Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

Name: AI in the Hands of Litigants: What Happens When Court Users Bring Their Own AI
Start: 2026-10-22T10:45:00-0400
End: 2026-10-22T12:15:00-0400

AI in the Hands of Litigants: What Happens When Court Users Bring Their Own AI

Thursday October 22, 2026 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Litigants are already using AI. Not in a pilot program, not with permission, not with guidance — on their own, at home, before they walk into court. In some settings, 70-80% of self-represented parties are using ChatGPT or similar tools to draft motions, research their rights, prepare for hearings, and write letters to judges. Some of them are winning appeals they would never have filed without AI assistance. Some of them are submitting documents full of hallucinated case citations. Most courts have no policy, no guidance, and no plan for a reality that is already here. The question is no longer whether litigants should use AI. The question is whether courts and legal aid organizations will respond thoughtfully or be caught flat-footed.
This session presents three perspectives on what a thoughtful response looks like. At the appellate level, one legal aid organization made the deliberate choice to teach litigants how to use AI effectively — training self-represented appellate clients to use AI tools for research and drafting, with adoption rates approaching 80% and outcomes that drew national media attention. At the trial level, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or "discourage AI usage" approaches have arisen amidst internal organizational debates on best practices, just as increasing adoption across society tests whether such policies remain tenable.
The tension between these approaches is productive: Should courts teach people to use external AI? Should they provide their own? Should they regulate what comes in the door? The answer may be all three — but the design choices matter enormously.
Against this backdrop, we will discuss developing official guidance and guardrails — not banning AI use, but creating a framework that helps litigants use it responsibly and helps judges evaluate AI-assisted filings fairly. One specific real-world example: a justice technology organization building court-integrated AI tools designed specifically for self-represented users — tools that work within the court's own infrastructure rather than leaving litigants to figure out consumer AI products on their own. Peering into the near to mid-term future, we will ask: How can courts and legal service providers anticipate litigant-facing policies as more autonomous AI agents proactively agument - or even act on behalf of - their human counterparts? At what point would mechanisms like AI agent licensure or other qualification processes start making sense?
A fishbowl discussion opens the floor to the room: What are you seeing in your courts? Are litigants bringing AI-generated documents? How are judges reacting? What problems have emerged, and what has surprised you? Then each table drafts a one-page AI guidance document that their court could issue tomorrow — practical, realistic, and focused on what court users actually need to know: what AI can help with, what it can't, what the risks are, how to disclose AI use, and where to get human help when the AI falls short. You'll leave with a model guidance template, a curriculum for teaching litigants to use AI, a summary of emerging court AI policies, and a clearer sense of how to prepare your court or organization for a reality that isn't coming — it's already here.

Speakers

Zoe Dolan

Public Counsel

Zoe Dolan divides her time between serving as a trial attorney at Eviction Defense Network in Los Angeles, where she studies potential AI applications for tenant empowerment in litigation, and Vybn.AI - a human/AI team exploring the frontiers of AI, law, and AI-augmented human capacity... Read More →

Jessica Frank

User Researcher and Project Manager, Free Law Project

Jessica Frank is an attorney, legal technologist, and Director of Justice Initiatives at Free Law Project, a nonprofit building open legal data infrastructure. She works at the intersection of access to justice, generative AI, and public-interest technology, and speaks regularly at... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Tech

Tickets

Success you have shared X tickets.

Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

Zoe Dolan

Jessica Frank

Get help with the event

Success you have shared X tickets.

Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

Zoe Dolan

Jessica Frank

Sign up or log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Get help with the event