Picture a county courthouse on a Monday morning. The line at the clerk’s window is already six deep. A woman is trying to understand why her hearing date changed. Behind the counter, a clerk wants to help, but there are 200 new filings to process, three voicemails from attorneys, and a stack of data entry that should have been done Friday. She gives the best answer she can in ninety seconds and calls the next number.
Now picture the same courthouse, same Monday, same clerk. But the filings were sorted and categorized overnight. The data entry handled itself. The hearing change has already triggered a plain-language notification to everyone involved. When the woman steps up to the window, the clerk doesn’t have ninety seconds. She has five minutes. Enough time to explain what’s happening, answer the follow-up questions, and make someone feel like the system sees them.
The difference between those two mornings isn’t a different clerk. It’s a different set of tools. Some of these tools exist today. Others are still emerging. But the direction is clear, and courts that start thinking about this now will be better positioned to serve their communities as the technology matures.
Courts Don’t Have a People Problem. They Have a Time Problem.
Court professionals chose this work because they care about people and communities. But caring takes time, and time is exactly what most courts don’t have.
The numbers tell the story. A 2025 national survey by the Thomson Reuters Institute and National Center for State Courts found that 48% of professionals said they don’t have enough time to get their work done. Separately, the NCSC found that more than 70% of courts experienced staffing shortages in the past year, with 61% expecting them to continue. Nearly half of the courts reported increasing caseloads, and 24% reported growing delays.
When a single clerk is responsible for processing hundreds of documents, managing schedules, fielding questions, and entering data across multiple systems, something has to give. Usually, it’s the thing that doesn’t show up on a task list: patience.
That’s where technology comes in. Not to replace the people doing this work, but to give them their time back.
How Courts Are Using AI Right Now (And What’s Changing)
Automation and AI are often used interchangeably, but they’re not, and that distinction matters. Automation follows rules. If a filing meets these criteria, route it here. AI goes further. It can read a document, understand its context, and flag what’s missing or unusual. Many courts are already successfully using automation, and AI builds on that foundation.
So, what does the practical impact look like? Some of the most immediate wins come from automation, not AI.
Take scheduling. Court delays are a persistent problem, and failure to appear is one of the biggest drivers. Research consistently shows that automated text reminders, the kind that goes out in plain language a few days before a hearing, reduce failure-to-appear rates by 20 to 40 percent. These reminders cost less than a dollar per case. That’s not AI. It’s a simple automation. But fewer missed hearings mean fewer bench warrants, fewer people cycling through the system unnecessarily, and less wasted time for everyone involved. Sometimes the simplest tools make the biggest difference.
Where AI adds value is in the less-structured work. Document management gets easier when AI can sort, categorize, and summarize incoming filings, then flag what’s incomplete before a clerk ever touches it. Data entry errors drop when intelligent validation catches inconsistencies in real time. And in roughly 75% of civil cases, at least one party is navigating the system without a lawyer. AI-powered guided tools that answer common procedural questions outside business hours can help those people understand their next step without waiting in line or calling during working hours. That said, courts using AI tools must understand applicable regulations to ensure personally identifiable information (PII) remains protected.
Every minute a court saves on administrative work is a minute returned to the people it serves.
Beyond Efficiency: How Reducing Admin Work Improves Court Outcomes
Efficiency is easy to measure. Empathy isn’t. But anyone who’s worked in a courthouse knows the difference between rushing someone through a process and helping them understand it.
When staff aren’t buried in administrative work, they can listen more carefully. They can explain the process without watching the clock. They can respond to someone’s fear or frustration with patience instead of pressure. That’s not a soft benefit. It directly affects outcomes. People who understand what’s expected of them are more likely to comply. People who feel respected are more likely to engage. People who trust the process are more likely to show up.
Think about it from the other side of the window. For many people, a court appearance is one of the most stressful experiences of their lives. It could include custody disputes, compliance requirements, and/or charges they may not fully understand. When the system communicates clearly and treats them like a person rather than a case number, everything shifts. They’re more likely to follow through and more likely to walk away feeling the process was fair, even when the outcome wasn’t what they hoped for.
Burnout in courts is real, well-documented, and not getting better on its own. When staff are running on fumes by noon, the quality of every interaction after that suffers. Technology won’t create empathy. But it can protect the space where empathy has room to show up, by making sure the people on the front lines still have something left to give.
How Courts Can Adopt AI Without Losing Public Trust
While new technology can be exciting, none of this works without trust. And trust requires honesty about what AI can’t do yet.
AI systems can hallucinate. They generate confident, professional-sounding information that can be completely wrong. In the legal space, this has already caused real problems. Attorneys have been sanctioned for filing briefs containing case citations that didn’t exist, generated by AI tools that presented fiction as fact. In a court context, an unreviewed hallucination isn’t just embarrassing. It’s a liability. This is why human reviews aren’t a nice-to-have. They are the entire point.
Courts also carry the weight of history here. Algorithmic tools in the justice system have faced serious, legitimate criticism around bias, particularly in pretrial risk assessment. Those experiences should inform how courts approach new technology, not be brushed aside. Healthy skepticism isn’t resistance to progress. It’s what responsible adoption looks like.
And the public is paying attention. The NCSC’s 2025 public opinion poll found that 51% of Americans believe AI will be more harmful than helpful to courts, driven by concerns about mistakes and diminished trust in decisions. Court leaders aren’t just managing internal adoption. They’re managing public confidence. Moving too fast, or without transparency, risks eroding the very trust that courts depend on. (For more on navigating these challenges, see our posts on court privacy in the age of AI and effective data governance.)
Right now, only about 17% of courts are using generative AI, even though 55% rate it as having a high or transformational impact over the next five years. That gap isn’t about a lack of interest. It’s about readiness, and readiness takes work, including clear governance, human-in-the-loop safeguards, staff training, and thoughtful implementation. For courts exploring where to start, our Court Innovator’s Implementation Workbook walks through these questions step by step.
The Future of Courts: Where Technology and Human Connection Work Together
Courts don’t have to choose between being high-tech and being human. The best ones will be both. AI handles the volume so people can handle the moments that matter. The clerk at the window gets five minutes instead of ninety seconds.
The person on the other side of the glass walks away knowing what comes next, not wondering why they came.
About the Author
Michael Scott is an AI Product Manager at equivant, where he leads development of the equivant intelligence platform. With 20 years of experience in court technology, he builds production AI systems designed to help courts work smarter while keeping people at the center.
