Generally speaking, representing yourself in court is not considered a good idea. But there is another potentially bad route. You can say that you pass the task to an AI avatar to express yourself and show off your startup’s abilities. That seems to be the approach taken by AI entrepreneur Jerome Dewald. Reports from the registerand it was not well received by the courts.
Dewald was plaintiff in an employment dispute with MassMutual New York with the insurance company and was scheduled to be discussed in court on March 26, 2025. Dewald was diagnosed with throat cancer 25 years ago and, according to his account, still suffers from continuing to speak out about it on the register. So he asked the court if he could submit a video to issue his statement. This is a reasonable and sufficient request that appears to have been approved in advance by the court.
That the court did not approve, Based on the judge’s responsea video submitted by Dewald, but he didn’t make a statement, he was a brilliantly average guy the judges have never seen before. Seconds after the nameless Business Stud statement, Associate Judge Sally Manzanette Daniels cut out the video and asked, “Is that lawyer a case?” At that point, Dewald made it clear that the person who made the statement was not a person at all. It was an AI-generated video. “It’s not a real person,” he told the court.
It was then that Judge Manzanette Daniels lost it. “It would have been good to know that when you applied. You didn’t tell me that,” she said. “I’m not grateful for being misunderstood, so you’re suffering from or you won’t do that,” she said.
Now is probably a good time to mention that Dewald will lead a startup called AI startups Pro Se Pro It helps people to use AI tools to express themselves in legal issues. In fact, as the judge told him, “You’re not going to use this court to launch your business.”
To be fair to Dewald, it is not believed that his avatar was created on his own platform. Register Due to a lack of funds, it has been stagnant for about a year. His AI representative, named “Gym,” was created with a free trial version on the AI service. Tavus. He was going to make an AI version to speak in court, but he couldn’t make the trial work, so he I told the resistr He just settled on “one of their stock replicas, that big, beautiful man’s chunk.”
Still, the emergence of self-promotion and the unexpected appearance of AI avatars were enough to old Dewald from the court. He continued to argue himself and has since copied to the fact that he should have probably provided a heads-up of using AI to present his case. Lessons learned.
