AI Resilience Report forJudicial Law Clerks

Right now, AI is mostly augmenting judicial law clerks rather than replacing them, but the technology is moving fast. According to the National Center for State Courts ^[1], which interviewed 13 state and federal judges in late 2025, every judge interviewed was already using generative AI in some way — though they unanimously agreed that judges must remain "the deciders" and that GenAI can support, but not supplant, the essential work of judges as human decision-makers. Real pilots are underway: CalMatters reports ^[2] that Los Angeles and Riverside County Superior Courts are testing a tool from a company called Learned Hand that acts as an "AI clerk" — drafting orders and producing research memos, work usually done by human research attorneys.

On a broader scale, the American Bar Association's coverage of the 2026 8am Legal Industry Report ^[3] notes that 69% of legal professionals now personally use GenAI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for work — up from just 31% in 2025, with common uses including legal research, drafting, and summarizing documents — exactly the core tasks clerks perform.

But the tech isn't reliable enough to run solo. Stanford HAI researchers point out ^[4] that there have been over 1,700 legal cases involving hallucinated facts, cases, and laws, and a Lawfare essay from August 2026 ^[5] argues judges currently face an unsatisfactory set of choices — abstain, use consumer accounts, or rely on bundled legal-research AI — and that little institutional infrastructure exists to meet the pace of change.

Adoption is happening quickly on the individual level but slowly at the institutional level, and that's actually good news for aspiring clerks. Commercial tools are cheap and everywhere — the CalMatters investigation ^[2] found Riverside County spent just $10,000 on its Learned Hand pilot, while LA County has a roughly $314,000 contract, and about a dozen California superior courts are already using AI tools from LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, and Microsoft Copilot. Time savings are real: 38% of legal professionals report saving 1–5 hours per week and 14% save 6–10 hours weekly ^[6] using GenAI.

Yet legal, ethical, and public-trust concerns are strong brakes. Courts are actively sanctioning AI misuse — Norton Rose Fulbright's 2026 sanctions tracker ^[7] documents a growing wave of fines for AI-hallucinated citations, and the NCSC's judges also flagged privacy risks, negative public perception, and "deskilling" fears — worrying that over-reliance on GenAI could denigrate the skills of young lawyers and law students. That anxiety about training the next generation is one reason judges are unlikely to eliminate clerk positions outright.

Instead, expect the job to evolve: fewer hours grinding through case law, more hours verifying AI output, managing dockets, communicating with counsel, and helping judges wrestle with hard human questions. The skills that stay valuable — sound judgment, ethical reasoning, careful writing, and face-to-face communication in court — are exactly the ones AI struggles with most.