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. Supported by
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT 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.
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