Articles | Postado no dia: 14 October, 2026
Is Your Special Appeal Ready to Be Read by Artificial Intelligence?
Regimental Amendment No. 53/2026 added Article 343-A to the Internal Rules of Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice (STJ). Initial petitions in original proceedings and appeals submitted to the Court must include a summary of the facts and legal grounds, the relief sought, the content of the challenged decisions, and the statutory provisions invoked.
It is unusual for a procedural rule to specify, almost in bullet-point form, what a legal submission must contain. The explanation lies in STJ/GP Normative Instruction No. 42/2026, which regulates the new requirement. The structured summary will support the automated screening, classification, and grouping of cases by artificial intelligence systems.
The summary must be entered in a dedicated field in the electronic filing system in a format that AI systems can process. It must outline the facts, legal arguments, allegedly violated statutory provisions, relief sought, and precedents cited. In special appeals, it must also address the relevance of the federal legal issue, in connection with the new relevance threshold regulated by Law No. 15,484/2026.
The measure also offers a potential transparency benefit: the reporting Justice gains immediate access to the core of the dispute, while the lawyer, rather than the AI system, determines which information is presented first.
The requirement is not yet in force. It will take effect following an order issued by the STJ Presidency, with a 90-day adaptation period. After that period, failure to submit the summary will trigger a notice requiring correction within ten days, without reopening the original filing deadline. Deliberate inaccuracies may constitute conduct that undermines the dignity of justice.
For lawyers appearing before the higher courts across a wide range of legal fields, summarizing a case will no longer be merely supplementary. It will become part of the litigation strategy.
The special appeal now has two expressly identified readers under the new rule: the Justice and the AI system. The ability to summarize a dispute with technical precision is no longer just a matter of writing style; it has become a procedural requirement. A poorly prepared summary may undermine a case before the court even reaches the full legal arguments.
Authors: Igor Frota Moreira and Thaís Medeiros
