AI legal-research tool lifted Pakistani judges' case resolution 6.3%

A study by economist Sultan Mehmood tested a custom AI tool combining GPT-4 with a database of nearly 130,000 Pakistani judicial opinions and statutes, deployed to 1,559 trial judges since 2024. Cases resolved rose 6.3% with no measurable drop in decision quality, against a backlog of 2.26 million cases.

Why it matters: This is one of the first large-scale, real-world studies showing AI assistance measurably improving throughput inside a public institution without a quality tradeoff, evidence that's usually anecdotal elsewhere. It gives policymakers in other backlogged judicial systems a concrete data point for weighing similar AI deployments.