Why are courts and government law agencies so slow to implement AI?
This piece was originally written for the Thomson Reuters Institute. You can read the original here.
Courts and government legal agencies at the federal, state, and local levels continue to face budget constraints and challenges in attracting and retaining talent, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute’s recent 2025 Government Legal Department Report, which also found that court staff and legal professionals strongly desire to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time researching increasingly complex issues and practicing law.
The implementation of generative AI (GenAI) and other innovative technology tools could help these professionals find more efficiencies within their short-staffed teams — yet there are many hurdles to implantation, the report found. Despite the opportunity technology could hold, 36% of court and legal professionals surveyed describe their agency’s attitude toward GenAI as pessimistic or apocalyptic. More than half of these respondents say their organizations have no plans to use GenAI technology in the future; and more than 40% say their organizations lack a plan on how to manage, adopt, and implement innovative GenAI-driven technology.
Further, there are many factors that could be contributing to this skepticism and technological resistance, the report found.
Status of tech implementation in courts & agencies
The report showed that while about 40% of respondents say their agencies saw technology investment increase over the last two years, more than two-thirds describe their public sector technology as inferior to private sector technology and systems. And in the agencies in which tech systems are in place or planned for adoption, they are most likely for use in document management, matter management, and public records Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
In fact, more than half of the respondents surveyed say their agencies have no plans to install third-party software tools that incorporate GenAI, professional packages that incorporate GenAI, or open-source AI tools.
A potential contributing factor to the hesitancy to digitize and implement cloud-based technology is the threat of cyber-attacks. For example, DuPage County, Illinois, experienced a ransomware attack in May that affected its sheriff’s office, circuit clerk, and county courthouse. Fortunately, their planning and resilience efforts allowed for continuity even as the departments were forced offline.
Another example is the Kansas Judicial Branch and the major cybersecurity incident it experienced in October 2023, which forced all but one county’s court systems offline and exposed the personal data of more than 150,000 individuals. The Russian-based cyber-attack crippled e-court systems for more than three months, and addressing the backlog of paper filings from that period took seven months to work through following the initial attack.
Cultural resistance & financial barriers to tech change
In addition to this hesitancy, the legal sector as a whole has had to reconcile the impact of AI technology. Any task that can be partially or fully automated through AI technology still holds value, even if the time of completion is minuscule. And for lawyers who may represent litigants in court, finding this value proposition can be daunting.
Legal professionals leveraging AI can automate drafting, document review, and significantly reduce their administrative time, which is a benefit to their departments. However, the upfront costs associated with technology for those same departments can be a big hurdle to overcome.
Even if the desire for technological implementation is in place within a court system, budget and cost and the bureaucratic approval process are the biggest barriers to adoption. Public sector procurement is historically structured around long-term contracts, and a preference is given for the lowest cost choice, which can limit flexibility.
Gone are the days of a one-time lump-sum investment in innovative technology. Indeed, the entire Gov/Tech industry is rapidly shifting in the direction of cloud-based solutions and SaaS (software as a service) models — with cloud vendors seeing a 10% increase in SaaS subscription models. However, government agencies — which are traditionally high-value, slow-moving, but secure customers — are effectively discouraged from transitioning or experimenting with newer tools by their contract terms.
There are many factors that could be contributing to this skepticism and technological resistance, the report found.
Yet, some are finding a way. Orange County Superior Court, California, is an outlier in its levels of data fluency, strategic innovation adoption, and measured success in driving operational efficiency.
Darren Dang, former Chief Financial and Administrative Officer for the Superior Court, says the court’s strategy was to first invest in its people (via training programs and building data fluency through a data academy); followed by process (building a data culture and identifying the court’s core problems); with technology implementation last. By focusing on low-risk, high-impact problems first, buy-in was built over time, Dang explains.
This aligns with the National Association of Court Management’s core competency around court performance — it begins with the capacity (and data analytics) to measure performance, and from there, moves to the ability to define problems through the data, and finally, to seek solutions.
Effective organizations ready to embrace GenAI should ask themselves: “What problem am I solving?” rather than “How can we best use AI?” Indeed, AI should be used to solve real problems that are currently hindering court performance, rather than using it just because the technology is new and available.
As the Government Legal Department Report showed, the path to AI adoption in courts and government legal agencies is blocked by structural, cultural, and statutory resistance. However, by starting with a clear identification of the problems these organizations face, and creating room for ethical and strategic innovation, GenAI could become a more pragmatic solution for courts and government legal agencies rather than a hypothetical one.
