"the share of lawsuits brought by self-represented people increased from 11% in 2022 to 16.8% in 2025" [16.8%]
The quantified jump from 11% to 16.8% in three years directly measures AI-correlated expansion of legal system access, while the article separately confirms win rates have not improved, establishing the asymmetric dynamic the signal claims.
Reasoning from this article
The article treats the US federal court surge as an instance of a broader pattern: AI tools lower the skill floor for complex professional tasks (drafting, argumentation) without lowering the expertise ceiling required to succeed at them. This access-without-outcome gap is likely to recur across other licensed-profession domains (medicine, finance, immigration) wherever AI enables task completion but not task mastery. The Vermont case spike—from 45 to 1,100 filings annually—illustrates how a single viral how-to post can translate AI capability into institutional volume pressure at scale.