Before he left Nashville’s criminal court bench, Judge Jim Todd watched a defense attorney question a witness while repeatedly glancing at his phone.
The attorney wasn't distracted by personal messages. An artificial intelligence app was helping him develop questions in real time based on the witness's answers.
Todd said what the attorney was doing was perfectly allowable, though unusual.
“Why wouldn't it be?” he said.
The questions themselves were a mixed bag, however.
“Some of the questions were OK, and some of them didn't make any sense, and most of them did not comport with the rules of evidence,” Todd said.
The incident illustrates AI's growing role in the courtroom.
As Chris Smith, a personal injury attorney based in Nashville, said, “Everyone
is using AI in some capacity."
There’s a wide variance of tasks being offloaded to AI, including interview transcription, legal research and brainstorming, drafting documents and, as Todd saw, questioning a witness.
Attorneys, former judges, government officials and academics told The Tennessean AI benefits include more thorough research and reduced costs. But the technology is already straining the legal system as judges read through more filings and deal with misquoted or fictitious case citations. Most think there are going to be other challenges as the technology is further adopted.
As early as 2016, articles were published in the leading legal industry magazine ABA Journal predicting the impact of AI on the practice of law would be revolutionary.
“I'm both thrilled, exhilarated and excited by AI one minute, and terrified and extremely worried and skeptical the next minute, and really having both of those thoughts at the same time,” Mark Williams, a Vanderbilt Law School professor teaching a course on AI and the law, said. “If you don't feel some mix of those things, you're probably not paying attention.”
Lawyers' AI use grew quickly. Now it's 'a disservice if I don't use AI'
It’s rare that Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti writes a brief for a case himself. But when he did it earlier this year, he used AI in his preliminary legal research. It’s something he normally would have asked an intern to do.
“It spit out a little essay, but the important part was the cases it identified. And then I would read those cases and use that as a starting point for additional research,” Skrmetti said. “And that was super helpful. That probably saved me an hour or two at least.”
Skrmetti said the AG’s office, which is the state’s chief law enforcement office, uses AI for research, sorting through large piles of documents and editing. But it doesn’t rely on AI to create documents that will be filed with the court. All of it needs to be checked by a human, he said.
The Davidson County District Attorney’s Office, on the other hand, only uses AI for transcription, District Attorney Glenn Funk said. That alone is saving staff a “ton” of time, but Funk said he feels that the stakes of prosecutors’ jobs are too high to use AI.
“The practice of criminal law is so fundamentally different than other areas of law, my perception is the usage of AI will forever be limited in some ways,” Funk said.
U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee Braden Boucek, the area’s lead federal prosecutor, had a much different perspective. He told The Tennessean that not only do attorneys in his office use AI in various ways but they also have a duty to.
“The duty of competence affirmatively requires attorneys to keep up with ‘changes in the law’ and ‘the benefits and risks’ involved in ‘relevant technology,’” Boucek wrote in an email to The Tennessean.
Doing so, Boucek said, expands the capacity of the attorney and reduces costs for the client.
That lines up with what The Tennessean heard from several attorneys.
“In fact, I feel that I'm doing my clients a disservice if I don't use AI appropriately as well as I can,” Ben Raybin, a Nashville lawyer primarily practicing criminal defense, said.
Raybin said AI helps him brainstorm like a smart first-year associate would, organize complicated legal arguments and spot holes in them, and analyze large troves of records in a fraction of the time.
Some law firms are leaning heavily into using AI. Nashville firm Bass, Berry & Sims, for example, recently added a “director of AI & knowledge management” position.
Todd said many judges are using it, too, mostly through the AI tools on major legal research platforms.
“While it is a good starting point to get you somewhere, you always have to fact-check it,” Todd said.
Hallucinated cases and AI-induced mistakes
On Aug. 6, federal magistrate Luke Evans in the Middle District of Tennessee sanctioned environmental lawyer Billy Ringger, who practices out of Knoxville and Asheville, $1,500 for a mistake in a legal filing. It arose, in part, from Ringger’s use of AI.
Ringger used the AI research tool on WestLaw, one of the two major legal research platforms, to summarize a legal opinion. Ringger explained to Evans that on the page, the difference between the wording in the AI summary and the opinion itself "is not always apparent from the reports themselves.”
Ringger took part of the AI summary and placed it in quotes without double-checking that that language actually appeared in the opinion, a choice he admitted was “sloppy work and a now-obvious mistake.” Ringger apologized, took responsibility and took two AI training and education courses, he wrote.
In his written order sanctioning Ringger, Evans explained there is nothing inherently wrong with using legal research tools powered by AI. However, AI makes it so much easier to mix up case law than before, Evans wrote.
"[A]rtificial intelligence combines the illusion of thorough review and analysis with the temptations of speed and low cost,” Evans wrote, giving attorneys the power to violate court rules “in embarrassing ways within minutes.”
Ringger’s is the only case of a monetary sanction for AI misuse in a Tennessee court that researcher Damien Charlotin has located. Since he started keeping track in April 2025, Charlotin found more than 2,000 cases of confirmed or suspected AI misuse in court across the globe, including 16 cases in Tennessee courts that did not result in a monetary sanction.
At the local level, former Circuit Court Judge Bethany Glandorf, who said she did not use AI in her role, said she encountered times when AI hallucinated case law or court rules on several occasions.
Evans wrote in the Ringger case, “wasting the Court’s time and limited resources chasing false legal authority must not happen again.”
People without attorneys are also using AI to draft documents, which Boucek, the U.S. Attorney, said has resulted in a "flood" of filings. This, along with hunting down misquoted or fake case citations, is already taxing judges’ time. Todd said he expects judges will be saddled with more similar work in the future.
“Once attorneys figure out that AI can churn out briefs and memorandums pretty quickly, they'll start filing a lot of them, which means that judges may or may not have time to fact-check their cases,” Todd said.
'Are we going to stop learning things because we're using these tools?'
The work that many lawyers are automating was long handled by lower-level attorneys, interns or paralegals, according to sources interviewed for this story.
For Williams, these tasks being automated — like legal research, document review and drafting basic filings — were how up-and-coming lawyers developed their skills.
“You build your expertise through kind of doing grunt work,” Williams said. “Now we're potentially coming into a time where the model that we had to train people to get them to be the experts that we need them to be" is being taken away.
Like others working in the legal field, Williams is concerned about people becoming so reliant on AI that they stop learning new things.
“Maybe it's not going to diminish what we already know, but are we going to stop learning things because we're using these tools?” said Cat Moon, a Vanderbilt Law professor who also teaches a course on AI and the law.
The nature of legal work, often with long hours and heavy workloads, may itself drive attorneys to overly depend on AI, Skrmetti, the attorney general, said.
“It's a stressful profession. Someone gets a little bit behind, they think, 'hey, what harm is it going to be if I use this to get ahead?',” Skrmetti said. “I view it as something that can really help us supplement the work we do if it's used right, and if we're really careful about the ethical limitations.”
One of the ethical concerns Skrmetti and others have is a possible breach of confidentiality if an attorney puts a client's sensitive information into public AI platforms like ChatGPT.
AI changes coming in and out of the courtroom
However, Boucek and others said they don’t see a need for any additional rules or regulations right now. Getting your facts straight, Boucek said, is already addressed by the “basic obligation to review with professional judgment.”
However, some courts have started requiring people to disclose if they’ve used AI. The Tennessee Worker’s Compensation Appeals Board, for example, requires all filings which contain “any content written by an artificial intelligence tool” to say so on the first page.
While not as explicit, federal magistrate for the Middle District of Tennessee Lynda Hill has included a clause in her initial orders reminding attorneys of their ethical duties, given the risks of AI creating “fictitious, factually inaccurate, and legally unsound” content.
Smith, the personal injury lawyer, said he sees disclosure requirements like the Worker’s Compensation Appeals Board’s as a flawed solution. That’s in part because of how widespread the technology has become. But it’s also because most disclosure requirements make no distinction between using ChatGPT to write a lawsuit from a couple of prompts and using AI to suggest new wording to make a sentence clearer.
Changes will also be coming outside of the courthouse walls and docket sheet, industry leaders expect.
How law firms operate will likely change. Skrmetti thinks in time, most firms will cut back on hiring some young lawyers as their tasks become automated. Moon and Williams, the academics, said they have not yet seen evidence of that. Anecdotally, Smith said he no longer employs any paralegals, and when it looked like hiring one would help his firm, he instead decided to increase its AI budget.
"AI-native law firms" are already springing up that use AI at every step of the workflow, Williams said. These firms focus on a high volume of cases with repeatable steps, like creating non-disclosure agreements, at a lower cost to consumers. In these firms, attorneys serve more as "technicians" than legal advisors, according to the Thomson Reuters Institute.
Rachel Shields Williams, the director of AI and knowledge management at Bass, Berry & Sims, expects that billing clients hourly will likely change as attorneys become more efficient. She said she does not know what the new dominant business model will become, but it’s going to change, she said.
Regardless of how pervasive AI gets, there will always be a need for attorneys who can stand up in front of a judge or jury and connect to people and make a case, industry experts said.
“The computer can be right, but rarely is it persuasive,” said Aaron Bernard, assistant solicitor general in the Tennessee AG’s office. Bernard said he rarely uses the technology.
Have questions about the justice system? Evan Mealins is the justice reporter for The Tennessean. Contact him with questions, tips or story ideas at emealins@tennessean.com.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Your attorney probably uses AI. How the tech is reshaping law practice
