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When David Gets an Iron Man Suit and Goes Rogue: AI, Pro Se Litigants, and the Real Cost to the Legal System.

When David Gets an Iron Man Suit and Goes Rogue: AI, Pro Se Litigants, and the Real Cost to the Legal System.

The pro se litigant has always occupied a complicated space in US courtrooms. Untrained, often overwhelmed, and facing the full weight of an adversarial system built by and for lawyers, they earned a kind of judicial grace. Courts extended them latitude. Judges read their filings charitably. Opposing counsel learned to manage expectations and exercise patience. The reasoning for the latitude was simple and, for a long time, fair: David and Goliath standing across the aisle in front of a judge, only one wearing a tailored suit with a briefcase and most importantly, a law degree.

That logic made sense. But something has changed: AI showed up and life is just not the same. David just got an Iron Man suit from Tony Stark, and he is not being careful with it. In fact, David is drunk by the power it has received and is causing havoc to the court system, to lawyers, and to opposing parties.

Is Ignorance Still Ignorance?

The pro se litigant of five years ago was genuinely limited. Individuals without legal training, filing on their own behalf, produced documents that looked like what they were: the earnest, imperfect effort of someone who did not know what he/she did not know. Courts accommodated that. The filings were rough but proportionate to the filer’s actual capacity.

Today’s pro se litigant may be working with a large language model, such as ChatGPT or Claude, that generates facially coherent, structurally sound legal documents in seconds. The motion looks like a motion, the complaint looks like a complaint. The documents cite cases, deploy proper terminology, and follow formatting conventions. The only problem is that the cited cases may not exist, the legal theories may be entirely inapplicable, and the filers may not have read a single page of what was generated on their behalf.

Does That Still Qualify as Ignorance?

Ignorance, in its traditional legal sense, implies a genuine lack of knowledge. The pro se party drafting a clumsy pleading is ignorant of proper form and legal theories. The party who prompts an AI tool, receives a forty-page brief, and files it unread is something different. That is not writing from ignorance. That is delegating from indifference, or even worse, filing in malice, knowing that the filing is clogging the docket, annoying the judge, and making the other party spend thousands of dollars in attorney fees and costs.

That distinction matters enormously, and it is one the courts are only beginning to grapple with.

The Real Cost, in Dollars and Cents

This is not an abstract conversation. It is playing out in courtrooms right now, at real and measurable cost.

In litigation, the first person to read an AI-generated pro se filing is not a judge. It is the opposing party’s attorney, who will receive it, review it, analyze it, respond to it, and charge every minute of that work to their client. Clients who have invested in proper legal representation are now absorbing the cost of the other side’s decision to outsource their litigation strategy to a chatbot.

The filings are often coherent enough on the surface to trigger proceedings and require formal responses. They cite authority that sounds real. They raise issues that appear, at first glance, to be legal questions worth addressing. But they are frequently unfounded, procedurally inapplicable, and built on cases that simply do not exist. The judge then inherits the responsibility to address what attorneys can not resolve on their own: procedural situations that are not actually novel legal issues, just legal monstrosities produced by AI hallucinations, procedural abnormalities that consume judicial time and attention while contributing nothing to the resolution of any legitimate dispute.

The economics of this, for the pro se filer, are essentially frictionless. Maybe a filing fee. A twenty-dollar monthly subscription and some minutes to craft a prompt. Nothing else stands between him/she and the next document AI will mechanically draft. The docket fills up. The other side spends. The machinery of the court grinds on, processing filings that no one on the filing side has actually read.

Does This Constitute Judicial Harassment?

At some threshold, it might.

Judicial harassment, broadly understood, describes the use of legal process not to vindicate a legitimate claim, but to burden, exhaust, or wear down the opposing party through the sheer volume of litigation activity. It is the weaponization of procedure. Courts have tools to address it: sanctions, vexatious litigant designations, fee-shifting mechanisms. But those tools were developed in a world where generating abusive litigation was expensive and required effort.

The economics have changed. Flooding a docket used to cost something. Now it costs almost nothing, maybe twenty dollars a month for an AI subscription, if paid at all. The AI does the drafting. The pro se party pays the filing fee and clicks submit. The burden lands entirely and massively on the represented side.

This is something for legislators to take seriously and for the bench to think through carefully. The existing frameworks were built for a slower, more expensive world. Whether they are adequate for this one is an open question, and not one that will answer itself.

Are the Courts Catching Up?

They are trying. Several federal and state courts have begun requiring disclosure of AI-assisted filings, mirroring the AI certification requirements that are now standard in represented practice in jurisdictions that were quicker in addressing the matter. But adoption is uneven, enforcement is inconsistent, and the rules are moving considerably more slowly than the technology.

The deeper question is whether disclosure requirements are even the right tool. A pro se party who discloses AI use has not thereby demonstrated that they understand what they filed, or that the filing has merit. Disclosure addresses transparency. It does not address the volume.

What may ultimately be needed is a willingness, on the bench, to revisit the latitude traditionally extended to pro se filers when that latitude is being structurally exploited, not to punish genuine ignorance, which still deserves the grace courts have always shown it, but to distinguish it from strategic indifference or malice. Courts are not required to accommodate the abuse of their own processes, and AI has made that abuse remarkably easy and cheap.

Beyond rules and procedures, what is needed right now is a change in mentality. Judges need to stop looking at every pro se litigant the same way. The world is not the same, and pro se litigants are not the same either. Simple. Treating every pro se filing as the work of a person genuinely navigating the system without resources is no longer an accurate assumption. Some of these filings are not the work of a struggling person. They are the output of a machine, filed without review, by someone who understood exactly how low the cost was.

The Sky Does Not Fall

Every generation of lawyers has had its version of this conversation. The photocopier. The fax machine. Electronic legal research. Email. E-filing. Each one arrived with warnings about disruption, and each one ultimately became infrastructure. The sky falling was announced several times before, and we are still here. The sun rose the next morning.

That pattern will hold here too. The disruption is real. The problems it creates are real, measured in dollars, court time, and professional hours spent by attorneys serving clients who should not have to bear those costs. But the system has absorbed disruption before.

What it requires is honest attention from the people best positioned to give it: lawyers who understand both the law and the technology, judges willing to draw new lines, and legislators paying close enough attention to know that old frameworks may need updating.

In the meantime, we do what we have always done. We sit with our clients, the business owners, the family companies built over generations, carrying the weight of a grandfather’s work, a father’s sacrifice, and someone’s whole life’s effort. We hold their hands through proceedings that should not exist and expenses they should not have to bear. We show up prepared. We do the work. We fight the fight.

Maybe we lawyers are the new Davids.

And if you are already dealing with a filing that should never have existed, do not wait for the problem to escalate. Speak up. Research the law, preserve the record, and file what is necessary to bring the issue clearly before the court. These situations only become more expensive and more difficult the longer they remain unaddressed.

If you need ideas, reach out. Let’s look at it together.

Perhaps this new technological era will push us to strengthen our human connections, value our education, step outside our offices, and collaborate with fellow lawyers to defend the integrity of our profession. We are a respected and essential professional community, and we can help lead the evolution of legal practice in this new technological environment.

In love and in the practice of law,

Your Bz Esq.

Paola Vergara, Esq. is the managing partner of Vergara Legal P.A., a business law firm serving Florida. She writes about law practice and the business of being a business owner for her law firm’s legal blog and her Substack, Your Bz Esq.