The hype cycle for chatbots, software that can generate compelling strings of words from a simple prompt, is in full swing. Few industries are more terrified than lawyers, who have been investing in tools to generate and process legal documents during years. After all, you might joke, what are lawyers if not primitive human chatbots, generating convincing strings of words from simple prompts?
For state and local courts across the United States, this joke will soon become a lot less funny. Debt collection agencies are already flooding the courts and ambushing the common people with thousands of low-quality, low-cost cases. Courts are sadly not ready for a future where anyone with a chatbot can become a wealth of information, or where everyday people can rely on chatbots to get desperately needed legal advice.
Garbage in, foreclosures out
When you imagine a courtroom, you might picture two opposing lawyers arguing before a judge, and perhaps a jury. That image is mainly a mirage. Americans have the right to a lawyer only when charged with a crime; for everything else, they are alone. As a result, the vast majority of civil cases in state and local courts have at least one party without an attorney, often because they have no other choice. And because court proceedings are designed for lawyers, each case with a self-represented litigant requires more resources from the courts, assuming the person without a lawyer shows up.
Add enough cases like this to a court’s docket and the results are ugly. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, thousands of foreclosure cases went to court at the same time. Many of the cases were riddled with flaws: false affidavits, bad notarizations, retroactive procedures, inadequate documentation, etc. But the foreclosures took place anyway, and people lost their homes.
This was not an isolated event. It is a warning of what happens when the world changes and the courts do not adapt. To see that future for robot lawyers, take today’s high-volume taxpayer: debt collection agencies. Small debt cases ($5,000 or less), filed en masse by collection agencies, increasingly dominate local court dockets. While national-level data is hard to find (more on that later), in 2013, the Pew Charitable Trusts found that small dollar debt cases accounted for a quarter of all civil (not criminal) cases filed in the United States. In 1993, it was just over 10 percent. And the cases are on the rise. red and blue state
The goal of debt collection cases is simple: turn hard-to-collect debts into easy-to-collect wage garnishments. In most states, when someone loses a debt case, a court can order their employer to redirect their wages to a creditor. The easiest way for that to happen? When the defendant does not appear, breaching the case. Most debt cases end in default: The defendant chooses not to appear, is confused about what to or should do, or, just as often, never receives notice of a case. “Sewer service,” in which plaintiffs deliberately avoid notifying defendants about a legal case (for example, by mailing a case to an old address), has been a festering problem in debt and eviction cases for decades, and continues to this day. In some cases, people find out they have been sued only after noticing their paycheck has been garnished.
When a case fails, many courts will simply grant whatever judgment the plaintiff has requested, without verification whether the plaintiff has provided adequate (or any) documentation that the plaintiff owns the debt, that the defendant still owes the debt, or whether the defendant has been duly notified of the case Sometimes even the math is wrong: A study of Utah courts found that 9.3 percent of debt cases miscalculated the interest to which plaintiffs were entitled after a judgment. In other words: garbage in, embargoes out.