Court Innovation Q&A with Jason Tashea
At Renaissance Philanthropy, we believe this is an inflection point for America’s courts. New technologies, shifting public expectations, and mounting caseload pressures are colliding with decades-old systems that determine people’s access to safety, economic mobility, and justice. Our Courts and Justice Innovation work, led by Jason Tashea, is focused on identifying and supporting breakthrough ideas that help courts become more transparent, fair, and responsive to the public they serve.
We believe philanthropy has a catalytic role to play by backing work that blends technical rigor with deep understanding of the courts, and by helping build the field of practitioners, researchers, and public servants prepared to guide modernization responsibly.
Jason Tashea’s proposal for a Court Innovation Fund sits squarely within this vision. Drawing on his experience leading the Judicial Innovation Fellowship and working inside courts across the country, he outlines the chokepoints holding courts back and the opportunity to meet this moment with practical, scalable solutions. In this Q+A, we explore why this moment is different, how AI is reshaping the front door of American democracy, and what it will take to ensure modernization strengthens public trust in the justice system.
Kumar Garg: What sparked the idea of a potential Court Innovation Fund, and why is this moment different for courts and for justice innovation?
Jason Tashea: For the past three and a half years, I designed and led the Judicial Innovation Fellowship at Georgetown Law. This program placed technologists and designers in state and local courts to improve the courts’ responsiveness to public needs. In our final report, we identified multiple systemic chokepoints inhibiting court innovation in the U.S., and by extension people’s ability to access justice, economic mobility, and personal safety. Informed by this on-the-ground experience, we felt a dedicated fund to court innovation was overdue to build the field and overcome these chokepoints.
The timing for this work could not be more acute. The pandemic helped courts understand the cost of having incompatible technical systems, and AI is a wakeup call for courts trying to keep up with the rapid state of change. If this one-two punch wasn’t enough, criminal justice reform and federal justice efforts are faltering and federal funding changes risk lost revenue and exploding dockets. Taken together, this moment requires innovative state and local courts to meet the moment and ensure equal justice for all. A focused philanthropic fund can be the catalyst.
KG: Why did you join Renaissance Philanthropy to design this work, and what role can philanthropy play in shaping how technology and AI enter the courts?
JT: The chokepoints I mentioned above are created by limitations in the court techstack, court staff training, and research. Scalable technology, modular trainings, and spurring novel research are three things that philanthropy is adept at catalyzing. However, philanthropy has largely been absent from the courts, leaving a core American institution in disrepair.
Specifically, there’s a need for increased technical sophistication across states that a fund like our can support. For example, every court in the country needs a case management system – it’s the digital backend that makes a court work. However, there’s no agreed standard to what a CMS should cost, leaving courts in the dark when negotiating with private vendors. If wasted money wasn’t enough, when new CMS roll out they are often followed by false arrests and people being held in custody longer than their jail sentence. Philanthropy can spark the research into what a CMS should cost and how to prevent software glitches from sending people to jail.
Teaming up with Renaissance provides an opportunity to work with brilliant minds across science, technology, and philanthropy to refine and execute a more impactful vision. Since starting here, I’ve been challenged to think bigger and more critically about how to deploy resources that build the court innovation field and set the agenda for a still developing space. While building on my previous work, the team is uniquely positioned to challenge assumptions and share lessons from other fields–all leading to a more thoughtful and complete path forward.
KG: Courts are processing millions of cases a year and facing an “AI tsunami." How do you think these technologies will reshape the front door of American democracy, and what’s at stake if courts don’t get ahead of it?
JT: This isn’t trouble ahead, the tsunami is here now. A few weeks ago, I wrote about a bill in Wisconsin that would replace human court translators with AI software. As I outlined in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the state will regret this bill becoming law, because the technology isn’t ready for high-stakes situations like the courts. This is for two reasons. First, most languages are “low-resource” meaning there isn’t a lot of content online in a language like Hmong, Wisconsin’s third most spoken language, which limits the ability to train an AI system to make accurate translations. Second, even a high-resource language like Spanish, which has lots of online content to train AI on, mistranslates legal terms. “Due date” becomes “date to give birth”, and the pronoun “su” (either “your”, “his”, “her”, or “their”) can be mistranslated, sowing confusion over property ownership or legal responsibility. These are not harmless errors, and if legislators in Wisconsin have their way the courts will have to figure out how to get to the facts of the case without a trustworthy translation.
This is just one example of the tsunami that’s already here. In other instances, court watchers are seeing an uptick of debt cases in state courts, which they believe is aided by AI. It’s already well documented that debt claims are often low quality and depend on the defendant not showing up to court to win. AI has the potential to supercharge this predatory practice. Courts are reacting by building automated AI review tools to ensure that debt claims are credible before ruling. While this is a welcome innovation, we lack the tools, like benchmarks, to know if these review tools are accurate or contain hidden biases.
These two examples illustrate what is at stake for courts getting this moment right. Courts provide a process for fact finding and getting at the truth of a legal matter. To adopt AI translation services too early or to rely on unvalidated software to determine case outcomes risks the public’s trust. With nearly 70 million cases a year, courts are one of the most common touch points for the public and our government, getting it wrong there undercuts trust in our entire democratic system.
KG: How do we ensure modernization doesn’t just digitize dysfunction, such as replacing paper with platforms, but instead makes courts more transparent, fair, and accessible to the public?
JT: New technology is an opportunity to rethink the process.
Above I mentioned the high volume docket that is debt court in America. These cases, which already accounted for 1-in-4 civil cases in state courts before the pandemic, are surging across the country. Usually for $10,000 or less, debt buying companies file millions of cases across the U.S. with the hope that the defendant doesn’t appear in court. This allows the judge to rule against the defendant without considering the facts of the case, called a default judgment. The problem is that many of these claims, drafted with the help of AI, do not pass basic scrutiny, like assuring that the person sued is the holder of the debt. Regardless, with the court’s blessing, the company takes the defendant to collections for an amount that can exceed the original debt due to court ordered interest and lawyer’s fees. These outcomes perpetuate a punishing cycle of debt that include garnishments, liens on homes, and bank account freezes.
To fight back against this predatory practice, states, like Arizona and New York, changed the judicial review process requiring a judge to assure that the claim meets statutory standards before entering a default judgment. This is a smart policy change to curb predatory debt suits. It also creates a massive administrative challenge for judges to sift through the ever-growing pile of claims. Luckily, it’s the perfect job for AI to automate the review process.
This is a great example of where there first needed to be a process change. In a world without this change, AI would be drafting more claims and the court wouldn’t have a heightened standard of review to protect the public from junk cases. This process change put downward pressure on the courts to do more with the same number of resources and staff. AI has the potential to step in and assist staff with review, flagging problematic cases for human review. Not just an opportunity in debt cases, this type of process improvement-technical two-step could impact how courts expunge and seal criminal records, correct data input errors, and ensure process of service, a requirement in any civil suit, is handled properly. But the technology won’t succeed without court process changes first.
KG: Who needs to be at the decision-making table for responsible court modernization, particularly around AI governance and standards?
JT: Courts are how the public experience the law. This makes courts a critical service provider in need of public feedback to improve their services. But the public alone are insufficient by themselves. A goal of the Court Innovation Fund is to grow the coalition of people supporting court innovation. Obviously, we need judges, court administrators, IT staff, and other public servants involved in defining the needs and challenges of their demanding work. But we should also be thinking more broadly: there are unexplored issues impacting court modernization, including the economics of reform, the consumer harms created by private vendors, and how the increasing digitization of courts is creating cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Yet, we don’t see economists, consumer protection attorneys, or cyber experts coming to aid the courts.
As much as this potential Fund will organize the buyers and end users of court technology, we also need to incentivize on-ramps to other professions to expand the universe of potential solutions needed by the courts. This approach increases the internal capacity of courts to vet, develop, and deploy responsible, user-centered projects while growing the coalition of professionals in this space.
KG: Looking ahead four years, what does success look like: for you, for the Fund, and for the courts themselves?
JT: Building innovative courts means having connected courts. In four years, success is courts that are connected to the public, their own data, and the future. This means courts are accessible to rural, suburban, and urban communities through easy to navigate technology. Courts having access to and understanding of their own data means that they can see inside their operations, make decisions based on need, and advocate for greater support from their legislators. And being connected to the future entails courts having trained and knowledgeable staff able to articulate challenges and potential technical solutions and their limitations, especially as it regards AI.
We can accomplish this through a series of complementary, intentional bets across the technology, people, and research that makes court innovation possible. Each individual project, like scaling software that breaks courts out of vendor lock-in and defining the return-on-investment of court innovation, can stand alone as a proof point on what the future of courts looks like. They also build on each other, creating a feedback loop that gives us the confidence to double down on promising interventions and identify tweaks that may be needed.
Follow along on Jason’s Substack as he continues unpacking what the AI era means for courts, justice, and the future of public institutions.
