Categories
Reading

Report on litigants’ outcomes on Zoom court hearings

The Indiana University team, led by professor Victor Quintanilla, has released the report Accessing Justice with Zoom: Experiences and Outcomes in Online Civil Courts.

The team had set up a novel system to recruit court users to give feedback about their experience attending court in-person or remotely, combining that with administrative data and observational data about how the hearings proceeded. This allows them to examine the various effects, preferences, and outcomes that are at play now that online/remote/Zoom court proceedings are now available.

Explore some of the findings that the team found with Indiana court users, including

  • the technological capability and usage of litigants
  • comparison of preferences for remote hearings vs in person
  • how people participated in remote hearings
  • how frequently litigants experienced technical issues
  • what kinds of concerns and dynamics were interrelated

See more at the Indiana Equity Accelerator.

Categories
Current Projects

How do we measure mistakes and harms of legal services?

As new services and tech projects launch to serve the public, there’s a regular question being asked:

  • How do we measure if these new justice innovations do better than the status quo?
  • How can we compare the risk of harm to the consumers by these new services & technologies, as compared to a human lawyer — or compared to no services at all?

This entails diving into the discussion of legal services mistakes, risks, harms, errors, complaints, and problems. Past discussions of these legal service problems tend to be fairly abstract. Many regulators & industry groups focus on consumer protection at the high level: how can we protect people from low-quality, fraudulent, or problematic legal services?

This high-level discussion of legal service problems doesn’t lend itself well to specific measurements. It’s hard to assess whether a given lawyer, justice worker, app, or other service-tech tool is more or less protective of a consumer’s interest.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can more systematically and clearly measure the quality level (and risk of harm) of a given legal service. As I’ve been exploring & auditing AI platforms for legal problem-solving, this systematic evaluation is needed to be able to assess the quality issues on these AI platforms.

Measuring Errors vs Measuring Consequences

As I’ve been reading through work in other areas (particularly health information and medical systems), I’ve found the work of medical & information researchers to be very instructive. See one such article here.

One of the big things I have learned from medical safety analysis has been the importance of separating the Mistake/Error from the Harm/Consequence. Medical domain experts have built 2 sets of resources:

This is somewhat of a revelation: to separate the provider error from the user harm. Not all errors result in harm — and not all harms have the same severity & level of concern.

As I am studying AI provision of legal services is that AI might make an error, but this does not always result in harm. For example, the AI might tell a person the wrong timeline around eviction lawsuits. The person might screenshot this incorrect AI response and send it their landlord – “I actually have 60 days to pay back rent before you can sue me – see what ChatGPT says!”. The landlord might cave, and give that person 60 days to pay back rent. The user hasn’t experienced harm, even though there was an error. That’s why it’s worthwhile to separate these problems into the Mistake and the Harm.

Planning out a protocol to measure legal services errors & harms

Here is how I have been developing mistake-harm protocol, to assess legal services (including AI platforms answering people’s questions). Here is a first draft, that I invite feedback to:

Step 1: Categorize what Legal Service Interaction you’re assessing. Does the legal service interaction fit into one of these common categories?

  • Provision of info and advice in response to a client’s description of their problem, including statement of law, listing of options, providing plan of steps to take (common in brief services, hotlines, chats, AI)
  • Filling in a document or paperwork that will be given to court or other party, including selection of claims/defenses
  • Intake, screening about whether the service can help you
  • Prep and advocacy in a meeting, hearing, mediation, or similar
  • Negotiation, Assessment of options, and Decision advice on key choices
  • (Meta) Case Management of the person’s problem, journey through the system
  • (Meta) Pricing, billing, and management of charges/payments for the service

Step 2: Categorize what Problem or Mistake has happened in this interaction (with the thought that we’ll have different common problems that happen in these different service interactions above)Preliminary list of problems/mistakes

  • Provider supplies incorrect (hallucinated, incorrect jdx, out of date, etc) info about the law, procedure, etc
  • Provider supplies correct info, but in a way that user does not understand enough to make wise choice
  • User misinterprets the provider’s response
  • Provider provides biased information or advice
  • User experiences provider as offensive, lack of dignity/respect, hurtful to their identity
  • Provider incorrectly shares private data from user
  • Provider is unreasonably slow
  • Provider charges unreasonable amount for service

Step 3: Identify if any Harm or Consequence occurred because of the problem. Acknowledging that not all of the situations above result in any harm at all – or that there are different degrees of harm.Possible harms that user or broader community might experience if the problems above occur.

  • User does not raise a claim or defense that they are entitled to, and might have gotten them a better legal judgment/outcome.
  • User raises an inapplicable claim, cites an incorrect law, brings in inadmissible evidence – makes a substantive or procedural mistake that might delay their case, increase their costs, or  lead to a bad legal judgment.
  • User spends $ unnecessarily on a legal service.
  • User’s legal process is longer and costlier than needed.
  • User brings claim with low likelihood of success, and goes through an unnecessary legal process.
  • User’s conflict with other party worsens, and the legal process becomes lengthier, more expensive, more acrimonious, and less likely to improve their (or their family’s) social/financial outcomes.
  • User feels legal system is inaccessible. They are less likely to use legal services, court system, or government agency services in future problems.
Categories
AI + Access to Justice Current Projects

Presentation to Indiana Coalition for Court Access

On October 20th, Legal Design Lab executive director presented on “AI and Legal Help” to the Indiana Coalition for Court Access.

This presentation was part of a larger discussion about research projects, a learning community of judges, and evidence-based court policy and rules changes. What can courts, legal aid, groups, and statewide justice agencies be doing to best serve people with legal problems in their communities?


Margaret’s presentation covered the initial user research that the lab has been conducting, about how different members of the public think about AI platforms in regards to legal problem-solving and how they use these platforms to deal with problems like evictions. The presentation also spotlit the concerning trends, mistakes, and harms around public use of AI for legal problem-solving, which justice institutions and technology companies should focus on in order to prevent consumer harms while harnessing the opportunity of AI to help people understand the law and take action to resolve their legal problems.

The discussion after the presentation covered topics like:

  • Is there a way for justice actors to build a more authoritative legal info AI model, especially with key legal information about local laws and rights, court procedures and timelines, court forms, and service organizations contact details? This might help the AI platforms, avoid mistaken, information or hallucinated details.
  • How could researchers measure the benefits and harms of AI provided legal answers, compared to legal expert-provided legal answers, compared to no services at all? Aside from anecdotes and small samples, is there a more deliberate way to analyze the performance of AI platforms, when it comes to answering peoples questions about the law, procedures, forms, and services? This might include systematically measuring how often these platforms make mistakes, categorizing exactly what the mistakes are, and estimating, or measuring how much harm emerges from these mistakes. A similar deliberate protocol might be done for the benefits that these platforms provide.
Categories
AI + Access to Justice Current Projects

Interest Form signup for AI & Access to Justice

Are you a legal aid lawyer, court staff member, judge, academic, tech developer, computer science researcher, or community advocate interested in how AI might increase Access to Justice — and also what limits and accountability we must establish so that it is equitable, responsible, and human-centered?

Sign up at this interest form to stay in the loop with our work at Stanford Legal Design Lab on AI & Access to Justice.

We will be sending those on this list updates on:

  • Events that we will be running online and in person
  • Publications, research articles, and toolkits
  • Opportunities for partnerships, funding, and more
  • Requests for data-sharing, pilot initiatives, and other efforts

Please be in touch through the form — we look forward to connecting with you!

Categories
AI + Access to Justice Current Projects

Report a problem you’ve found with AI & legal help

The Legal Design Lab is compiling a database of “AI & Legal Help problem incidents”. Please contribute to this database by entering in information on this form, that feeds into the database.

We will be making this database available in the near-future, as we collect more records & review them.

For this database, we’re looking for specific examples of where AI platforms (like ChatGPT, Bard, Bing Chat, etc) provide problematic responses, like:

  • incorrect information about legal rights, rules, jurisdiction, forms, or organizations;
  • hallucinations of cases, statutes, organizations, hotlines, or other important legal information;
  • irrelevant, distracting, or off-topic information;
  • misrepresentation of the law;
  • overly simplified information, that loses key nuance or cautions;
  • otherwise doing something that might be harmful to a person trying to get legal help.

You can send in any incidents you’ve experienced here at this form: https://airtable.com/apprz5bA7ObnwXEAd/shrQoNPeC7iVMxphp 

We will be reviewing submissions & making this incident database available in the future, for those interested.

Fill in the form to report an AI-Justice problem incident

Categories
AI + Access to Justice Current Projects

Call for papers to the JURIX workshop on AI & Access to Justice

At the December 2023 JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, there is an academic workshop on AI and Access to Justice.

There is an open call for submissions to the workshop. There is an extension to the deadline, which is now November 20, 2023. We encourage academics, practitioners, and others interested in the field to submit a paper for the workshop or consider attending.

The workshop will be on December 18, 2023 in Maastricht, Netherlands (with possible hybrid participation available).

See more about the conference at the main JURIX 23 website.

About the AI & A2J workshop

This workshop will bring together lawyers, computer scientists, and social science researchers to discuss their findings and proposals around how AI might be used to improve access to justice, as well as how to hold AI models accountable for the public good.

Why this workshop? As more of the public learns about AI, there is the potential that more people will use AI tools to understand their legal problems, seek assistance, and navigate the justice system. There is also more interest (and suspicion) by justice professionals about how large language models might affect services, efficiency, and outreach around legal help. The workshop will be an opportunity for an interdisciplinary group of researchers to shape a research agenda, establish partnerships, and share early findings about what opportunities and risks exist in the AI/Access to Justice domain — and how new efforts and research might contribute to improving the justice system through technology.

What is Access to Justice? Access to justice (A2J) goals center around making the civil justice system more equitable, accessible, empowering, and responsive for people who are struggling with issues around housing, family, workplace, money, and personal security. Specific A2J goals may include increasing people’s legal capability and understanding; their ability to navigate formal and informal justice processes; their ability to do legal tasks around paperwork, prediction, decision-making, and argumentation; and justice professionals’ ability to understand and reform the system to be more equitable, accessible, and responsive. How might AI contribute to these goals? And what are the risks when AI is more involved in the civil justice system?

At the JURIX AI & Access to Justice Workshop, we will explore new ideas, research efforts, frameworks, and proposals on these topics. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:

  • Identify the key challenges and opportunities for using AI to improve access to justice.
  • Identify the key challenges and opportunities of building new data sets, benchmarks, and research infrastructure for AI for access to justice.
  • Discuss the ethical and legal implications of using AI in the legal system, particularly for tasks related to people who cannot afford full legal representation.
  • Develop proposals for how to hold AI models accountable for the public good.

Format of the Workshop: The workshop will be conducted in a hybrid form and will consist of a mix of presentations, panel discussions, and breakout sessions. It will be a half-day session. Participants will have the opportunity to share their own work and learn from the expertise of others.

Organizers of the Workshop: Margaret Hagan (Stanford Legal Design Lab), Nora al-Haider (Stanford Legal Design Lab), Hannes Westermann (University of Montreal), Jaromir Savelka (Carnegie Mellon University), Quinten Steenhuis (Suffolk LIT Lab).

Are you generally interested in AI & Access to Justice? Sign up for our Stanford Legal Design Lab AI-A2J interest list to stay in touch.

Submit a paper to the AI & A2J Workshop

We welcome submissions of 4-12 pages (using the IOS formatting guidelines). A selection will be made on the basis of workshop-level reviewing focusing on overall quality, relevance, and diversity.

Workshop submissions may be about the topics described above, including:

  • findings of research about how AI is affecting access to justice,
  • evaluation of AI models and tools intended to benefit access to justice,
  • outcomes of new interventions intended to deploy AI for access to justice,
  • proposals of future work to use AI or hold AI initiatives accountable,
  • principles & frameworks to guide work in this area, or
  • other topics related to AI & access to justice

Deadline extended to November 20, 2023

Submission Link: Submit your 4-12 page paper here: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=jurixaia2j

Notification: November 28, 2023

Workshop: December 18, 2023 (with the possibility of hybrid participation) in Maastricht, Netherlands

More about the JURIX Conference

The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (JURIX) is an organization of researchers in the field of Law and Computer Science in the Netherlands and Flanders. Since 1988, JURIX has held annual international conferences on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

This year, JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems will be hosted in Maastricht, the Netherlands. It will take place on December 18-20, 2023.

The proceedings of the conferences will be published in the Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence and Applications series of IOS Press. JURIX follows the Golden Standard and provides one of the best dissemination platforms in AI & law.


Categories
Current Projects

Paths Toward Access to Justice at Scale presentation

In October 2023, Margaret Hagan presented at the International Access to Justice Forum, on “Paths toward Access to Justice at Scale”. The presentation covered the preliminary results of stakeholder interviews she is conducting with justice professionals across the US about how best to scale one-off innovations and new ideas for improvements, to become more sustainable and impactful system changes.

The abstract

Pilots to increase access to justice are happening in local courts, legal aid groups, government agencies, and community groups around the globe. These innovative new local services, technologies, and policies aim to build people’s capability, reduce barriers to access, and improve the quality of justice people receive. They are often built with an initial short-term investment, to design the pilot and run it for a period. Most of them lack a clear plan to scale up to a more robust iteration, or spread to other jurisdictions, or sustain the program past the initial investment. This presentation presents a framework of theories of change for the justice system, and stakeholders’ feedback on how to use them for impact.

The research on Access to Justice long-term strategies

The presentation covered the results of the qualitative, in-depth interviews with 11 legal aid lawyers, court staff members, legal technologists, funders, and statewide justice advocates about their work, impact, and long-term change.

The research interviews asked these professionals about their long-term, systematic theories of change — and to rate other theories of change that others have mentioned. They were asked about past projects they’ve run, how they have made an impact (or not), and what they have learned from their colleagues about what makes a particular initiative more impactful, sustainable, and successful.

The goal of the research interviews was to gather the informal knowledge that various professionals have gathered over years of work in reforming the justice system and improving people’s outcomes when they experience legal problems.

This knowledge often circulates casually at meetings, dinners, and over email, but is not often laid out explicitly or systematically. It was also to encourage reflection among practitioners, to move from a focus just on day-to-day work to long-term impact.

Stay tuned for more publications about this research, as the interviews & synthesis continue.

Categories
AI + Access to Justice Current Projects

AI Platforms & Privacy Protection through Legal Design

How can regulators, researchers, and tech companies proactively protect people’s rights & privacy, even as AI becomes more ubiquitous so quickly?

by Margaret Hagan, originally published at Legal Design & Innovation

This past week, I had the privilege of attending the State of Privacy event in Rome, with policy, technical, and research leaders from Italy and Europe.

I was at a table focused on the intersection of Legal Design, AI platforms, and privacy protections.

Our multidisciplinary group spent several hours getting concrete: what are the scenarios and user needs around privacy & AI platforms? What are the main concerns and design challenges?

We then moved towards an initial brainstorm. What ideas for interventions, infrastructure, or processes could help move AI platforms towards greater privacy protections — and avoid privacy problems that have arisen in similar technology platform advancements in the recent past? What could we learn from privacy challenges, solutions, and failures that came with the rise of websites on the open Internet, the advancement of search engines, and the popular use of social media platforms?

Our group circled around some promising, exciting ideas for cross-Atlantic collaboration. Here is a short recap of them.

Learning from the User Burdens of Privacy Pop-ups & Cookie Banners

Can we avoid putting so many burdens on the user, like with cookie banners and privacy pop-ups on every website? We can learn from the current crop of privacy protections, which warn European visitors when they open any new website and require them to read, choose, and click through pop-up menus about cookies, privacy, and more. What are ways that we can lower these user burdens and privacy burn-out interfaces?

Smart AI privacy warnings, woven into interactions

Can the AI be smart enough to respond with warnings when people are crossing into a high-risk area? Perhaps instead of generalized warnings about privacy implications — a conversational AI agent can let a person know when they are sharing data/asking for information that has a higher risk of harm. This might be when a person asks a question about their health, finances, personal security, divorce/custody, domestic violence, or another topic that could have damaging consequences to them if others (their family members, financial institutions, law enforcement, insurance companies, or other third parties) found out. The AI could be programmed to be privacy-protective, to easily let a person choose at the moment about whether to take the risk of sharing this sensitive data, to help a person understand the risks in this specific domain, and to help the person delete or manage their privacy for this particular interaction.

Choosing the Right Moment for Privacy Warnings & Choices

Can warnings and choices around privacy come during the ‘right moment’? Perhaps it’s not best to warn people before they sign up for a service, or even right when they are logging on. This is typically when people are most hungry for AI interaction & information. They don’t want to be distracted. Rather, can the warning, choices, and settings come during the interactions — or after it? A user is likely to have ‘buyer’s remorse’ with AI platforms: did I overshare? Who can see what I just shared? Could someone find out what I talked about with the AI? How can privacy terms & controls be easily accessible right when people need it, usually during these “clean up” moments?

Conducting More Varied User Research about AI & Protections

We need more user research in different cultures and demographics about how people use AI, relate to it, and critique it (or do not). To figure out how to develop privacy protections, warning/disclosure designs, and other techno-policy solutions, first we need a deeper understanding of various AI users, their needs and preferences, and their willingness to engage with different kinds of protections.

Building an International Network Working on AI & Privacy Protections

Could we have anchor universities, with strong computer science, policy, and law departments, that host workshops and training on the ethical development of AI platforms? These could help bring future technology leaders into cross-disciplinary contact with people from policy and law, to learn about social good matters like privacy. These cross-disciplinary groups could also help policy & law experts learn how to integrate their principles and research into more technical form, like by developing labeled datasets and model benchmarks.—Are you interested in ensuring there is privacy built into AI platforms? Are you working on user, technical, or policy research on what the privacy scenarios, needs, risks, and solutions might be on AI platforms? Please be in touch!Thank you to Dr. Monica Palmirani for leading the Legal Design group at the State of Privacy event, at the lovely Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome.

Categories
AI + Access to Justice Current Projects

AI & Legal Help Crossover Event with computer scientists and lawyers

In July, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Stanford hosted the “AI and Legal Help Crossover” event, for stakeholders from the civil justice system and computer science to meet, talk, and identify promising next steps to advance the responsible development of AI for improving the justice system.

This builds off of our Spring workshop, co-hosted with the Self-Represented Litigants Network, that led justice professionals through a brainstorm of how AI could help them and their clients around access to justice.

Here are 3 topic areas that arose out of this workshop, that we’re excited to work on more in the future!

Topic 1: Next Steps for advancing AI & Justice work

These are the activities that participants highlighted as valuable for

Events that dive into AI applications, research, and evaluation in specific areas of the justice system. For example, could we hold meetings that focus in on specific topics, like:

  • High volume, quick proceedings like for Debt, Traffic, Parking, and Eviction. These case types might have similar dynamics, processes, and litigant needs.
    • What are the ideas for applications that could improve the quality of justice and outcomes in these areas?
    • What kinds of research, datasets, and protocols might be done in these areas in particular, that would matter to policymakers, service providers, or communities?
  • Innovation hot areas like Eviction Diversion and Criminal Justice Diversion, where there already are many pilots happening to improve outcomes. If there is already energy to pilot new interventions in a particular area, can we amplify these with AI?

Local Justice/AI R&D Community-building, to have regional hubs in areas where there are anchor institutions with AI research/development capacity & those with justice system expertise. Can we have a network of local groups who are working on improving AI development & research? And where local experts in computer science can learn about the opportunities for work with justice system actors — so that they are informed & connected to do relevant work.

Index of Justice/AI Research, Datasets, Pilots, and Partners, so that more people new to this area (both from technical and legal backgrounds) can see what is happening, build relationships, and collaborate with each other.

Domain Expert Community meetings that could attract more legal aid lawyers, self-help court staff, clerks, navigators, judicial officers, and those who have on-the-ground experience with helping litigants through the court system. Could we start gathering and standardizing their expertise — into more formal benchmarks, rating scales, and evaluation protocols?

Unauthorized Practice of Law & Regulatory Discussions to talk through where legal professional rules might play out with AI tools – -and how they might be interpreted or adapted to best protect people from harm while benefiting people with increased access and empowerment.

National Group Leadership and Support, in which professional groups and consortia like the Legal Services Corporation, State Justice Institute Joint Technology Committee, CiTOC, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, or National Center of State Courts could help:

  • Define an agenda for projects, research, and evaluation needs
  • Encourage groups to standardize data and make it available
  • Call for pilots and partnerships, and help with the matchmaking of researchers, developers, and courts/legal aid groups
  • Incentivize pilots and evaluation with funding dedicated to human-centered AI for justice

Topic 2: Tasks where AI might help with justice systems research. 

We grouped the ideas for applications of AI in the justice system into some themes. These resonate with our earlier workshop on ideas for AI in the justice sector, that we held with the Self Represented Litigation Network:

  • Litigant Empowerment applications
  • Service Improvement applications
  • Accountability applications
  • Research & System Design applications

Litigant Empowerment themes

  • AI for litigant decision-making, to help a person understand possible outcomes that may result from a certain claim, defense, or choice they make in the justice system. It could help them be more strategic with their choices, wording, etc. 
  • AI to craft better claims and arguments so that litigants or their advocates could understand the strongest claims, arguments, citations, and evidence to use. 
  • AI for narratives and document completion, to help a litigant quickly from their summary of their facts and experiences to a properly formatted and written court filing.
  • AI for legalese to plain language translation, that could help a person understand a notice, contract, court order, or other legal document they receive.

Service Improvement themes

  • AI for legal aid or court centers to intake/triage users to the right issue area, level of service, and resources they can use.
  • AI for chat and coaching, to package experts’ knowledge about following a court process, filling in a form, preparing for a hearing, or other legal tasks.

Accountability themes

  • AI to spot policy/advocacy targets, where legal aid advocates, attorney general offices, or journalists could see which courts or judges might have issues with the quality of justice in their proceedings, where more training or advocacy for change might be needed.
  • AI to spot fraud, bad practices, and concerning trends. For example, can it scan petitions being filed in debt cases to flag to clerks where the dates, amounts, or claims mean that the claim is not valid? Or can it look through settlement agreements in housing or debt cases to find concerning terms or dynamics?

Research & System Design themes

  • AI to understand where processes need simplification, or where systems need to be reformed. They could understand through user error rates, continuances, low participation rates, or other factors which parts of the justice system are the least accessible — and where rules, services, and technology needs reform.
  • AI for understanding the court’s performance, to see what is happening not only in the case-level data but also at the document-level. This could give much more substance to what processes and outcomes people are experiencing.

Topic 3: Data that will be important to make progress on Justice & AI

Legal Procedure, Services, and Form data, that has been vetted by experts and approved as up to date. This data might then train a model of ‘reliable, authoritative’ legal information for each jurisdiction about what a litigant should know when dealing with a certain legal problem.

  • Could researchers work with the LSC and local legal aid & court groups that maintain self-help content (legal help websites, procedural guides, forms, etc.) to gather this local procedural information – -and then build a model that can deliver high-quality, jurisdiction-specific procedural guidance?

Court Document data, that includes the substance of pleadings, settlements, and judgments. Access to datasets with substantive data about the claims litigants are making, the terms they agree to, and the outcomes in judgments can give needed information for research about the court, and also AI tools for litigants & service providers that analyze, synthesize, and predict.

  • Could courts partner with researchers to make filings and settlement documents available, in an ethical/privacy-friendly way? 

Domain Expert data in which they help rate or label legal data. What is good or bad? What is helpful or harmful? Building successful AI pilots will need input and quality control from domain experts — especially those who see how legal documents, processes, and services play out in practice. 

  • Could justice groups & universities help bring legal experts together to help define standards, label datasets, and give input on the quality of models’ output? What are the structures, incentives, and compensation needed to get legal experts more involved in this?
Categories
AI + Access to Justice Current Projects

Opportunities & Risks for AI, Legal Help, and Access to Justice

As more lawyers, court staff, and justice system professionals learn about the new wave of generative AI, there’s increasing discussion about how AI models & applications might help close the justice gap for people struggling with legal problems.

Could AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google Bard help get more people crucial information about their rights & the law?

Could AI tools help people efficiently and affordably defend themselves against eviction or debt collection lawsuits? Could it help them fill in paperwork, create strong pleadings, prepare for court hearings, or negotiate good resolutions?

The Stakeholder Session

In Spring 2023, the Stanford Legal Design Lab collaborated with the Self Represented Litigation Network to organize a stakeholder session on artificial intelligence (AI) and legal help within the justice system. We conducted a one-hour online session with justice system professionals from various backgrounds, including court staff, legal aid lawyers, civic technologists, government employees, and academics.

The purpose of the session was to gather insights into how AI is already being used in the civil justice system, identify opportunities for improvement, and highlight potential risks and harms that need to be addressed. We documented the discussion with a digital whiteboard.

An overview of what we covered in our stakeholder session with justice professionals.

The stakeholders discussed 3 main areas where AI could enhance access to justice and provide more help to individuals with legal problems.

  1. How AI could help professionals like legal aid or court staff improve their service offerings
  2. How AI could help community members & providers do legal problem-solving tasks
  3. How AI could help executives, funders, advocates, and community leaders better manage their organizations, train others, and develop strategies for impact.

Opportunity 1: for Legal Aid & Court Service Providers to deliver better services more efficiently

The first opportunity area focused on how AI could assist legal aid providers in improving their services. The participants identified four ways in which AI could be beneficial:

  1. Helping experts create user-friendly guides to legal processes & rights
  2. Improving the speed & efficacy of tech tool development
  3. Strengthening providers’ ability to connect with clients & build a strong relationship
  4. Streamlining intake and referrals, and improving the creation of legal documents.

Within each of these zones, participants had many specific ideas.

Opportunities for legal aid & court staff to use AI to deliver better services

Opportunity 2: For People & Providers to Do Legal Tasks

The second opportunity area focused on empowering people and providers to better perform legal tasks. The stakeholders identified five main ways AI could help:

  1. understanding legal rules and policies,
  2. identifying legal issues and directing a person to their menu of legal options,
  3. predicting likely outcomes and facilitating mutual resolutions,
  4. preparing legal documents and evidence, and
  5. aiding in the preparation for in-person presentations and negotiations.
How might AI help people understand their legal problem & navigate it to resolution?

Each of these 5 areas of opportunities is full of detailed examples. Professionals had extensive ideas about how AI could help lawyers, paraprofessionals, and community members do legal tasks in better ways. Explore each of the 5 areas by clicking on the images below.

Opportunity 3: For Org Leadership, Policymaking & Strategies

The third area focused on how AI could assist providers and policymakers in managing their organizations and strategies. The stakeholders discussed three ways AI could be useful in this zone:

  1. training and supporting service providers more efficiently,
  2. optimizing business processes and resource allocation, and
  3. helping leaders identify policy issues and create impactful strategies.
AI opportunities to help justice system leaders

Explore the ideas for better training, onboarding, volunteer capacity, management, and strategizing by clicking on the images below.

Possible Risks & Harms of AI in Civil Justice

While discussing these opportunity areas, the stakeholders also addressed the risks and harms associated with the increased use of AI in the civil justice system. Some of the concerns raised include over-reliance on AI without assessing its quality and reliability, the provision of inaccurate or biased information, the potential for fraudulent practices, the influence of commercial actors over public interest, the lack of empathy or human support in AI systems, the risk of reinforcing existing biases, and the unequal access to AI tools.

The whiteboard of professionals’ 1st round of brainstorming about possible risks to mitigate for a future of AI in the civil justice system

This list of risks is not comprehensive, but it offers a first typology that future research & discussions (especially with other stakeholders, like community members and leaders) can build upon.

Infrastructure & initiatives to prioritize now

Our discussion closed out with a discussion of practical next steps. What can our community of legal professionals, court staff, academics, and tech developers be doing now to build a better future in which AI helps close the justice gap — and where the risks above are mitigated as much as possible?

The stakeholders proposed several infrastructure and strategy efforts that could lead to this better future. These include

  • ethical data sharing and model building protocols,
  • the development of AI models specifically for civil justice, using trustworthy data from legal aid groups and courts to train the model on legal procedure, rights, and services,
  • the establishment of benchmarks to measure the performance of AI in legal use cases,
  • the adoption of ethical and professional rules for AI use,
  • recommendations for user-friendly AI interfaces, that can ensure people understand what the AI is telling them & how to think critically about the information it provides, and
  • the creation of guides for litigants and policymakers on using AI for legal help.

Thanks to all the professionals who participated in the Spring 2023 session. We look forward to a near future where AI can help increase access to justice & effective court and legal aid services — while also being held accountable and its risks being mitigated as much as possible.

We welcome further thoughts on the opportunity, risk, and infrastructure maps presented above — and suggestions for future events to continue building towards a better future of AI and legal help.