AI & Access to Justice

The Stanford Legal Design Lab has made AI and Access to Justice a primary workstream for the coming years.

As more justice professionals & community members become aware of AI, our Lab is doing cutting-edge R&D work about how AI systems are performing when people try to use them for legal problem-solving — and how we can build smarter, more responsible AI for access to justice.

Projects on AI & Access to Justice

Posts on AI & Access to Justice

Courses on AI & A2J

Network Events on AI & A2J

Research on AI & A2J

Learned Hands game to label people’s legal issues

Learned Hands is an online game to build labeled datasets, machine learning models, and new applications that can connect people online to high-quality legal help. Our team at Legal Design Lab partnered with the team at Suffolk LIT Lab to build it, with the support of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Playing the Learned Hands game lets you label people’s stories with a standardized list of legal issue codes. It’s a mobile-friendly web application that you’re welcome to come play and earn pro bono credit with.

The game produces a labeled dataset of people’s stories, tagged with the legal issues that apply to their situation. This dataset can be used to develop AI tools like classifiers to automatically spot people’s issues.

Read more about the Learned Hands project here.

Play the Learned Hands game here.

See the labeled dataset at Suffolk LIT Lab’s site.

AI/Legal Help Problem Incident Database

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.

Autumn-Winter 23-24 AI for Legal Help 809E

In Autumn-Winter quarters 2023-24, the Legal Design Lab team will offer the policy lab class “AI for Legal Help”.

It is a 3-credit course, with course code LAW 809E.We will be working with community groups & justice institutions to interview members of the public about if & how they would use AI platforms (like ChatGPT) to deal with legal problems like evictions, debt collection, or domestic violence.

Our class client is the Legal Services Corporation’s TIG (Technology Initiative Grant) team.

The goal of the class is to develop a community-centered agenda about how to make these AI platforms more effective at helping people with these problems, while also identifying the key risks they pose to people & technical/policy strategies to mitigate these risks.

The class will be taught with user interviews, testing sessions, and multi-stakeholder workshops at the core – to have students synthesize diverse points of view into an agenda that can make AI tools more equitable, accessible, and responsible in the legal domain.

Explore the 809E AI for Legal Help course more here.

JURIX ’23 AI & Access to Justice academic workshop

In December 2023, our Lab team is co-hosting an academic workshop on AI & Access to Justice at the JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

There is an open call for submissions to the workshop. Submissions are due by November 12, 2023. We encourage academics, practitioners, and others interested in the field to submit a paper for the workshop or consider attending.

Read more about the workshop & call for papers here.

AI & Legal Help Crossover Workshop

In Summer 2023, 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.

Read more about the workshop & proposals here.

Stanford-SRLN Spring 2023 brainstorm 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.

Read more about the session & the brainstorm of opportunities and risks.