US federal judges discuss the intersection of emerging technology, AI with the legal system

As privacy and artificial intelligence litigation continue to mount in U.S. courts, a pair of federal judges acknowledged that the speed of technological advancement is outpacing society's ability to effectively regulate it. 

At the IAPP Global Summit 2026, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Chief Judge James Boasberg and U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts Judge Allison Burroughs discussed how their digital-related caseloads are becoming more complex as nuanced arguments emerge over alleged personal harms caused by technology.

According to Burroughs, U.S. citizens' baseline protections against surveillance and illegal searches of their property are derived from the First and Fourth Amendments. Now, 250 years after the country's founding, she said existing laws and constitutional protections implemented decades earlier are "not keeping up, never have kept up and never will keep up" with the speed of innovation. 

One example is law enforcement's authority to open pen registers that record the metadata of outgoing phone calls of surveillance targets and do not require a search warrant under the Fourth Amendment. However, Burroughs said the courts have interpreted the "pen register" statute to allow law enforcement to use the same criteria to tap cell towers to extrapolate user cellular data, which has fueled a legal debate over whether existing laws can be retrofitted to present-day technology, or if new legislation is required "for the sake of consistency."

"The gap is getting bigger for two reasons," Burroughs said. "One is that there's so much more data stored electronically that if you even do a search on someone's laptop, you're going to get more data now than you used to get, and the other one is that there is so much more technology, there are just so many ways of gaining access to data."

Technology on the bench

Emerging technologies are already having profound implications for how the legal system itself will function in the near future.

Boasberg presided over a case where lawyers made filings that contained hallucinatory information from their AI use. In that instance, he required that side to pay attorney's fees to the other side after discovering they used AI in their briefs as a sanction. 

While he does not personally use any AI for his work currently, Boasberg said it would be short-sighted for the judiciary to write off the technology altogether as AI becomes more and more of a staple of modern existence. 

"I'm sure lawyers using AI is happening a lot more on the state level, and some judges are referring lawyers to state bars (for possible discipline), but there have been federal judges whose opinions included hallucinatory (citations) and that was obviously embarrassing for them," he said. "The question is how can it help without compromising privacy issues, sealed cases; there's just a whole lot that we have to figure out, but I think judges are trying to learn how we can use this constructively."

The two main legal tools used by judges and lawyers, according to Burroughs, are produced by LexisNexis and Westlaw, which both have AI integrated into them. However, for the versions of both tools used by judges, she said the AI features in their systems have been effectively "blacked out." Several judges presiding over the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit have been participating in a pilot program to begin experimenting with the AI features in both legal tools.

Burroughs sees a place for AI to assist judges with their repetitive tasks. However, she thinks the technology will never be able to make human judgment calls that judges must apply while presiding over cases, in addition to not being suitable for all opinion writing. There may come a day when AI plays a role in administrative hearings, such as Social Security or immigration appeals, typically within government entities that have an enormous backlog of cases. 

"Where AI will be most useful are for the things that repeat, and the things that we repeat in our chambers, we just cut and paste from one case to another," Burroughs said. "The things that AI are not going to be able to capture, they are judgment issues, not a matter of reciting boiler plate text. There's going to be more AI depending on the fiduciary, but I don't know that it's going to take over our opinion writing."

A role for AI in rulings?

Borrowing from Burroughs' example of AI being hypothetically used for administrative hearings, if an AI model were trained on the same type of cases repeatedly, Boasberg posited that an appellee may opt for an AI-rendered decision for expediency's sake. 

"If you're dealing with the same types of cases over and over, if AI were 95% accurate, would people come to say, 'I'd rather take AI at 95% than wait years for a judge (to review my case?),'" he said. "I'd feel lucky if I were 95% accurate."

For now, as judges grapple with the immediate impacts of emerging technology on the legal system, Burroughs recommended colleagues push for transparency when questioning lawyers about their legal filings. 

"We want lawyers to tell us when they've used AI. They can use it, but they have to disclose it," she said. "They can use AI, they can't use AI, they must disclose when they're using it, they have to certify that they do citation checks to make sure they don't have hallucinatory citations — it's hard to think of what these rules would be going forward today."