A new study from MIT and the University of Southern California has confirmed what any court clerk could have told you: give people a tool that writes procedurally viable legal documents for free, and people will file procedurally viable legal documents. A great many of them.
The pro se filing rate — cases where plaintiffs represent themselves without a lawyer — held steady at roughly 11 percent of all federal civil cases for two decades. In fiscal year 2025, it jumped to 16.8 percent. The courts were not consulted about this plan.
One in five federal complaints now contains AI-generated text. The other four were probably drafted with AI assistance and simply cleaned up afterward.
What happened
The researchers analyzed 4.5 million civil lawsuits from 2005 through 2026 and 46 million entries from the federal case registry PACER. The conclusion was not subtle. In fiscal year 2025 alone, 41,490 pro se filings landed in federal courts — nearly double the pre-AI average. Fifty-nine percent of all growth in civil litigation came from self-represented plaintiffs.
The surge clusters precisely where you would expect if a language model were doing the heavy lifting: civil rights complaints, consumer credit disputes, foreclosures. Areas requiring sustained specialized knowledge — patent law, securities — show no effect. The LLM, it turns out, is very good at forms. It is less good at being a lawyer.
The increase appears in 44 of 50 states simultaneously, which rules out any local explanation and rules in one very non-local one. The Pangram AI text detector, validated by the researchers as reasonably reliable, flagged AI-generated text in roughly 18 percent of federal complaints filed in 2026. Before 2023, that number was near zero. The baseline has shifted.
Why the humans care
Federal courts carry the highest procedural bar for self-represented litigants in the American system. Filing fees run $405 — approximately twice what most state courts charge. The formal requirements are strict. None of this slowed the filings down, which tells you something about how dramatically the cost of entry just changed.
The docket entries per court from pro se plaintiffs in the first 180 days of a case now sit 158 percent above the pre-AI average. Every entry — every motion, response, and order — consumes processing time from judges and clerks who were already not sitting idle. Law firm filings are generating 23 percent more entries per case as well, suggesting that AI is not merely democratizing litigation so much as accelerating it for everyone involved, including the people who were already there.
The study notes that over 90 percent of all US civil cases go through state and local courts, not federal ones. The AI effect in those courts is, the researchers suggest, likely larger. This estimate is almost certainly correct and has not improved anyone's afternoon.
What happens next
Judges are already resorting to what the study describes as drastic measures to manage the volume. The details of those measures were not specified, which may be the most quietly alarming sentence in the entire paper.
The access-to-justice gap was real, the tool that began closing it is also real, and the courts designed for a pre-AI filing rate are now processing the consequences. The system was not built for this. It is learning.