Louisiana court buys AI servers to test how tech can streamline workload
Louisiana court buys AI servers to test how tech can streamline workload By Sara Merken
Oct 22 (Reuters) - A Louisiana state courthouse across the Mississippi River from New Orleans has a new addition: two AI servers to power new tools to support court staff and judges.
The servers and supporting equipment, installed about a month ago in Louisiana's Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal in Gretna, are part of the court's plan to create its own AI applications even as it continues to experiment with other commercially available options, Judge Scott Schlegel and Chief Judge Susan Chehardy wrote in a Substack post on Tuesday.
"Token prices, subscriptions, and the costs of operating AI will likely look quite different a few years from now," the judges wrote. "Rather than bet entirely on one approach, we decided to pursue both and learn from the experience."
The court bought two Dell servers with Nvidia chips that cost about $65,000 each at the time of purchase, Schlegel told Reuters. He said the court is not endorsing a particular product and other courts should evaluate their specific needs.
The Louisiana court appears to be the first state court to announce such a move, even as state and federal courts around the country have been putting in place rules and guidelines for how judges and court staff are permitted to use AI.
On the federal level, the clerk's office of the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals uses local servers to support case processing applications, which includes incorporating "limited AI" to increase efficiency and productivity, Thomas Plunkett, the clerk of the court, told Reuters.
Sixty percent of judges in a random-sample survey released in March said they are using at least one AI tool in their work, according to the study by Northwestern University researchers.
The Louisiana state court is working with the nonprofit Institute for the Advancement of Legal and Ethical AI (ALEA Institute) to develop AI applications. Schlegel told Reuters the project began by interviewing court staff and clerks to see where the technology would be useful.
“Can it assist, should it assist, and in what sense should it assist? Augment, not replace,” he said.
The judges said early efforts will focus on the intake and compliance process when documents are submitted.
The court hopes to later build capabilities to help signal when filings include nonexistent cases and check documents for hidden instructions meant to manipulate AI systems, they wrote. Future applications could also help staff lawyers craft bench memoranda, which are documents meant to help prepare a judge.
Northwestern law professor Daniel Linna, who co-authored the study on judges' AI use, told Reuters this week that he wasn’t aware of many judges building AI tools. He and students at Northwestern built a prototype of a tool in collaboration with a judge to review Social Security disability benefits decisions, and are working with other judges on a case management project.
There is upside in "creating domain-specific tools that you can put some guardrails and other things in place to make sure you’re getting the kind of accuracy that you’d want to have for that work,” he said.
(Reporting by Sara Merken in New York)