Categories
AI for Legal Help Current Projects

User interviews on AI & Access to Justice

As we continue to run interviews with people from across the country about their possible use of AI for legal help tasks, we wanted to share out what we’re learning about people’s thoughts about AI.Please see the full interactive Data Dashboard of interview results here.

Below, find images of the data dashboard. Follow the link above to interact more with the data.

We will also maintain a central page of user research findings on AI & Access to Justice here.

Below, find the results of our interviews as of early 2024.

We asked people to self-assess their ability to solve legal problems and to use the Internet to solve life problems.

We also asked them how often they use the Internet.

Finally, we asked them about their past use of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing/CoPilot, or Bard/Gemini.

Trust & Value of AI to Participants

We asked people at the beginning of the interview how much they would trust what AI would tell them for a legal problem.

We asked them the same question after they tried out an AI tool for a fictional legal problem of getting an eviction notice from their landlord.

We also asked them how helpful the AI was in dealing with the fictional problem, and how likely they would be to use this in the future for similar problems.

Preferences for possible AI tool features

We presented a variety of possible interface & policy changes, that could be made to an AI platform.

We asked the participants to rank the utility of these different possible changes.

Categories
AI for Legal Help Current Projects

AI as the next frontier of making justice accessible

Last week, Margaret had the privilege of presenting on the lab’s work on AI and Innovation at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As a part of the larger conference of Making Justice Accessible, her work was featured on the panel about new solutions to improve the civil justice system through technology.

She discussed how the Lab’s current research and development work around AI has grown out of a larger question about helping people who are increasingly going online to find legal help.

The AI work is an outgrowth of previous work on

  • improving legal help websites,
  • auditing and improving search engines’ treatment of legal queries,
  • working on new ways to present information in more visual and plain language ways, and
  • building cohorts of providers across regions to have more standardized and discoverable help online.

This panel also included presentations on other, linked efforts to use technology to improve civil justice, including Georgetown’s Judicial Innovation Fellowship program, Stanford’s Filing Fairness Project, and Suffolk LIT Lab’s document assembly and efiling efforts.

Categories
AI for Legal Help Current Projects

AI & Justice Workers

At the Arizona State University/American Bar Foundation conference on the Future of Justice Work, Margaret Hagan spoke on if and how generative AI might be part of new service and business models to serve people with legal problems.

Many in the audience are already developing new staffing & service models, that combine traditional lawyer-provided services with help provided by community-justice workers.

In the conference’s final session, the panelists discussed how technology — particularly the new generative AI models — might also figure into new initiatives to better reach & serve people struggling with eviction orders, bad living conditions, domestic violence, debt collection, custody problems, and more.

Margaret presented a brief summary of the Legal Design Lab’s work on user research into what people need & want from legal AI, how they currently use AI tools, what justice professionals are brainstorming as possible AI-powered justice work, and metrics and benchmark protocols to evaluate the AI.

Possible AI-powered justice work zones

This clear listing of the tasks that go into “legal work” and “legal services” that we need to do in AI – -is similar to what people working on new community justice worker models are also doing.

Breaking legal work apart into these tasks can help us think systematically about new, stratified models of delivering services.

  • Inside of these zones of work, what are the specific tasks that exist (that lawyers and legal org staff currently do, or should be doing)?
  • Who can and should be best doing this task?
    • Only Seasoned Lawyers: Which of the tasks can only be done by expert lawyers, with JDs, bar admissions, and multiple years practicing in a given problem area & on this task?
    • Medium-to-Novice Lawyers: Which of the tasks can be done by medium-to-novice lawyers, with JDs, bar admission, but little to no practice experience in this problem area or on this task (like pro bono volunteers, or new lawyers)?
    • Seasoned Justice Workers: Which of the tasks can be done by people who are paralegals, advocates, volunteers, social workers, and other community justice workers who have multiple years working this problem area & doing this kind of task?
    • Medium-to-Novice Justice Workers: Which of the tasks can be done by community justice workers who are new to this problem area & task?
    • Tech + Lawyer/Justice Worker: Which of these tasks can be done by technology (initial draft/work product) then reviewed by a lawyer or justice worker?
    • Technology: Which of these tasks can be done technology without human review?

Ideally, our justice community will have more of these discussions about the future of providing services with smart, safe models that can improve capacity & people’s outcomes.

Categories
Resources

User Persona Template

Is your team working on a legal innovation project, using a human-centered design approach? Then you are likely focused on different kinds of ‘users’, ‘stakeholders’, or ‘audience members’ as you plan out your innovation.

Our Legal Design Lab team has a free Canva template to make your own user personas easily.

This Canva template gives blank & example user persona templates that your team can fill in with your interviewees’ and stakeholders’ details. We recommend making multiple personas, and then possibly also making a schematic comparing different kinds of users.

The template document includes example images drawn by Margaret Hagan, that you can use in making your persona.

Have fun & let us know how your user persona creation goes!

Categories
Current Projects Eviction Innovation

Eviction diversion design workshop

Last week, Margaret Hagan traveled to Houston Texas for the National Center for State Court convening of Eviction Diversion Initiative facilitators. She ran a half day workshop on how to use human centered design to improve the program design, paperwork, and Service delivery of eviction diversion help at housing courts around the country.

This Design Workshop built on the several years of design work that the Legal Design Lab has done with courts and legal aid groups across the country, to improve how people are helped when facing eviction and their life outcomes.

Workshop participants, including lawyers, social workers, and court staff who work on running new eviction diversion programs in courts across the country, were able to go through the following sequence:

  • learning the basics of design mindsets, including focused on your users point of view and creating new experiments to see what can work better
  • choosing an example user to focus on, creating a Persona to summarize the person’s situation, needs, goals, and preferences
  • detailing that person’s current user journey through the housing and eviction system, and if they get too good or bad outcomes around housing, money, credit report, and other factors
  • zooming in on a particular touchpoint on this user journey, where a new intervention could improve the person’s experiences and outcomes
  • brainstorming many different ways that this problem/opportunity touchpoint could be improved, including with new paperwork, new Service delivery models, new space designs, new cultural or rule shifts, or new technology tools. Participants were shown an array of possible Innovation projects, which they could build on top of
  • Choosing a handful of the brainstormed ideas, to then bring home to share with colleagues and to try out in short pilots

It was wonderful to work with leaders from across the country, especially those who are so creative, empathetic, and ready to try out new ideas to make the court system work better for normal people.

Some of the ideas included:

  • new paperwork that’s more supportive, clear & encouraging
  • space redesigns in hallways and courtrooms, to make it more human, breathable, polite, and dignified
  • technology tools that offer coaching and check-ins
  • data connections to improve efficiencies, and more!

See the presentation slides for the eviction diversion design workshop.

Categories
AI for Legal Help Current Projects

Bringing an AI & Access to Justice Community Together

Last week, our team at the Legal Design Lab presented at the Legal Services Corporation Innovations in Technology Conference on several topics: how to build better legal help websites, how to improve e-filing and forms in state court systems, and how to use texting to assess brief services for housing matters.

One of the most popular, large sessions we co-ran was on Generative AI and Access to Justice. In this panel to several hundred participants, Margaret Hagan, Quentin Steenhuis at Suffolk LIT Lab, and Hannes Westerman from CyberJustice Lab in Montreal presented on opportunities, user research, demonstrations, and risks and safety of AI and access to justice.

We started the session by doing a poll of the several hundred participants. We asked them a few questions

  • are you optimistic, pessimistic, or in between on the future of AI and access to justice?
  • what are you working on in this area, do you have projects to share?
  • What words come to mind when you think about AI and access to justice?

Margaret presented on opportunities for AI & A2J, user research the Lab is doing on how people use AI for legal problem-solving, and what justice experts have said are the metrics to look at when evaluating AI. Quentin explained Generative AI & demonstrated Suffolk LIT Lab’s document automation AI work. Hannes presented on several AI-A2J projects he has worked on, including JusticeBot for housing law in Quebec, Canada, and LLMediator which he has worked on with Jaromir Savelka and Karim Benyekhlef to improve dispute resolution among people in a conflict.

We then went through a hands-on group exercise to spot AI opportunities in a particular person’s legal problem-solving journey & talk through risks, guardrails, and policies to improve the safety of AI.

Here is some of what we learned at the presentation and some thoughts about moving forward on AI & Access to Justice.

Cautious Optimism about AI & Justice

Many justice professionals, especially the folks who had come to this conference and joined the AI session, are optimistic about Artificial Intelligence’s future impact on the justice system — or are waiting to see. A much smaller percentage is pessimistic about how AI will play out for access to justice.

We had 38 respondents to our poll before our presentation started, and here’s the breakdown of optimism-pessimism.

In our follow-up conversations, we heard regularly that people were excited about the possibility of AI to provide services at scale, affordably to more people (aka, ‘closing the justice gap’) — but that the regulation and controls need to be in place to prevent harm.

Looking at the word cloud of people’s responses to the question “What words come to mind when you think about AI & the justice system?” further demonstrates this cautious optimism (with a focus on smart risk mitigation to empower good, impactful innovation).

This cautious optimism is in contrast to a totally cold, prohibitive approach to AI. If we saw more pessimism, we might have heard more people expressing that there should be no use of AI in the justice system. But at least among the group who attended this conference, we saw little of that perspective (that AI should be avoided or shut down in legal services, for fear of its possibility to harm). Rather, people seemed open to exploring, testing, and collaborating on AI & Access to Justice projects, as long as there was a strong focus on protecting against bias, mistakes, and other risks that could lead to harm of the public.

We need to talk about risks more specifically

That said, despite the pervasive concern about risk and harm, there’s no clear framework on how to protect people from them as of yet.

This could be symptomatic of the broader way that legal services have been regulated in the past. That instead of talking about specific risks, we speak in generalizations about ‘protecting the consumer’. We don’t have a clear typology of what mistakes can happen, what harms can occur, how important/severe these are, and how to protect against them.

Because of this lack of a clear risk framework, most discussions about how to spot risks and harms of AI are general, anecdotal, and high-level. Even if everyone agrees that we need safety rules, including technical and policy-based interventions, we don’t have a clear menu of what those can be.

This is likely to be a large, multi-stakeholder, multi-phased process — but we need more consensus on a working framework of what risks and mistakes to watch out for, how much to prioritize them, and what kinds of things can protect people from them. Hopefully, there will be more government agencies and cross-state consortiums working on these actionable policy frameworks that can encourage responsible innovation.

Demos & User Journeys get to good AI brainstorms

Talking about AI (or brainstorming about it) can be intimidating for non-technical folks in the justice system. They may feel that it’s unclear or difficult to know where to begin when thinking about how AI could help them deliver services better, how clients could benefit, or how it could play a good role in delivering justice.

Demonstration projects, like those shared by Quinten and Hannes, are beneficial to legal aid, court staff, and other legal professionals. These concrete, specific demos allow people to see exactly how AI solutions could play out — and then riff on these demo’s, to think through variations of how AI could help on client tasks, service provider tasks, executive directors’, funders’, or otherwise.

Demo projects don’t have to be live, in-the-field AI efforts. Rather, showing early-stage versions of AI or even more provocative ‘pie-in-the-sky’ AI applications can help spark more creativity in the justice professional community, get into more specific conversations about risks and harms, and help drive momentum to make good responsible innovation happen.

Aside from demo’s of AI projects, user journey exercises can also be a great way to spark a productive brainstorm of opportunities, risks, and policies.

In the second half of the presentation, we ran an interactive workshop. We shared a user story of someone going through a problem with their landlord, in which their Milwaukee apartment had the heat off and it wasn’t getting fixed.

We walked through a status quo user journey, and which they tried to seek legal help, got delayed, made some connections, and got connected with someone to do a demand letter.

We asked all of the participants to work in small groups, to identify where in the status quo user journey, AI could be of help. They brainstormed lots of ideas for the particular touchpoints and stakeholders: for the user, friends and family, community organization, legal aid, and pro bono groups. We then asked them to spot safety risks and possible harms, and finally to propose ways to mitigate these risks.

This kind of specific user journey and case-type exercise can help people more clearly see how they could apply the general things they’re learning about AI, to specific legal services. It inspires more creativity and gets more common collaboration to happen about where the priority should be.

Need for a Common AI-A2J Agenda of Tasks

During our exercise and follow-up conversations, we saw a laundry list emerge of possible ways AI could help different stakeholders in the justice system. This flare-out of ideas is exciting but also overwhelming.

Which ideas are worth pursuing, funding, and piloting first?

We need a working agenda of AI and Access to Justice tasks. Participants discussed many different kinds of tasks that AI could help with:

  • drafting demand letters,
  • doing smarter triage,
  • referral of people to services that can be a good fit,
  • screening frequent, repeat plaintiffs’ filings for their accuracy and legitimacy,
  • providing language access,
  • sending reminders and empowerment coaching
  • assisting people fill in forms, and beyond.

It’s great that there are so many different ideas about how AI could be helpful, but to get more collaboration from computer scientists and technologists, we need to have a clear set of goals, prioritizing among these tasks.

Ideally, this common task list would be organized around what is feasible and impactful for service providers and community members. This task list could attract more computer scientists to help us build, fine-tune, test, and Implement generative AI that can achieve these tasks.

Our group at Legal Design Lab is hard at work compiling this possible list of high-impact, lower-risk AI and Access to Justice tasks. We will be making it into a survey, and having as many people in the justice professional community rank which tasks would be the most impactful if AI could do them.

This prioritized task list will then be useful in getting more AI technologists and academic partners, to see if and how we can build these models, what benchmarks we should use to evaluate them, and how we can start doing limited, safety-focused pilots of them in the field.

Join our community!

Our group will be continuing to work on building a strong community around AI and access to justice, research projects, models, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Please stay in touch with us at this link, and sign up here to stay notified about what we’re doing.

Categories
AI for Legal Help Current Projects

User Research Workshop on AI & A2J

In December 2023, our lab hosted a half-day workshop on AI for Legal Help.

Our policy lab class of law students, master students, and undergraduates presented their user research findings from their September through December research.

Our guests, including those from technology companies, universities, state bars, legal aid groups, community-based organizations, and advocacy/think takes, all worked together in break-out sessions to tackle some of the big policy and legal opportunities around AI in the space.

We thank our main class partners, the Technology Initiative Grant team from the Legal Services Corporation, for assisting us with the direction and main feedback to our class user research work.

Categories
Current Projects

Filing Fairness Toolkit

The Stanford Legal Design Lab & the Rhode Center on the Legal Profession have just released the Filing Fairness Toolkit.

The toolkit covers 4 areas, with diagnostics, maturity models, and actionable guidance for:

  1. improving Filing Technology Infrastructure
  2. building a healthy Filing Partner Ecosystem
  3. establishing good Technology Governance
  4. refining Forms & Filing Processes

This Toolkit is the product of several years of work, design sessions, collaborations with courts and vendors across the country, and stakeholder interviews. It is for court leaders, legal tech companies, legal aid groups, and government officials who are looking for practical guidance on how to make sure that people can find, complete, and file court forms.

Check out our diagnostic tool to see how your local court system measures up to national best practices in forms, efiling, and services.

We know efiling and court technology can be confusing (if not intimidating). We’ve worked hard to make these technical terms & processes more accessible to people beyond IT staff. Getting better efiling systems in place can unlock new opportunities for access to justice.

Please let us know if you have questions, ideas, and stories about making forms, efiling, and other court tech infrastructure more accessible, user-friendly, and impactful.

Read more at the Toolkit announcement page.

Categories
AI for Legal Help Current Projects

Schedule for AI & A2J Jurix workshop

Our organizing committee was pleased to receive many excellent submissions for the AI & A2J Workshop at Jurix on December 18, 2023. We were able to select half of the submissions for acceptance, and we extended the half-day workshop to be a full-day workshop to accommodate the number of submissions.

We are pleased to announce our final schedule for the workshop:

Schedule for the AI & A2J Workshop

Morning Sessions

Welcome Kickoff, 09:00-09:15

Conference organizers welcome everyone, lead introductions, and review the day’s plan.

1: AI-A2J in Practice, 09:15-10:30 AM 

09:15-09:30: Juan David Gutierrez: AI technologies in the judiciary: Critical appraisal of LLMs in judicial decision making

09:30-09:45: Ransom Wydner, Sateesh Nori, Eliza Hong, Sam Flynn, and Ali Cook: AI in Access to Justice: Coalition-Building as Key to Practical and Sustainable Applications

09:45-10:00: Mariana Raquel Mendoza Benza: Insufficient transparency in the use of AI in the judiciary of Peru and Colombia: A challenge to digital transformation

10:00-10:15: Vanja Skoric, Giovanni Sileno, and Sennay Ghebreab: Leveraging public procurement for LLMs in the public sector: Enhancing access to justice responsibly

10:15-10:30: Soumya Kandukuri: Building the AI Flywheel in the American Judiciary

Break: 10:30-11:00 

2: AI for A2J Advice, Issue-Spotting, and Engagement Tasks, 11:00-12:30 

11:00: Opening remarks to the session

11:05-11:20: Sam Harden: Rating the Responses to Legal Questions by Generative AI Models

11:20-11:35: Margaret Hagan: Good AI Legal Help, Bad AI Legal Help: Establishing quality standards for responses to people’s legal problem stories

11:35-11:50: Nick Goodson and Rongfei Lui: Intention and Context Elicitation with Large Language Models in the Legal Aid Intake Process

11:50-12:05: Nina Toivonen, Marika Salo-Lahti, Mikko Ranta, and Helena Haapio, Beyond Debt: The Intersection of Justice, Financial Wellbeing and AI

12:05-12:15: Amit Haim: Large Language Models and Legal Advice12:15-12:30: General Discussions, Takeaways, and Next Steps on AI for Advice

Break: 12:30-13:30

Afternoon Sessions

3: AI for Forms, Contracts &  Dispute Resolution, 13:30-15:00 

13:30: Opening remarks to this session13:35-13:50: Quinten Steenhuis, David Colarusso, and Bryce Wiley: Weaving Pathways for Justice with GPT: LLM-driven automated drafting of interactive legal applications

13:50-14:05: Katie Atkinson, David Bareham, Trevor Bench-Capon, Jon Collenette, and Jack Mumford: Tackling the Backlog: Support for Completing and Validating Forms

14:05-14:20: Anne Ketola, Helena Haapio, and Robert de Rooy: Chattable Contracts: AI Driven Access to Justice

14:20-14:30: Nishat Hyder-Rahman and Marco Giacalone: The role of generative AI in increasing access to justice in family (patrimonial) law

14:30-15:00: General Discussions, Takeaways, and Next Steps on AI for Forms & Dispute Resolution

Break: 15:00-15:30

4:  AI-A2J Technical Developments, 15:30-16:30

15:30: welcome to session
15:35-15:50: Marco Billi, Alessandro Parenti, Giuseppe Pisano, and Marco Sanchi: A hybrid approach of accessible legal reasoning through large language models
15:50-16:05: Bartosz Krupa – Polish BERT legal language model
16:05-16:20: Jakub DrĂ¥pal – Understanding Criminal Courts
16:20-16:30: General Discussion on Technical Developments in AI & A2J

Closing Discussion: 16:30-17:00

What are the connections between the sessions? What next steps do participants think will be useful? What new research questions and efforts might emerge from today?

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.