What are the specific things that generative AI might do, that could help improve access to justice & good life outcomes for people going through a problem with housing, debt, family, traffic, or other legal-related areas?
The Legal Design Lab has been working with stakeholders in brainstorming sessions & detailed design sprints to map out all different AI tools that could be helpful to legal aid groups, court help centers, local government agencies, community justice orgs, and others that deliver legal and navigation services to the public.
This is our most current task list, as of Spring 2025.
On this page, please explore this list of specific Legal Tasks for which generative AI (or other human or technology services) could improve the system & people’s outcomes. We present this list to encourage more R&D, including new pilots, benchmarks, datasets, and related materials to tackle these challenges.
This task list was last updated in April 2025.
Why this Task List? Our goal with this list is to go beyond a general discussion about whether AI can or cannot improve access to justice. By focusing on specific, discrete Tasks, we hope to encourage more model development, rigorous technical evaluation, and human-centered research with end-users, frontline service providers, and big-picture policymakers. We may find that AI may perform quite well on one task that can increase access to justice, but fail on others.
Tasks Organized into Zones: We have separated the tasks into different zones, based on what phase of a person’s legal journey they occur in. Sometimes the zones also correspond to the role of the person who currently has to perform this task.
Getting Info tasks
How can a person who is trying to understand their legal problem get initial orientation and guidance?
This set of tasks concerns people who are at the start of their legal problem-solving journey. At this stage, they may not even be aware that their housing, family, money, or work problem is ‘legal’ or ‘justiciable’. This set of tasks focuses on helping the person understand their situation, options, and help services.
Legal Q&A
This task involves legal Questions and Answers. Typically this happens at the beginning stages of a legal problem. The person experiencing the problem, or their friend or family member, is seeking out information. What is this problem called? What options do I have? Who can help me? What are my next steps?
Currently, this task occurs in person in informal conversations, on search engines, in pro bono clinics, in waiting rooms or lobbies of courts or legal aid groups, or on social media sites. People’s goals are to get reliable, clear information that is actionable for them to take the next step (or to know that they don’t want to pursue a legal path for this problem).
Triage and Referrals
The Triage & Service Referrals task often happens in the beginning stages of a legal problem, though it can also happen when it has reached a crisis stage. It might be the person going through the problem, or a service provider like a social worker, teacher, librarian, food pantry worker, or domestic violence counselor who is looking to find help services for this person.
The goal of this task is to present a curated, short menu of service options for this person. What are the full-service, unbundled services, and DIY services that the person could use to address this problem? Which of these are a good fit for the person’s scenario, eligibility, and capability?
Ideally, a tool can give them a very short, staged list of what services would be a good fit — and help them easily connect to this tool or group to get started on dealing with the problem.
Help Guides
This task covers possible tools that generate tailored legal help guides to a person. These would give accessible, actionable information to a person to take action on their legal problem.
Case Document Explainer
In this task, a person needs to understand a formal legal notice or court document they have received. What does it mean? What should they do next? A better AI tool would help them understand the document and take action.
Providing Info tasks
Parallel to receiving info, how can a service provider create effective, usable, accurate legal information? This set of tasks focus on how to support providers in creating brief legal help.
Q&A Supporter
When providers need to respond to people’s brief legal questions, how can AI support them in delivering user-friendly, accurate information in their answers?
Guide Writers
Help Translator
Media Creator
Law Watcher
Content Reviewer
Service Onboarding tasks
As a provider group (like a legal aid group, government agency, or court help center) starts to consider if and how it will give help to a person, these are the tasks they need help with to kick off the relationship and get started with service delivery.
Intake Interviewer
User/Case Profilers
Case Document Reviewer
Legal Analyzer
Support Coach
Work Product tasks
This zone of Legal Paperwork Tasks concerns the main work product that is involved in resolving most legal problems: creating forms, letters, briefs, or other sets of legal paperwork. These tasks include both the rote provision of information into structured form fields, and the more complicated tasks of presenting strategic, carefully-thought-through arguments, citations, requests, and narratives.
It can also include work product and legal decisions around negotiations, settlements, and out-of-court dispute resolution.
Standard Document Filler task
The Standard Doc Filler task covers the work that is being done by both service providers’ form authors & the end-users (litigants and the navigators and advocates who assist them). It entails helping the litigant (or their service provider) to elicit the correct details that the form requires, in a clear and comprehensive presentation.
The tool ideally will make it more likely that a person can correctly, fully fill in a court form, and that they are able to represent their situation, narrative, and claims in a format that will serve their case well.
Narrative Crafter
Expert Document Crafter
This task involves the creation of legal documents (like motions, filings, complaints, etc.) that go beyond filling in a highly structured template. This kind of document is a more complicated one, that is not a standard form.
Document Check
For any legal paperwork task, the Document Checker task helps the person or the service provider to ensure that the paperwork they’ve drafted is accurate, succinct, and comprehensive.
This could include spelling and grammar checks, but also looks for common red flags or missing information that is specific for the particular form, contract, letter, agreement, or other specific kind of legal paperwork.
Ideally, the tool that can do this would prevent errors and rejections in the short term, and bad terms or ill-informed decisions in the long term.
Electronic Filer
Settlement Reviewer
Negotiation Helper
Tool Making tasks
This area of tasks concern providers’ work at building technology to help provide legal assistance. Can AI support them in developing and maintaining tech systems?
Form Creator
Interview Creator
User Tester
Site Administrator
Admin and Strategy tasks
This area of tasks focus on how to help provider groups to better manage their groups, take care of administrative tasks, and create strategies.
Data Anonymizer
Trend Spotter
Smart Calendering
Service Rules Updater
Grant Reporter
Court Management Tasks
This zone of legal tasks concerns the court system. Of those legal problems that become court cases, these tasks concern how they are received, screened, processed, and triaged. These tasks currently are performed by staff members, like court filing clerks and judicial clerks.
Filing Screener
The filing screening task primarily falls to court clerks right now. As a person or organization files a lawsuit, the complaint paperwork arrives at the court clerk’s inbox or desk. The clerk is responsible for assessing this complaint document, to see if it meets the procedural (and perhaps semi-substantive) requirements to be accepted as a court case, that this court will consider.
A tool could help the clerk to screen these Complaint files to see if they are fully in compliance with the court’s requirements. This might be particularly necessary as robo-filing leads to a growing number of complaints filed (including those filed through automated, bulk systems).
Procedure Triage
In this task, court officials have received many court cases in a given topic area. Their Procedure Triage task would involve assessing what kind of procedural track would be a good fit for this particular case.
For example, should this case be put on an expedited track, or a slower and more intensive one? Or, for a family conflict, what kind of dispute resolution track should this case be on: mediation with a third party, negotiation between the parties directly, or high-conflict adversarial with heavy involvement from court staff and judges? Or, for a landlord-tenant conflict, should this be sent to an eviction diversion program or to a housing court hearing?
The triage tracks may differ depending on case type and jurisdiction, but the tool ideally would screen and predict which cases would best fit which of the available procedural or service tracks.