According to her own account, Judge María Victoria Quiñones can now issue up to 20 rulings in a week, marking a significant increase from the four she was able to manage prior to adopting Copilot, the AI assistant she utilizes daily.

Copilot proves to be an indispensable tool for Quiñones, as she relies on it for tasks such as transcribing, summarizing hearings, and drafting various judicial documents. The AI assistant also lends a hand in reviewing grammar and wording, comparing draft rulings, and managing internal data, making her work more efficient.

Judge Quiñones expresses her enthusiasm for these tools, stating, “For us, this is magic… These tools have come to facilitate and improve judicial work.”

A comprehensive AI strategy

The Colombian judiciary has taken a pioneering role in Latin America by embracing the use of AI. The country’s constitutional court issued a ruling in 2024 that permitted judges to utilize AI tools to expedite processes, provided they adhered to specific guidelines.

The judicial governing body subsequently released regulations in December, mandating that judges review and verify any information generated by AI and disclose its use. Furthermore, the regulations prohibit the use of free AI chatbots and the use of AI for purposes such as assessing evidence, scrutinizing facts, making value judgments, or solving legal problems, including drafting final rulings.

In addition to the integration of AI, virtual hearings have become increasingly prevalent in Colombia. What began as a necessity during the pandemic in 2020 has evolved into a staple in the country’s judicial process. By 2024, virtual hearings had grown to 1.1 million, accounting for approximately 80% of total hearings, with Teams becoming the exclusive provider in October.

The Copilot beta program, launched last year, is set to expand to approximately 150 participants, including judges and clerks, according to Johanna Pimiento, head of digital transformation at Colombia’s judicial governing body.

Pimiento emphasizes that the primary motivation for using AI is the high level of backlog rates. “Judges are constantly overwhelmed… and they need to be able to provide more timely responses. That’s why we are keen to start using AI tools.”

More than 2.5 million cases were pending resolution in 2023, the latest year available, which represents half of all cases, according to Colombia’s judicial authority. The average caseload for a Colombian judge in 2023 exceeded 800 cases. An administrative ruling, for instance, takes 10 years on average to be resolved, according to the judicial authority’s data.

The use of technology has doubled the volume of total hearings in the country over the last 14 years, to nearly 1.4 million in 2024, Pimiento says, and the introduction of Copilot is expected to further enhance judges’ productivity and efficiency.

While some judges are resistant to digitalization, most have welcomed the shift, recognizing the benefits of AI in making their work more manageable, Pimiento says, although proper training, data privacy, and potential data breaches are among the top challenges.

Microsoft’s privacy policies and commitment to data security are some of the key reasons for Colombia’s judiciary to partner with the company, according to the judiciary’s head of digital transformation. Copilot runs on Microsoft Azure, ensuring that users retain ownership of their data, which is never shared with third parties or used for marketing purposes, she points out.

Enhanced efficiency

The potential benefits are numerous. Judges and their teams can be more productive, and ordinary citizens can gain access to justice while saving time thanks to virtual hearings, as they no longer need to travel to the courtroom. This also benefits lawyers.

Lawyer Roberto Serrato estimates that virtual hearings and AI have reduced the duration of judicial processes by half, while also enhancing transparency and accountability of judges and other public officials by facilitating attendance for all parties involved. “The efficiency of the judiciary has greatly improved” with the use of technology, he says.

The possibilities of Copilot applied to justice are almost endless, Quiñones adds: “It has a thousand spectacular things… This is something we couldn’t humanly do before.”

For instance, she recently asked Copilot to compare a draft ruling sent by a colleague with all previous rulings available on one specific topic. She obtained an answer in seconds. Without Copilot, the judge says, her team would have spent a whole morning browsing files. Quiñones uses internal data—over 10,000 digitalized legal cases accumulated and archived over the years.

The judge has even created custom Copilot prompts to streamline her workflow while using several other platforms, including Microsoft Power Automate and SharePoint, tools that optimize work processes and manage content. She then shares best practices with the other judges participating in the beta program through a Teams chat.

Born in Bogotá, Quiñones attended a military school while pursuing a career as a high-performance sprinter. Both experiences instilled in her the discipline and efficiency she now seeks to bring to the judiciary, she says.

Her experiences as a police officer first and later as a lawyer exposed her to the challenges of the judicial system, sparking her interest in using technology to improve access to justice, a topic she eventually explored in her thesis.

For the judge, the ultimate goal of integrating technology is to provide better public service, especially to those with fewer resources, and to be more accountable.

It’s a concern that has particularly troubled her ever since she read No One Writes to the Colonel, one of her favorite books by Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez, who was born in the Magdalena region.

In the novella, a colonel waits endlessly for a government pension that never arrives, which Quiñones sees as a metaphor for the slow pace of justice: “That’s what happens in Colombia’s justice system and in many other places, people waiting and waiting for years to get an answer from the administration.”

Meanwhile, the judge can’t hide her pride in being recognized for her role in the integration of technology and the use of AI in the judiciary. She often jokes that, unlike other parents who struggle with even the TV remote, she teaches her two children how to use devices.

“For me, it’s the opposite—I’m always the one showing them how things work,” Quiñones says with a smile.

Top image: Colombian judge María Victoria Quiñones, who has championed the use of AI for years, at her office in Santa Marta, in the Magdalena region. Photo by Federico Ríos Escobar.