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In a society as litigious as the US, the slowness of the courts is effectively an Omnicausal problem at this point. Not just in taking a year to decide on tariffs for the SC, but even state and local courts are swamped.
Why do more than 95% of criminal cases end up in plea bargains? Because the court simply can not handle actually taking them to trial unless you wanted a trial set long after everyone involved is dead. And plea bargains suck, they punish innocents (who can't afford to wait the absurd amount of time for an actual trial) and let guilty criminals get away with lesser punishments (because the terms have to be really generous compared to what a trial sentence may end up in). Seriously look at almost any case where someone got off absurdly light for a crime and you'll also notice that they almost always pled guilty in it because again, over 95% of criminal cases end in a plea bargain of some kind.
The clogging up of immigration courts is one major part of the crisis we had, asylum applicants could take years an average of four for a case to be resolved. Keeping them locked up for that whole time is wasteful and inhumane, but letting them out creates an obvious exploit.
How about other issues like say, a landlord wanting to evict a bad tenant? A hearing in some of the busier counties could take you a few months. Want to build an energy transmission line? Have fun spending more than a decade on various legal challenges. You might be a parent unable to see your child for more than a year because of custody disputes being unsettled.
This ain't just a US problem either, Canada and the UK apparently have it even worse with the backlogs in some areas. It didn't use to be this bad so clearly it's possible for a functional court system to actually go at a timely manner, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly what is causing this issue and how to fix it.
IANAL but it seems to me that a big part of the problem comes from common law resting on case law and therefore requiring that complex cases are ground out to a satisfactory conclusion. There seems to be no concept of ‘it would take a year to solve this complex case and all the claims and counter claims but you’ve got a week so do whatever you can’.
Also it feels that the nature of case law means that over any reasonable amount of time there will naturally be erosion of the original intent.
Which due to sheer population, judge polarization and information sharing circa today is going faster and faster
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It could genuinely be fixed (in the short term) by spending a LOT more money on the court system to get competent judges, clerks, assistants to process cases in a timely fashion, update systems to modern tech to increase throughput, and Marshall necessary resources to enforce the court's rulings too.
But Courts are inherently a cost center for any government. Indeed, in Florida, the statutory trend is to draft laws to discourage litigation at every turn. Requiring extra procedural hoops before filing is permitted, forcing pre-suit negotiations or even mediation, and now they're starting to restrict the ability to collect attorney's fees.
No government that I know of actively expands its judicial resources to scale with its economy or population.
There are some issues that have to funnel through the courts (Probate, the disposition of a dead person's stuff, being one of them), but beyond that, in their function as dispute resolver can still 'work' by making the process as ardurous and unpleasant as necessary for the parties to consider cooperation the strictly superior option.
My REAL suspicion is that AI will get good enough at predicting case outcomes that it will discourage active litigation/encourage quick settlements, as you can go to Claude, Grok, and Gemini and feed it all the facts and evidence and it can spit out "75% chance of favorable verdict, likely awards range from $150,000 to $300,000, and it will probably take 19-24 months to reach trial."
And if the other party finds this credible, the incentive for solving things cooperatively become obvious.
Didn't the Qing make a law that reporting a crime to the police, where the accused was found not guilty, would be punished more severely than the actual crime, so as to discourage undue involvement of the legal system in people's affairs? Or am I remembering wrong?
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I don't know that LLMs really could add much since any lawyer would be able to give you a ballpark on likelihood of success and the award range. The thing with civil litigation is that discovery can take time, and high value cases with good evidence will always be given priority. For the trial docket I work off of, a case can go from filing to trial in under a year, and most cases don't take much longer. And this is a relatively complex type of litigation where that's already pushing it as far as having enough time to develop the case is concerned. But cases that are if lower value or have evidentiary issues can take a decade to resolve, not through any fault of the court but because the attorney responsible isn't motivated to list them for trial until the ducks are all in a row.
I mean, I'd just point out that this answers your initial thought:
Any lawyer can give you the ballpark, but the LLM now makes it 'viable' to file and prosecute a suit as long as it is expected to be barely EV positive.
The cost of getting 'all ducks in a row' should go down substantially.
By getting all your ducks in a row I'm not referring to anything that an LLM can accomplish. I'm referring to things like making sure you have witnesses lined up for deposition and things of that nature, since you don't want to wait until the start of discovery before looking for them. This is mostly and issue in wrongful death cases, where you can't just depose the plaintiff to get the evidence and often need to track down third parties. Whether or not you can get a case off the trial list after discovery closes depends on the custom of the attorneys in the area in which you're practicing. There's one firm I deal with a lot that has a habit of listing cases they don't do anything with and having them removed (some trial terms my caseload is disproportionately made up of these perennials that never seem to go off, including one from 2013 with a crazy plaintiff who refuses to settle anything and whose attorney keeps listing it and removing it to keep the guy happy, or so I assume); I never oppose these motions, because I (and my clients) prefer to maintain a good working relationship with the firm over forcing the issue to get a single case dismissed. Other practice areas aren't so cordial and laid back, and plaintiff's attorneys aren't going to list cases unless they're sure they'll actually go off.
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As I understand it a lot of commercial / divorce / etc outcomes are already predictable and it doesn’t make people less litigious.
SORT OF.
In the more emotionally-driven areas (so yeah, outside of commercial), like divorce and contested probate, sometimes people genuinely just want to inflict the process as a punishment on the other side... and sometimes emotions flip and what looked like a surefire drawn-out fight gets resolved in a weekend.
Lawyers are still bound to do what their clients want, after all. But if a lawyer can pull up their AI Case Analyzer and say "Look, its not just my opinion, the Computer is telling you that even if we drag this out for two years your best outcome is an additional 10-15k over the offer that's on the table now" maybe we avoid some conflict.
(one can hope that clients can see reason, this might be a fool's bet)
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It will be interesting to see if people view the LLM as more authoritative, though. Lawyers will take losing cases if they are going to be paid for them.
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Especially at the smaller scale where there's a ton of emotive considerations and people are infrequently engaged with the legal system.
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