ICAIL – Justice Innovation

AIDA2J Workshop at ICAIL 2026

What we are looking for

We want papers on AI tools, datasets, and systems that relate to access to justice, dispute resolution, and legal data infrastructure. The research themes include:

AI for legal help and epistemic accessibility: plain-language legal assistance, legal triage, document automation, conversational agents, and accessibility across linguistic and digital barriers.

AI for dispute resolution: AI-supported negotiation, mediation, online dispute resolution, and court-adjacent procedural tools.

Governance and accountability: explainability, bias mitigation, human-AI interaction in high-stakes legal contexts, compliance with the AI Act and related frameworks.

Evaluation and legal data infrastructure: empirical and user-centered evaluation methods, benchmarking legal AI, dataset design for RAG-based systems, and legal data standards.

This last category is close to work we have been doing in our Lab on evaluation frameworks and shared data infrastructure for legal help AI. If you are working on how to measure whether legal AI actually helps people, or how to build shared resources that multiple organizations can use, we want to hear from you.

Submission details

Long papers: up to 10 pages. Short papers: up to 5 pages. Demo proposals: 1 to 2 pages. All submissions follow ACM proceedings guidelines and go through OpenReview.

The deadline is May 1, 2026. Notification is May 18. Camera-ready is June 1. The workshop is June 8.

Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings. Selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions to a Diamond Open Access journal indexed in Scopus and Web of Science.

A note if you are new to this

Quinten Steenhuis wrote a practical guide on how to write an academic paper in AI and Law, aimed at practitioners and nontraditional researchers. If you are doing real work on legal help AI but have not submitted to an academic conference before, this guide is a good starting point. We want submissions from people building and testing these tools, not only from traditional academic researchers.

ICAIL workshop on AI & Access to Justice

The Legal Design Lab is excited to co-organize a new workshop at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2025):

AI for Access to Justice (AI4A2J@ICAIL 2025)
📍 Where? Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois, USA
🗓 When? June 20, 2025 (Hybrid – in-person and virtual participation available)
📄 Submission Deadline: May 4, 2025
📬 Acceptance Notification: May 18, 2025

Submit a paper here https://easychair.org/cfp/AI4A2JICAIL25

This workshop brings together researchers, technologists, legal aid practitioners, court leaders, policymakers, and interdisciplinary collaborators to explore the potential and pitfalls of using artificial intelligence (AI) to expand access to justice (A2J). It is part of the larger ICAIL 2025 conference, the leading international forum for AI and law research, hosted this year at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Why this workshop?

Legal systems around the world are struggling to meet people’s needs—especially in housing, immigration, debt, and family law. AI tools are increasingly being tested and deployed to address these gaps: from chatbots and form fillers to triage systems and legal document classifiers. Yet these innovations also raise serious questions around risk, bias, transparency, equity, and governance.

This workshop will serve as a venue to:

Share and critically assess emerging work on AI-powered legal tools
Discuss design, deployment, and evaluation of AI systems in real-world legal contexts
Learn from cross-disciplinary perspectives to better guide responsible innovation in justice systems

What are we looking for?

We welcome submissions from a wide range of contributors—academic researchers, practitioners, students, community technologists, court innovators, and more.

We’re seeking:

Research papers on AI and A2J
Case studies of AI tools used in courts, legal aid, or nonprofit contexts
Design proposals or system demos
Critical perspectives on the ethics, policy, and governance of AI for justice
Evaluation frameworks for AI used in legal services
Collaborative, interdisciplinary, or community-centered work

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

Legal intake and triage using large language models (LLMs)
AI-guided form completion and document assembly
Language access and plain language tools powered by AI
Risk scoring and case prioritization
Participatory design and co-creation with affected communities
Bias detection and mitigation in legal AI systems
Evaluation methods for LLMs in legal services
Open-source or public-interest AI tools

We welcome both completed projects and works-in-progress. Our goal is to foster a diverse conversation that supports learning, experimentation, and critical thinking across the access to justice ecosystem.

Workshop Format

The workshop will be held on June 20, 2025 in hybrid format—with both in-person sessions in Chicago, Illinois and the option for virtual participation. Presenters and attendees are welcome to join from anywhere.

Workshop Committee

Hannes Westermann, Maastricht University Faculty of Law
Jaromír Savelka, Carnegie Mellon University
Marc Lauritsen, Capstone Practice Systems
Margaret Hagan, Stanford Law School, Legal Design Lab
Quinten Steenhuis, Suffolk University Law School

Submit Your Work

For full submission guidelines, visit the official workshop site:
https://suffolklitlab.org/ai-for-access-to-justice-at-the-international-conference-on-ai-and-law-2025-ai4a2j-icail25/

Submit your paper at EasyChair here.

Submissions are due by May 4, 2025.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by May 18, 2025.

We’re thrilled to help convene this conversation on the future of AI and justice—and we hope to see your ideas included. Please spread the word to others in your network who are building, researching, or questioning the role of AI in the justice system.