The prompt that appeared in a Court of Appeals ruling

Fri, 09 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This week a ruling from the Ninth Chamber of the Santiago Court of Appeals made the rounds with something pasted at the end: the instructions given to an artificial intelligence assistant. “You are a judge of the Court of Appeals who must draft the reasoning section of the ruling…”. The chamber corrected the document the next day and asked its clerk for a report. Here is my reading, in short.

That a court file shows the instructions given to an AI assistant confirms something the data already shows: AI is now a widespread technology in the legal world. Globally, 44% of judicial operators across 96 countries already use these tools in their work (UNESCO, 2024). In Chile, a survey of civil judges (Lillo, Cantillana and Sanhueza, an ANID project) shows that one in ten says they use it in their judicial work, while half have never received any training in technology. That is good news for courts with an ever-growing workload. But AI does not replace the lawyer, whether in-house, litigator or judge: it makes tasks faster, and responsibility for legal judgment stays with the person.

What this case puts up for debate is not the quality of the decision but the method. Copying and pasting from a generic assistant, without cleaning up or checking, is exactly what the current rules try to prevent. Article 17 of the Supreme Court’s Code of Judicial Ethics states that the judicial decision “is always a human task and its responsibility cannot be delegated”, and requires independently verifying any answer or citation that comes out of these systems. The Judicial Academy’s guide on artificial intelligence also asks judges to record what role the tool played and never to enter the parties’ data into prompts. The Chilean Bar Association’s guide, from July 2026, requires lawyers to keep control of the matter and personal responsibility for what they sign. The lesson is to favor specialized tools and, above all, training. More than mastering the software of the moment, a lawyer needs the judgment to know what to delegate to the machine and what not to.

Chile's judiciary, seen as an information system

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On Saturday, July 25, 2026, a lawyer who had stopped representing a bank, a workers’ benefits fund, a department store’s credit card and a cemetery company sat down to resign his powers of attorney. There were thousands of cases, spread across the whole country. Instead of filing the briefs one by one, he left a program doing it for him. By mid-morning on Monday it had filed 38,477 briefs in civil courts all over Chile, between 500 and 900 per court, and the Oficina Judicial Virtual, the online portal through which almost everything reaches a Chilean court, was suffering “severe interruptions and slowness.” The civil judges of Santiago asked the Supreme Court to restrict the lawyer’s access, to ban the use of artificial intelligence for filing briefs, and to add a CAPTCHA, those “I am not a robot” checkboxes.

The striking thing about the case is that every brief was legitimate. Resigning a power of attorney is in the law, and so is notifying the client. Nobody cheated. What happened is more interesting, and to see it you have to look at the judiciary the way a software engineer looks at any information system: who produces data, where it comes in, which programs move it, and at exactly which point a person has to read, decide and sign.

A kitchen with three cooks

Picture a neighborhood restaurant. For decades you ordered at the counter: you had to go there, stand in line and talk to someone. The line was a nuisance, but it throttled the orders without anyone having designed it that way. One day the restaurant launches an app. From your phone, anyone can order in seconds, at any hour, with no line. The app never says “the kitchen is full”: it takes every order and pins it to the kitchen wall.

The kitchen, meanwhile, has the same three cooks. Every dish needs someone to read the ticket, cook it and send it out. If the app falls short, you can rent more servers in an afternoon. Hiring cooks takes months and a budget.

Now picture a customer who hooks a program up to the app and places ten thousand orders in one night. The app barely holds up. The wall fills with tickets. And the cooks arrive on Monday to that wall of paper, with the usual urgent orders lost somewhere in the pile.

Chile’s judiciary has exactly that shape. With one aggravating factor: the law obliges the cooks to answer every ticket.

The map, in two colors

This article includes a diagram: see it on the web version.

I drew the system in two colors, and that distinction is the central idea of this article. Blue is software: the filing portal, the systems where each case lives, the daily bulletin of rulings. It grows by buying infrastructure. Amber is people: judges, court clerks, staff, process servers. It grows with staffing, and staffing is set by the annual budget law.

Let’s follow a brief through the map.

Whoever files. Lawyers and firms, big litigants such as banks and retailers, citizens with the national digital ID, institutions such as the prosecutor’s office or the civil registry. And, recently, programs that use a lawyer’s credentials. To the system, that program is indistinguishable from the lawyer; only its rhythm gives it away.

The door. The Oficina Judicial Virtual (OJV) has existed since Law 20.886 of 2016, Chile’s electronic litigation law. It authenticates whoever comes in, stamps the filing with date and time, and drops it into the electronic folder of the corresponding case. It accepts everything that passes validation. It has no per-account limit and no way of saying “wait.”

The inbox. Each brief lands in the court that owns its case, identified by the case number. If a court is swamped, the brief cannot be sent to another one with less work: the case belongs to that court. And the inbox of briefs awaiting a ruling has no cap.

The decision. Everything scarce lives here. For each brief, a clerk drafts the ruling (the court’s answer, even if it is just “noted”) and a judge or court secretary signs it with an advanced electronic signature, the certificate-backed digital signature the law requires. That step cannot be sped up or split: one person reads and signs.

The exit, which leads back to the entrance. The ruling is published in the daily bulletin, the list of each day’s rulings, and with that it counts as served. Service starts the procedural clock, and the deadline produces the next brief. Seen from a distance, the system is a wheel: every answer produces the next question.

With that in hand, the gap is plain to see. In 2024 more than 3 million cases entered Chile’s judiciary and close to 2 million were closed. The backlog existed before any robot.

Three ways to fill the wall

July’s burst was the most visible, but there are other ways to saturate the amber side. Traced on the same map, I see at least three.

The burst. One account, one program, one weekend. Since there is no per-user quota, a single litigant consumed capacity in every civil court in the country. No alert caught it: the project lead of the civil case system noticed it while watching the intake, and the portal’s call center phoned the lawyer to ask what he was doing. The only brake was blocking, by hand, the internet address the briefs were coming from.

The sustained load. Debt collection. Banks, retailers and benefits funds collect on promissory notes through summary enforcement proceedings, where the debtor rarely puts up a defense. Between 2014 and 2016, 92% of what entered the civil courts was of that kind. It is predictable, almost mechanical traffic, and it runs through the same judge, the same clerk and the same inbox as a genuinely contested lawsuit.

The correlated spike. The constitutional protection actions against the isapres, Chile’s private health insurers. Since 2022, the annual price-increase letter reaches every policyholder in the same month, and behind it come hundreds of thousands of near-identical actions, filed directly with the Courts of Appeals. Between January and May 2022 alone there were 292,584. Since a ruling only binds the person who asked for it, the courts decide them one by one. In 2023, when they dropped, intake at the Courts of Appeals fell by 69.4%.

Three scenarios and one shared design flaw: the system admits at the speed of software and resolves at the speed of people, with no cap on the queue in between and no way of telling whoever is filing that the kitchen is full.

Why this matters, if you are a lawyer

Lawyers are going to automate. They already do: templates for protection actions, programs that file collection lawsuits in series and, now, AI agents that operate the filing portal the way a paralegal would. July’s debate was framed as “should AI be allowed to file briefs?” I think the useful question is a different one: what happens to a system designed when filing was expensive, now that filing is free.

Engineering knows that problem well, and its answers have relatives in Chilean procedural law. Three, in plain language.

A quota per account, instead of a CAPTCHA. A CAPTCHA punishes every user and measures none; a patient robot passes it anyway. A reasonable quota of filings per hour, with a fair queue for whoever needs more, protects the court without shutting the door on anyone. The legal relative already exists: the good-faith principle of Law 20.886 and the portal’s terms of use, which today are only enforced after the damage is done.

A bulk procedure, with a single ruling. Resigning thousands of powers of attorney was a legitimate need. The system only offered “one brief per case,” so the lawyer built the loop himself. One filing with the list of cases and one ruling per court turns 38,000 briefs into a few dozen acts. Briefs with an attached list are already used in practice; what is missing is a system that understands them.

A system that says “received, queued.” Today the portal accepts in silence and the clerk absorbs the cost. An explicit “received, pending admission” status, with defined procedural effects, would make the queue visible to the court and to whoever is filing. And urgent matters (protection actions, child support, domestic violence) should have their own line: preferential processing exists in the law; it needs to exist in the inbox.

None of this replaces the judge. All of it exists so that a judge’s minute is spent deciding, and not absorbing traffic.

If you want to go deeper: the full map

This article is the pocket version. The full map draws the system box by box, with its real names (OJV, SITCI, SITCORTE, case distribution, process servers), the law that defines each one and its engineering reading. The three scenarios light up on the same diagram, and a table translates fifteen procedural institutions into the vocabulary of distributed systems. It is meant for programmers and for lawyers with technical curiosity, and there I do use the jargon without translating it. The map is in Spanish, and the sources for every figure in this article are listed at its foot.