Tennessee Edition
Welcome to Issue 009 of The Bench & Bar AI Brief, Tennessee Edition.
Planned publication date: July 21, 2026.
Courts have spent good time warning lawyers that artificial intelligence can invent authorities. The next challenge is larger. If AI makes legal drafting faster and cheaper, courts may face more filings, new kinds of self-represented assistance, and a wider range of quality. That is not yet proof of a filing surge. It is a capacity question worth measuring before it becomes a crisis.
The National Center for State Courts put that question at the center of a July 15 webinar titled The coming wave: How courts can prepare for AI-assisted litigation. The program examined what AI-assisted filings may mean for court operations and access to justice. Its stated operational subjects included measuring baseline filing trends, simplifying processes, applying existing procedural tools, and investing in the right technology.
The careful word is may. The event page does not prove that filing volume has already increased because of AI. Its value is that it moves the conversation from headlines to court administration. A court cannot manage a trend it does not measure, and it should not buy a technology before it knows which problem the technology is meant to solve.
NCSC's earlier implementation guides, dated March 2024, supply a useful foundation. They recommend starting with simple, low-risk tasks that use public information and favoring internal work before public-facing output. They call for human subject-matter review, training for judges and staff, controlled pilots, and careful examination of contracts and data practices.
The platform guide also recommends a team-based approach. Information technology, legal counsel, the bench, and court operations should evaluate a tool together. Courts should know what data will be entered, who can access it, how it will be stored, whether prompts or outputs may train a model, and who has authority to accept the terms.
That advice matters because AI can enter a courthouse through many doors. It may arrive in a filing prepared by counsel, a self-represented litigant's draft, a vendor feature added to an existing product, or an internal experiment by court staff. One office may see a writing tool. Another may see a records, security, procurement, access-to-justice, or workload issue. All may be right.
Tennessee has a timely local reason to ask these questions. The Tennessee Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council will hold a public meeting on Wednesday, July 22, from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Central in Nashville, with online viewing available. The official notice describes a statewide mission to advance AI use in an ethical, adaptable, collaborative, and beneficial manner.
The notice does not identify a judiciary-specific agenda. Courts and lawyers should not claim otherwise. But the meeting is still a useful reminder that statewide AI planning and court-specific readiness are different jobs. Judicial systems have distinct duties involving records, due process, independence, access, security, and accountable decision-making. Those duties need a court-owned plan.