pay a lawyer $150 to polish it, and file in the expedient District of Vermont. Cases filed by people without lawyers in Vermont rose from about 45 a year before 2022 to more than 1,100 in 2024. 在线社区如雨后春笋般涌现，交流如何利用人工智能进行诉讼的自助指南。2024年12月，Reddit上一篇热门帖子指导移民申请人如何因申请审查延误而起诉美国公民及移民服务局：用Microsoft Copilot起草一份强制令申请书，花150美元请律师润色，然后在办事效率高的佛蒙特州地区法院提交。佛蒙特州非律师人士提交的案件数量从2022年前的每年约45起，上升到2024年的1100多起。
Even so, people without lawyers are far more likely to lose their case than people with lawyers, and that’s not changing even with the addition of AI, the study found. “It turns out that mounting a lawsuit is a complex, multifaceted task. Not all of it is just drafting text,” says Levy. 尽管如此，研究发现，没有律师的人比有律师的人败诉的可能性要大得多，即使有了人工智能的加持，这种情况也没有改变。“事实证明，提起诉讼是一项复杂且多层面的任务。不仅仅是起草文本那么简单，”利维说。
Chatbot-client privilege 聊天机器人与客户的特权
Judge William Garfinkel, a federal magistrate judge in Connecticut, has served on the bench for three decades, pondering all sorts of questions about lawyers’ relationship with their clients. Lately, he has been wondering whether people’s conversations with chatbots dispensing legal advice should be privileged, the way their conversations with lawyers are. “You can make a good argument that … conversations with large language models like Claude or ChatGPT or Grok should deserve some protection,” he says. 康涅狄格州的联邦治安法官威廉·加芬克尔（William Garfinkel）已经在法官席上工作了三十年，一直在思考关于律师与客户关系的各种问题。最近，他一直在思考，人们与提供法律建议的聊天机器人之间的对话，是否应该像与律师的对话一样享有特权（保密权）。“你可以提出一个很好的论点，即……与Claude、ChatGPT或Grok等大语言模型的对话应该得到某种保护，”他说。
Courts are starting to grapple with this question. In February, a federal court in Michigan ruled that a self-represented person’s conversations with ChatGPT to prepare her case were work product—legal work that is shielded from the opposing side. The decision came on the same day a federal court in New York held that documents a criminal defendant had generated using Claude were not privileged attorney-client conversations or work product. The court argued that Claude is not an attorney and that a user has no “reasonable expectation of confidentiality in his communication” with it because AI companies can disclose user data to third parties. 法院已开始着手处理这一问题。今年2月，密歇根州的一家联邦法院裁定，一名当事人为准备案件而与ChatGPT进行的对话属于“工作成果”（work product）——即受保护、无需向对方披露的法律工作。该裁决发布当天，纽约的一家联邦法院却裁定，一名刑事被告使用Claude生成的文件不属于受特权保护的律师-客户对话或工作成果。法院认为，Claude不是律师，用户对其与聊天机器人的交流没有“合理的保密预期”，因为人工智能公司可能会向第三方披露用户数据。
In March, Judge Braswell ruled that a self-represented person’s use of a chatbot should stay off limits. “It is true that AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and others … collect user data for training and other purposes. But … that does not eliminate all expectations of privacy,” she wrote. Courts have since remained split on the issue. 3月，布拉斯韦尔法官裁定，当事人使用聊天机器人的记录应受到保护。“诚然，ChatGPT、Claude、Gemini等人工智能系统……会收集用户数据用于训练和其他目的。但是……这并不能消除所有的隐私预期，”她写道。此后，法院在这一问题上一直存在分歧。
Malpractice without a pulse 无生命的医疗事故（失职）
Some judges are also wondering whether a chatbot, like a lawyer, has a duty to provide good legal advice. Judge Allison Goddard, a federal magistrate judge in California, has noticed that people without lawyers often get the wrong advice from ChatGPT when trying to assess the value of their case during settlement negotiations. In one case, a plaintiff who slipped and fell in a store asked for $700,000 from the store, which was wildly more than the case was worth. “Where are you getting the idea that you’re getting $700,000? Did you go to ChatGPT?” Judge Goddard asked. “Well …” the plaintiff muttered. 一些法官也在思考，聊天机器人是否像律师一样，有义务提供优质的法律建议。加利福尼亚州的联邦治安法官艾莉森·戈达德（Allison Goddard）注意到，非律师人士在和解谈判中试图评估案件价值时，经常从ChatGPT那里得到错误的建议。在一个案件中，一名在商店滑倒的原告向商店索赔70万美元，这远远超过了案件本身的价值。“你从哪里得出你会得到70万美元这个想法的？你问过ChatGPT吗？”戈达德法官问道。“嗯……”原告嘟囔道。