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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.
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.
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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.
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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