Source: The Christian Post

Los Angeles County’s Superior Court entered a partnership announced in March with Learned Hand to pilot an AI tool designed to draft orders and produce research memos to assist judicial officers and court staff, primarily for civil cases. The pilot will cost over $300,000 and run through early 2027, with the possibility of “limited use in criminal courts in the future,” and will provide select judges tools for case information processing, summarization, research, analysis and drafting assistance to help prepare for and manage cases. Learned Hand positions its product as distinct from open-source chatbots by offering a “closed system of authoritative sources” that links system outputs to original source material in the case file and says the tool is intended to assist preparation without supplanting judicial discretion.

The company was founded by Shlomo Klapper, identified as a former judicial clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals and a former Palantir deployment strategist, who stated the tool aims to address backlogs and time pressure on judges and court staff. The Superior Court of Los Angeles County was described as the nation’s largest trial court, with nearly 600 judicial officers, serving over 10 million residents across 36 courthouses and handling about 1.2 million filings annually. The dossier also notes Learned Hand’s technology is used by the Michigan Supreme Court and trial courts in 10 states, and it cites a February federal ruling in Manhattan — reported by The Wall Street Journal — in which Judge Jed Rakoff reportedly held that a criminal defendant who used an AI chatbot waived attorney-client privilege because sharing inputs with a third party and the platform’s privacy policy undermined any reasonable expectation of confidentiality.