Okay, look, we know you haven't signed up for our brand new indicator newsletter yet, but it's fine. It's fine. It's not a big deal.

Vito, it sounds like it is a big deal to you.

Just look at the show notes to sign up, all right? It comes out every Friday morning.

NPR. NPR.

Like many attorneys, Laura McLean is a bit of a Luddite.

I keep paper files.

I'm kind of old-fashioned, even though I'm not that old, right?

And Laura was at this trial earlier this year. She does family law, you know, divorces, custody disputes, heavy stuff. On the opposing side was a woman without an attorney representing herself.

So going pro se, as it's called in the biz. Yeah, and it was a divorce case

involving finance records and thousands of dollars at issue. And it's going really badly. The

woman on the other side is forgetting to object to things. She doesn't have the right number of

copies of documents for the court. She's getting flustered and things are just generally falling apart.

By the second day of the trial, she can hardly speak.

It was an absolute disaster. She wasn't even able to present evidence just because she had

relied so heavily on this outline. At one point, Laura offered to help her find her documents from her outline and give it to the judge

just to move the trial along. She'd been rifling through boxes and boxes of loose documents.

And then, as Laura is helping, she catches a glimpse of the woman's outline, her blueprint

for winning the case. It's all AI generated.

Even the chatbot prompts were still in there. And in the end, she lost the case. This is the indicator from Planet Money. I'm Vito

Emmanuel. And I'm Darian Woods. AI is transforming the legal system. And today, we're going to talk

about the wider costs of making it much easier to file a case by yourself without a lawyer.

On the one hand, people who can't afford lawyers have a legal coach in their corner.

...