Judges who engage thoughtfully with AI don't just work more efficiently, they model exactly the kind of careful, accountable use that the legal system needs
Key insights:
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Judges can lead by example in responsible AI adoption — By engaging thoughtfully with AI and using it to enhance (and not replace) human judgment, judges can set an important standard for accountability, verification, and ethical use across the legal system.
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AI excels at streamlining preparation, not decision-making — AI is most valuable for reducing the burden of preparatory tasks, such as summarizing briefs, organizing records, identifying questions, and clarifying technical or statutory language. It should not substitute for judicial reasoning, discretion, or decision-making.
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Verification and guardrails are non-negotiable — Responsible AI use requires vetted tools, strong privacy protections, precise prompting, and independent verification of all AI-generated content. The integrity of judicial work depends on maintaining these disciplined processes.
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There is a leadership opportunity sitting inside every courtroom in America, and most judges haven’t claimed it yet.
AI is already shaping the legal system, in how attorneys research, how clerks draft, and how litigants prepare their cases. In From theory to practice: A judge’s hands-on guide to using AI, the latest webinar from the AI Policy Consortium — a joint effort by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and the Thomson Reuters Institute (TRI) — Chief Justice Matthew Fader of Maryland observed that the “technology is just becoming ubiquitous.”
“It’s spreading faster than any technology I’ve encountered in my lifetime,” Chief Justice Fader said. The reality, of course, is that AI will influence a wide spectrum of legal processes, including how judicial work gets done. The question is whether judges will be passive observers of that shift, or active, thoughtful participants in it.
The advantages in engaging with AI extend beyond efficiency — it is also about leadership. Judges who use AI responsibly, with clear guardrails, careful verification, and a firm commitment to human judgment, can model the standard that the legal profession needs from the bench.
The preparation problem AI can actually solve
The bulk of the work for a successful hearing or trial is done long before the judge enters the courtroom. This happens through careful review of records, briefs, and complex subject matter. Yet time constraints often limit thorough preparation, and this is where AI adds real value.
When used appropriately, AI can streamline early-stage work without compromising judicial rigor. Judges can upload briefs and receive structured summaries of each party’s arguments, providing a clear roadmap before deep analysis begins. Transcripts can be searched instantly for specific testimony, and lengthy records can be organized by topic, which reduces manual review.
For more technical cases, AI can generate concise primers on unfamiliar subjects, helping judges engage expert testimony within the proper context. AI also can draft targeted oral argument questions, flag hallucinated or incorrect citations in briefs, identify factual inconsistencies, and create procedural checklists for motions or default judgments. It can even simplify complex statutory language to enhance the clarity of proposed jury instructions.
As Justice Linda Kevins of New York observed, the more creatively AI is applied, the more use cases emerge. Judges who begin with one small task often discover a range of new efficiencies, which transforms preparation from a burden to a strategic advantage.
Responsible use is the point
What separates a judge using AI as a thoughtful professional from one using it carelessly is the discipline built around it. And that starts before the first prompt.
Any tool a judge uses should be vetted by the court’s IT department, its administrative office, or both. The terms of service matter, such as whether prompts are retained, whether data is used for model training, whether confidential information could be exposed. These are not technical details to delegate, rather they are the minimum a judge should understand before uploading anything.
Prompting with intention matters too. Instructing AI tools to always cite its sources, to flag uncertainty, and to present arguments neutrally are habits that will produce better output and reduce the risk of erroneous data. Asking for authority behind every claim, and explicitly telling the tool not to guess, should become standard practice. The right questions to ask before any task, as Dr. Maura Grossman of the University of Waterloo, described it, are: “What are you trying to accomplish? And what’s the best tool for that?”
And verification is non-negotiable. AI tools can confuse a dissent with a majority holding, misstate what a lower court decided, or misquote language.
One simple rule, offered by Justice Kevin summed it up: “Whatever it gives me, I have to verify.” Every case that AI identifies, every citation it provides, every factual summary it generates must be checked against primary sources.
This is not a burden that undermines the value of AI; indeed, it is the practice that makes AI valuable.
What AI cannot do
In AI use in courts, the boundaries matters as much as the capability of the tools.
“This is not a truth-finding tool,” explained Chief Justice Fader. “This is a truth-agnostic, predictive tool.” AI generates statistically likely output based on patterns in its training data. It does not reason, weigh competing values, or sense that something in a case doesn’t add up. It has no judgment, no empathy, no moral compass, and no capacity to recognize when the law should evolve because justice requires it.
Judicial discretion is not an inefficiency AI can optimize away — and this is the point. As Justice Kevins said in the webinar, AI is “only an assistant, an extra assistant.” The analysis of how the law applies to a specific set of facts, before specific parties, in a specific moment — that is unavoidably human work. The moment any judge asks AI to assess which party has the stronger argument, a vital task has been delegated to the AI that should not have been.
Leading from the bench
Judges who engage with AI carefully set a visible standard for everyone who appears before them. These judges are better equipped to recognize when a filing’s AI-generated content is inaccurate. They can set informed expectations for clerks and staff, and they can ask the right questions when AI-related issues surface in litigation — many of which are already surfacing regularly.
The goal for judges is to use AI “to do their work more productively, but not to replace their judgment,” said Chief Justice Fader. And that balance should guide responsible judicial use: Neither avoidance, which is increasingly unrealistic; nor uncritical adoption, which carries real risk — but instead a more disciplined approach than either of these extremes.
The prepared judge is not simply the one who has read everything before walking into a courtroom. It’s the one who has used every available tool wisely, verified rigorously, and exercised the human judgment that no algorithm can replicate. That standard, consistently applied, is a form of leadership for which the legal profession has been waiting.
For more on the impact of AI in courts, visit the TRI/NCSC AI Policy Consortium for Law & Courts
