BRAZIL Trends and Developments Contributed by: Eduardo Perazza, Glaucia Coelho, Débora Chaves Martines Fernandes and Agnes Domingues, Machado Meyer
processes co-exist with disputes that resist stand- ardisation. The central question throughout is not whether AI belongs in the system – it already does – but whether the system is preserving sufficient space for the specialised, strategic advocacy that its most complex cases demand. AI in Brazil’s superior courts: from classification to decision-making AI use in the superior courts began years ago with the automation of administrative and classificatory tasks, mostly of repetitive, high-volume work that had until then been performed individually by each court staff member, with no meaningful gain in scale. The pro- ductivity leap was immediate and significant. • Victor (2018, STF) – classifies procedural docu- ments and identifies themes of general repercus- sion in appeals, a task that each court staff mem- ber previously performed manually in 44 minutes, and that the system now completes in five sec- onds. • RAFA 2030 (2022, STF) – categorises cases according to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. • VitorIA (2023, STF) – groups cases by textual simi- larity to facilitate the recognition of new themes of general repercussion. • Athos (2019, STJ) – groups cases by semantic similarity to identify controversies suitable for des- ignation as repetitive themes. • Sócrates (2019, STJ, now version 2.0) – performs automated reading of special appeal documents, identifies admissibility requirements and flags the legal controversies involved. These tools could sort, group and flag, but they could not “think”, write or reason. In December 2024, STF inaugurated the MARIA platform (AI-Assisted Writ- ing Support Module), its first generative AI tool, and that ceiling was decisively broken. MARIA produces summaries of votes, drafts headnotes and reports for appeals, and performs the initial analysis of constitu- tional complaints. With MARIA, AI at STF became a tool of direct support for analysis and decision draft- ing.
In February 2025, STJ followed with STJ Logos, a generative AI engine developed entirely in-house. The system has two core functions: generating decision reports and analysing the admissibility of appeals, the single highest-volume class of matters before STJ. For both tasks, STJ Logos produces standardised texts based on the case record, promoting greater efficiency and speed in the drafting process. The jus- tices then review and validate the output, marking a decisive shift from AI as a tool of organisation to AI as a participant in the decision-making process itself. The results were measurable. According to the STJ Presidency Report, chambers that used STJ Logos to draft at least 25% of their decisions recorded a roughly 30% increase in output, averaging 8,700 doc- uments per month in the system’s first five months of operation, from February to August 2025. It was in this context that, in March 2026, the National Council of Justice (CNJ) – which oversees the Brazilian judiciary through resolutions and recommendations, including its productivity goals – launched Promptus, a national repository of ready-made prompts for gen- erative AI, made available to all courts in the country. The initiative signals that AI is becoming easier, more accessible and more standardised across the judicial system, and it raises, in turn, a set of questions that the legal profession on the other side of the courtroom is only beginning to grapple with. On the lawyers’ side: AI as the new baseline Brazilian lawyers have responded with equally surpris- ing speed. According to the Report on the Impact of Generative AI on Law, published by the São Paulo Bar Association in 2026 (the “OAB-SP Report”), 77% of lawyers already use AI regularly in their professional activities, a jump of 22 percentage points from the previous year. In 12 months, AI became part of law- yers’ routine. The OAB-SP Report, which compiled responses from professionals across different areas of law throughout the country and received support from Bar associa- tions in multiple states, presents further data on the depth of this adoption. According to the survey, 76% of lawyers already use AI in drafting procedural docu- ments, the core of daily legal work. The figure drops
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