A Knox County judge explains why AI and sovereign citizen theories are no substitute for a real lawyer in a real courtroom.
Story by Carter Barczak | Photography by Nathan Sparks
Appeared in Cityview Magazine, Vol. 42, Issue 4 (July/August 2026)
s a young man, I haven’t had much occasion to set foot in a courtroom or lean on the counsel of an attorney. It simply hasn’t come up. So when I was asked to write about artificial intelligence and the legal system, I came at it with a particular kind of curiosity, the kind you get when a subject is new to you and you start poking at it from every angle. As it turned out, I had more personal experience to draw on than I first thought.
Not long ago I had a run-in with an auto repair shop. They caused damage to my vehicle, and I tried to handle it the straightforward way by simply asking them to cover the cost of what they had done. Reasonable, I thought. They disagreed. So I turned to attorney T. Scott Jones for help. A letter went out, some phone calls were made, and when things didn’t resolve, Scott eventually filed suit. The moment he did, the shop’s posture changed. They came to the table and offered a settlement for the full amount.
That made me think. The cost of that settlement was almost certainly far less than what their defense would have run, so why wait? Why put everyone through the process of filing? The answer, I came to understand, is reputation. Another attorney, or their client’s insurer, can look up opposing counsel. When they see someone who makes hundreds of court appearances a year, they know that person is not afraid to go to trial, and that knowledge influences decisions. I feel certain it influenced this one.
Which brought me to the question at the center of this piece. Could I have simply gone to an AI, drafted a lawsuit myself, and filed it? Almost certainly. Would it have carried the same weight as a filing from T. Scott Jones? Absolutely not.
My skepticism here is not secondhand. In my day job I have spent enough time around legal conversations to build a system that redlines emails for structure and clarity before they go out. It works well, and it has shown me exactly where AI earns its keep and where it does not. AI is good at form. It can take a tangled message and make it organized, clean, and easy to follow. What it cannot do is supply the judgment underneath, the sense of which point to press and when to press it. That is the difference between a document that looks right and one that actually works.
AI is good at form. What it cannot do supply the judgment underneath, the sense of which point to press and when to press it.
That distinction matters, and it is one that Knox County Sessions Judge Chuck Cerny understands well. Judge Cerny has been a familiar face in East Tennessee courts since his first election in 1998, having presided over the Veterans Treatment Court and now over the Mental Health Court. I spoke with him to get his perspective on what AI is doing to the legal landscape, and just as importantly, what it isn’t.
The first issue is what courts call pro se representation, meaning people who choose to represent themselves. It has always happened, Cerny says, but AI has added a new wrinkle. People now believe that between the internet and a chatbot, they can walk into a courtroom prepared. “I see a lot of pro se folks,” he says. “It could actually be increasing.”
The problem isn’t just confidence. It is competence, specifically the gap between what a filing looks like and what it actually does. Cerny compares it to sport. “Lawyers have a better understanding not only of the rules, but also how to get their evidence before the court. As a result of understanding the rules, you make better decisions about what play to call.”
AI-generated filings frequently miss the mark. Motions show up that have almost nothing to do with the case at hand, full of cut-and-pasted language that sounds authoritative but doesn’t apply. And then there are what the legal world calls hallucinations, where AI systems confidently cite cases that don’t exist, quote statutes that were never passed, and present legal fiction as established law. “What I’m seeing out of appellate courts when they are confronted with AI-generated garbage that includes hallucinations,” Cerny says, “is that those judges actually sanction lawyers for that behavior. And you can rest assured that an unrepresented litigant isn’t going to get a lot of sympathy from the court if they pull that kind of stuff either.”
You have to have actually read it. You have to believe it’s true. Because otherwise, you’re doing something unethical by its nature, and it’s not dissimilar to simple lying.
He puts the ethical obligation plainly. “You have to have actually read it. You have to believe it’s true. You have to believe that the citations actually exist. Because otherwise, you’re doing something unethical by its nature, and it’s not dissimilar to simple lying.”
Then there is the sovereign citizen movement, a separate phenomenon though not entirely unrelated in spirit. Sovereign citizens believe, in varying degrees, that they exist outside the laws everyone else is subject to. They are traveling, not driving. Signing a citation means nothing. They are not that person, only an agent appearing on behalf of that person. Cerny is patient with the subject, but clear. “They’re in error.” If you are behind the wheel in Tennessee, you need a license, registration, and insurance. If you refuse to sign a citation, the officer may simply arrest you. There is no philosophical workaround.
He shared a case that illustrates where this philosophy leads. A man facing foreclosure brought in someone from North Carolina who presented himself as legal counsel, though he was unlicensed in either state. This self-appointed advocate arrived for the hearing in what Cerny describes as “a pale blue vintage 1970s prom-like tuxedo.” Both men ended up in jail over their behavior in open court. The defendant lost his home, and his wife, quietly going through cancer treatments, was put out along with him. “The whole sovereign citizen movement is designed from the top down, almost like a pyramid scheme,” Cerny says. “It’s a farce. It’s a fraud. And people are actually victimized by it.”
The thread running through all of this is the same. It is the belief that the system can be navigated without competent representation. I wouldn’t say that is impossible, but for the common person it usually is. Not with AI, not with sovereign citizen theory, and not with a stack of motions copied from the internet.
My repair shop situation cost me some time and frustration, but it resolved well, in no small part because I had the right person in my corner. That is the lesson I would take from Judge Cerny’s courtroom, and from my own modest experience. When the stakes are real, hire a lawyer. ◆
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