Bringing AI to the Bench: Project Fortress for the Judiciary

State courts are running at or beyond capacity. Caseloads are growing. Staff positions go unfilled. Judges, law clerks, and court administrators work in scattered tools that don’t connect.

Indeed, in the 2025 Thomson Reuters Institute Survey of State Courts, 68% of respondents said their court experienced staff shortages in the prior year. More than three-quarters said they encounter hearing delays of 15 minutes or more on a typical week. When asked what they would do with more time, respondents’ most common answer was case management and case preparation – the nuts-and-bolts work courts exist to do.

Technology has not kept pace with these demands. Only 17% of courts have adopted generative AI, according to the survey. The tools most courts rely on – case management systems, document repositories, email – were designed to store and move information, not to help analyze or act on it. And most AI products available today operate as standalone additions, not as infrastructure integrated into how courts actually work.

The Project Fortress judiciary platform was built to address the structural problem underneath these challenges and to bring together data, documents, communications and AI.

The Foundation

The Fortress judiciary platform is built on Salesforce GovCloud. That foundation provides enterprise-grade security that courts and government agencies require, including NIST 800-53, FedRAMP authorization, StateRAMP and CJIS compliance. It also provides the infrastructure for structured data workflows, integrations, and role-based access that make platform-wide AI possible.

The platform is organized around chambers. Judges and law clerks work from a central workspace that surfaces dockets, case assignments, deadlines, and collaborative workflows. Court-specific modules are configured for civil, criminal, appellate, and special courts, with the terminology, workflows, and document types relevant to each.

Fortress connects to existing tools rather than replacing them. Document management systems, email, Microsoft Word, and SharePoint integrate into the platform. Judges and clerks continue working in familiar environments; Fortress organizes what those tools produce into a shared, searchable record.

How AI Operates Inside Fortress

There is a practical difference between AI point solutions and platforms that embed AI throughout.

When AI operates as a standalone product, it works with whatever documents or text you copy into it. It has no knowledge of the matter it’s working on beyond what you provide in a given session. It cannot draw on institutional knowledge, prior decisions, or the specific procedural posture of a case unless you manually provide all of that context.

Fortress AI operates inside live case environments. When a judge or clerk uses it to draft a bench memo, the AI already has access to the relevant briefs, prior orders, the case record, the chamber’s own prior opinions, and applicable state law – without the user needing to locate and load any of it. Through the chambers function, court teams can also build searchable repositories of opinions, research, and case files that any member can access. 

Each matter adds to the record. Institutional knowledge stays in the platform rather than residing in individual clerks’ files or disappearing when a clerkship ends.

How Courts Use Fortress

Fortress supports four primary workflows for courts:

• Opinion drafting. A Microsoft Word integration gives judges and clerks AI assistance directly inside their drafting environment. The AI draws on the chamber’s prior writing samples, the applicable case law, and the case record to help draft opinions, orders, and bench memos in the judge’s own voice. Work that previously took three or more weeks for a 20-page opinion can be reduced to one to three days. Brief analysis that previously took days can take minutes.
  
  

• Legal research. Fortress connects to each state’s statutes, case law, and court rules. Research workflows support precedent identification, citation validation, statutory interpretation, and multi-jurisdiction analysis from within the platform. The research output connects directly to drafting workflows so citation checking and precedent analysis are embedded in the opinion-writing process, not conducted separately.
  
  

• Docket and case management. Case assignments, clerk task workflows, hearing preparation, and judicial collaboration are managed from a single dashboard. The platform provides visibility into caseload across a chambers or across a court system, and surfaces priority items without requiring users to check multiple systems.
  
  

• Knowledge management. Chambers and court systems can build structured knowledge repositories, such as sentencing guidelines, local precedent databases or research on recurring legal questions, that all users can query. This allows courts to develop and preserve institutional knowledge rather than relying on individual staff tenure.

The Fortress Philosophy

Fortress was created by a practicing M&A attorney who built the original platform to solve problems he encountered managing high-volume deal work. The core observation was straightforward: legal work generates structured data –tasks, timelines, documents, communications, decisions – and none of it was being organized in a way that allowed technology, including AI, to use it effectively.

That same observation applies to courts. Judges, law clerks, and administrators generate an enormous amount of structured information in the course of their work. Most of it lives in disconnected systems, and none of it accumulates in a form that makes future work easier.

Building AI into the environment where the work occurs, rather than offering it as a separate tool users must switch to, is what allows it to be genuinely useful day to day rather than useful occasionally.

Courts are managing rising caseloads, staffing shortages, and increasing public scrutiny of the quality and consistency of judicial work. The Thomson Reuters survey found that court professionals expect AI to save nearly nine hours per employee per week within five years. Capturing those gains requires a structured platform, not just a new tool bolted onto existing systems.

Fortress is built to be that foundation, designed specifically for how courts work.

Watch an introduction to the Fortress judiciary platform or contact us today to learn how we can help your court.