A select group of Los Angeles County civil court judges is now using an artificial intelligence tool to help summarize legal motions and draft tentative rulings, marking a significant step in the integration of AI into one of the nation’s largest court systems.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the pilot program launched last month and gave about six civil court judges access to an AI platform called Learned Hand. The software can rapidly distill hundreds of pages of legal filings and use samples of a judge’s own writing style to help structure arguments and draft rulings. The program is expected to run into early 2027 at a cost of just over $300,000.
Court officials say judges in the program are required to review and edit any AI-generated draft before it becomes a tentative ruling. Rob Oftring Jr., the court’s chief spokesman, drew a comparison to the kind of help judges already receive from human staff. “Judicial officers have long been supported by research attorneys and law clerks who assist with summarization, legal research, analysis and drafting assistance,” Oftring said. “This assistance does not supplant the judicial officer’s independent role in decision-making.”
Shlomo Klapper, the founder and chief executive of Learned Hand, started the company in 2024 after working as an attorney and federal law clerk. According to the company’s website, the platform is built specifically for judges — not private law firms — and features a fact-checking process called “Deep Verify,” which checks every sentence of a generated order against cited sources. “We don’t just tell the judges to trust us,” Klapper said. “We say you can actually verify it yourself and see from particular sources where things are coming from.”
Klapper said Learned Hand is already in use by court systems in 10 states, including the Michigan Supreme Court, which began using the software last summer. He described the tool as a “judicial sous chef” — a support system, not a replacement. “There is no reason to fear that any technology company on earth, much less my own, should be making consequential decisions for the public,” he said.
Still, not everyone is on board. Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said he worries that AI-generated tentative rulings could subtly sway a judge’s thinking before they’ve done their own legal analysis. “Even when a judicial assistant or a law clerk comes up with a tentative on which position the judge should take, before the judge has taken their own position, that greatly influences what the judge’s position should be,” Hochman said.
An anonymous L.A. County judge who is not part of the pilot also raised concerns. “Even if you don’t necessarily adopt the AI’s tentative decision, psychologically that has become your reference point and any decision-making engaged in thereafter could be predicated on it,” the judge said.
Critics point to recent high-profile missteps involving AI in legal settings. An Los Angeles attorney was fined last year after submitting a legal filing that contained case citations hallucinated by ChatGPT. Last month, a federal prosecutor in North Carolina resigned after submitting a document that was almost entirely AI-generated. Those incidents have fueled skepticism about AI’s role in the justice system.
However, a Reuters survey conducted last summer found more than 70% of respondents believe AI is a positive force in the legal field, with the potential to drastically cut the number of human work hours spent on repetitive and time-consuming tasks.
Transparency is another sticking point. Under current rules, judges would not be required to disclose whether they used Learned Hand when drafting a ruling. David Slayton, the L.A. County Superior Court’s chief executive, said state rules require judges to consider disclosing the use of generative AI, but that no rule currently forces them to do so.
The court says the tool will primarily be used on civil motions, including motions for summary judgment and motions for approval of class-action settlements. Limited future use in criminal courts for post-conviction relief applications is possible under the contract, though the software is not currently being used in any criminal proceedings.
Klapper said the urgency is real. He described a court system buried under an ever-growing caseload, with more self-represented litigants filing cases in civil court — a trend he links to the public’s growing access to AI tools like ChatGPT. “The system is drowning and the flood hasn’t even started,” he said.
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