After years of planning and evaluation, many state courts are entering the next phase of AI adoption by targeting real-world operational challenges.
State courts are at critical crossroads. On one hand, they are facing heavier workloads and persistent staffing shortages, while managing increasingly complex cases; on the other, they now have access to the kind of advanced technologies that could help them work more efficiently and ease their caseloads.
Court professionals, including judges and staff, need to move past thinking about what AI could do. They should start using it now to modernize their work processes and improve access to justice for the nation’s citizens.
That message came through clearly in the recent 2026 Survey of State Courts, conducted by the Thomson Reuters Institute and the National Center for State Courts. The report — gathered from a survey of state, county, and municipal court judges and other court professionals — illustrates that many court leaders that have spent considerable time assessing the possibilities and risks of AI, and now, by their own admission, need to shift from planning to execution.
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Moving into the execution phase
Moving into the execution phase
As the report notes, about half of the court professionals surveyed said their courts have enacted an internal AI policy, developed guiding principles, or created an AI governance committee or task force. At the same time, about one-quarter of respondents said their courts have implemented a plan to incorporate AI into their workflows within the next 12 months.
This represents an important shift and shows that courts are moving beyond simply talking about AI and instead are beginning to establish the policies, governance, and infrastructure needed to use it responsibly.
Unsurprisingly, there is still plenty of work to do. Just 13% of respondents said their court had assessed AI data quality and governance, and the same share said it had developed a formal AI-literacy strategy. Fewer than 40% said their courts provide AI training.
However, the direction is clear and inspiring. Judges and court professionals for the most part are no longer involved in abstract discussions about AI’s potential. Indeed, they are getting on with the harder work of identifying where the technology can solve real operational problems and ease bottlenecks in the system.
Starting with the pain points
Interestingly, the best place for many courts to begin may be surprisingly unglamorous.
The report identifies data entry and updating information in courts’ case management systems (CMS) as a major opportunity for AI assistance. Court professionals and staffn identified data entry as their most error-prone and time-consuming task — and for court administration and clerks, it was also the highest-ranked stressor.
That makes CMS data entry a logical starting point for AI-driven modernization, and the reason isn’t simply that automation can make work faster. It’s that more automation can allow court professionals to spend their limited work time on more critical tasks in which human judgment actually matters.
In fact, the report offers a useful illustration of what that could look like. Judges and law clerks said that reducing repetitive, labor-intensive tasks would give them more time for research, writing, and substantive legal work. Other court professionals said they would use the additional time for strategic, developmental, and management work.
Focus on high-impact, low-risk use cases first
That approach also provides a practical way for courts to build confidence in the larger transformation. Rather than trying to change every workflow at once, courts can identify repetitive, manual, and error-prone processes, automate where appropriate, measure the results, and then expand to other areas.
And there is plenty of room to do that, the report suggests. Drafting and writing are currently the most common uses of AI among respondents, followed by legal research. Yet some operational tasks that respondents already describe as inefficient are barely using AI at all. For example, keeping courts’ schedules and calendars were frequently identified as labor-intensive, but only 2% of respondents said they currently use AI to assist with those tasks.
The opportunity, then, is not just to experiment with the technology for its own sake; rather, it’s to connect AI adoption directly to the problems courts most urgently need to resolve now.
The cost of standing still
Court professionals surveyed also identified a bigger issue at stake: workforce capacity.
Nearly 60% of respondents said their courts experienced staffing shortages during the past year. And among those court professionals who said that, nearly three-quarters of them said they also expect staff shortages to persist over the next 12 months. Looking further ahead, 72% of respondents said shortages of skilled labor will have a continuing impact — ranging from moderate to transformative — on courts over the next five years.
That makes modernization less of a technology project and more of an operational necessity for courts, and one that could help staff manage shortages and shift their time away from repetitive work. As the report showed, the potential gains are significant. Respondents estimate that AI will save them an average of three hours per week this year, increasing to more than nine hours per week within the next five years.
Why waiting carries its own risks
Standing still, therefore, has a cost. If courts don’t modernize, they risk having their staff and other professionals spend more of their limited capacity simply keeping up with day-to-day demands. These courts then will become increasingly reactive instead of strategic, falling behind as caseloads grow and staffing shortages continue.
Instead, those courts that use AI to help redesign workflows, rethink how staff time is used, and leverage technology in the right places will be those that are the most prepared for the future.
You can access the full 2026 Survey of State Courts report here.
