  Judicial opinions are written to be persuasive and could build public trust
in court decisions, yet they can be difficult for non-experts to understand. We
present a pipeline for using an AI assistant to generate simplified summaries
of judicial opinions. Compared to existing expert-written summaries, these
AI-generated simple summaries are more accessible to the public and more easily
understood by non-experts. We show in a survey experiment that the AI summaries
help respondents understand the key features of a ruling, and have higher
perceived quality, especially for respondents with less formal education.
