Michelle Schoenwald contributed to this article in her time as a summer associate in Hunton's New York office.

In principle, legal disputes are supposed to be resolved on the merits. Factfinders weigh evidence, courts apply the law, and cases are decided based on the strength of the parties’ positions. In practice, however, a well-resourced party can use the mechanisms of the justice system not only to litigate the merits, but also to increase the cost, complexity, and duration of the dispute for its opponent. It can sustain more motion practice and broader discovery, deploy heavier staffing and more experts, and absorb a longer procedural timeline. Each step may be available within the ordinary rules of litigation, but the cumulative effect can be to turn the process itself into a source of strategic pressure. The sobering reality is that a meritorious case can become economically unmanageable long before it becomes legally resolvable. 

For a resource-constrained party, this creates a serious challenge. It cannot always afford to litigate every substantive issue or match the opposing party’s time and manpower. The smaller party must ask a different question: if it cannot win conventionally, how can it compel the stronger side to view the conflict differently? The answer lies in asymmetric litigation warfare, called “lawfare.” 

Strategic Litigation Through Asymmetric Lawfare

In conventional warfare, a weaker force cannot survive confrontation with a stronger force indirect combat. Instead, the side with inferior military capabilities compensates for its disadvantages by employing intentional strategies. It looks for vulnerabilities and attacks with precision to produce the most resonant outcome. In this way, the weaker force can meaning fully affect its adversary, even while being overwhelmed and outnumbered.  

This tactic can be applied to litigation as well. When one party lacks the resources to fight a large adversary head-on across every doctrinal and factual front, it can implement asymmetric lawfare. The strategy is to move intentionally so that the burden of continuing the fight becomes less attractive. 

For example, the smaller party can push for discovery requests seeking sensitive documents and depositions of high profile witnesses. While the larger party may be willing to throw money at the litigation, it may be less willing to live with years of procedural irritation, internal disruption, recurring expense, and reputational harm. A party that believes it can prevail in theory may decide that prevailing in five years is less attractive than resolving the matter now. In that sense, asymmetric lawfare is an effort to convert resource superiority into practical discomfort.  

Historically, even when a smaller party could pursue aggressive and intentional tactics, its capacity to respond was limited. It might be able to demand large volumes of information, but struggle to manage, review, and use what was produced with the necessary speed and efficiency. Larger parties have often benefited from this imbalance, using sheer volume as a strategic advantage. The proliferation and use of AI materially change this dynamic and reshapes the strategic landscape.  

Leveraging AI in Asymmetric Lawfare

AI shifts the strategic balance in asymmetric lawfare by easing the personnel and time constraints that often limit smaller parties. Work that once required large teams of associates, contract
attorneys, and litigation support staff can now be performed more quickly and efficiently through intentional AI-assisted processes. For a party operating with fewer resources, this shift is consequential. 

Document review is the clearest example. AI can assist in sorting and summarizing large document sets, identifying recurring themes, grouping related communications, and extracting timelines. AI can also flag references to key individuals, disputed events, or specific subjects. 

Instead of drowning in production volume or ignoring potentially valuable material, smaller parties can process the information and focus on human review where it matters most.
The same is true for transcript-heavy work. Depositions, hearings, and witness interviews generate large amounts of information that are expensive to analyze manually. AI can assist in summarizing those materials, compare statements over time, find inconsistencies, and create outlines of all the issues. As a result, witness preparation and deposition strategy can be more deliberate and coherent. Transcripts can be used more powerfully when parties can efficiently connect what a witness said to emails, text messages, board materials and prior filings without devoting a large team to performing the integration manually. 

AI is also valuable in analyzing parallel proceedings, one of the most important but underappreciated areas of litigation strategy. Large institutional adversaries are often involved in multiple matters at once, and those matters can generate public filings, testimony and factual narratives that are inconsistent. AI can help smaller teams compare pleadings from different courts, summarize allegations and defenses across cases, and identify repeated representations by the same corporation or executive. AI can also parse similar matters involving different parties across jurisdictions and extract useful legal arguments and strategic tactics. AI gives smaller litigants access to a broader field of strategic intelligence than they historically could afford to develop. 

At the same time, AI does not eliminate the need for legal judgment. It does not decide what is discoverable, proportional, admissible, or tactically wise. It cannot assess judicial temperament or determine when a procedural fight is worth having. It is also not immune from error. Outputs can be incomplete, imprecise, or misleading if the system is used carelessly or without adequate verification. 

AI should be understood as an amplifier, not a substitute. Its value depends on disciplined lawyers who know how to frame questions, test outputs, and integrate what the technology produces into sound legal strategy. A team that uses AI uncritically may simply accelerate confusion. A team that uses it well can improve speed, coherence and reach without sacrificing professional judgment. 

There is also a more subtle limitation. AI can help process information, but it does not create leverage. Leverage still depends on strategic choices: where to press, what to pursue, which records matter, which witnesses matter, and how to sequence pressure in a way that affects the adversary’s incentives. Those choices remain distinctly legal and human judgments. Technology makes more options available, but it does not choose among them. 

In a legal system that remains deeply sensitive to resources, AI is the ultimate force multiplier. It allows smaller litigants to pursue strategies that are more sophisticated, durable, and credible than ever before. Often, that shift in capacity is enough to change the negotiation dynamic entirely. The stronger party may still believe it can win, but they must now decide if they can afford the cost of a fair fight.

Reprinted with permission from the August 26, 2026 issue of Law.com. ©2026 ALM Global Properties LLC, trading as Centellic. Further duplication without permission is prohibited. All rights reserved.