Extract from Jennifer McCarty’s article “The Rise of AI Assisted Pro Se Employment Litigation: What Employers Need to Know”
Pro se employment lawsuits are surging – and generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is quietly reshaping what those cases look like, how long they last, and how expensive they are to defend. Gone are the days of nonsensical handwritten pleadings; pro se plaintiffs are now arriving with polished filings and relentless motion practice. Although employers continue to prevail overwhelmingly on the merits, AI has changed the economics of defense.
The Trend: More Filings, Higher Costs, Longer Timelines
Pro se filings in federal employment cases have climbed sharply in recent years. According to LexisNexis’ Lex Machina’s 2026 Employment Litigation Report, the number of unrepresented plaintiffs more than doubled between 2021 and 2025, increasing from 2,052 to 4,388 cases. Over the same period, pro se plaintiffs’ share of all federal employment litigation rose from 9.7 percent to 16.5 percent. This growth is occurring against the backdrop of a record 26,635 federal employment lawsuits filed in 2025 – the highest total in at least a decade.
Why this matters for employers: GAI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude have dramatically lowered the barrier to entry for unrepresented litigants. Plaintiffs can now generate facially sophisticated complaints, opposition briefs, and discovery motions in minutes. As many employers are experiencing firsthand, AI “sycophancy” – the tendency of these tools to prioritize user validation over objective accuracy – is also fueling dramatically inflated settlement demands, often in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. As a result, nuisance‑value resolutions, once more common in pro se cases, are increasingly elusive, and employers should expect higher defense costs.
