The use of GenAI has the potential to transform legal aid and significantly reduce the US justice gap by improving legal service organizations' efficiency, productivity, and ability to serve more clients
More than 50 million low-income Americans don’t receive any or enough legal help for 92% of their civil legal problems, according to the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the largest funder of legal aid in the United States. This leaves people without adequate legal assistance in critical areas like housing, healthcare, and immigration. Criminal defendants often face similar challenges with inadequate representation that ultimately impact their lives and futures.
Indeed, pro se litigants are often navigating a complex system without counsel, filing papers on their own as best they can, submitting hand-written complaints, and struggling to navigate legal precedent they may not fully understand.
Using GenAI to improve legal service organizations
Legal aid professionals dedicate themselves to bridging this justice gap while working with extremely limited resources. The good news is that with advancements in technology, particularly generative AI (GenAI), there is a generational opportunity to transform legal aid and make significant strides in closing the justice gap.
To explore this opportunity further, more than 300 members of the legal aid community from 47 different states gathered at the inaugural AI for Legal Aid Summit, hosted by the LSC. A host of use cases in which GenAI has been used to by legal service organizations (LSOs) to better serve clients and expand access to their services were featured at the Summit. Some of these use cases discussed included:
Efficiency in legal workflows
GenAI can efficiently handle repetitive tasks and enhance decision-making with its ability to read, analyze, and write as skillfully as a junior associate. This means that it can complete many types of work in a fraction of the time it would take a human. For instance, it can review hundreds of pages in a litigation record in minutes and identify key terms from thousands of contracts in hours. While GenAI is not a lawyer — and as a result, attorneys always need to review thoroughly the output from GenAI-enabled tools — the ability to lean on technology to collect (at super-human speed) the building blocks needed for human decision-making is incredibly powerful.
This efficiency gained from using GenAI allows legal aid professionals to make strategic decisions faster, potentially resolving clients’ problems sooner. By delegating time-consuming tasks to GenAI, lawyers can focus more on strategy, advising, and supporting clients, which are all the aspects of legal work that machines cannot replicate. This shift in work distribution can all lawyers to serving more clients effectively.
Improved internal operations
Beyond direct client work, GenAI can also enhance productivity and efficiency in managing legal aid organizations. It can assist in various organizational tasks, such as marketing, grant writing, and human resources (HR). For example, GenAI can function as a marketing assistant by creating web pages, social media posts, and advertisements; and it can function as an HR aide, by writing interview questions and creating performance review templates. It also makes quick work of grant applications, with one LSO leader saying that an application that would normally take him two days to draft took him merely 30 minutes with the help of an AI-powered tool.
By taking on these administrative and organizational tasks for nonprofit LSOs, AI frees up valuable time for legal aid professionals to focus on their core mission of providing services to those in need. This increased efficiency and productivity can allow legal aid organizations to expand their reach and impact.
Stunning impact
The most encouraging — and inspiring — part of the Summit was hearing from LSO members who have been at the forefront of leveraging AI-powered solutions to better serve communities in need.
For example, Legal Aid of North Carolina built an AI chatbot called LIA, in partnership with LawDroid to provide actionable resources for simple legal matters, focusing on cases involving domestic violence, child custody, landlord-tenant disputes, and consumer law.
Also, the nonprofit Housing Court Answers worked with NYU School of Law and the legal technology company Josef to build a tool that helps NYC tenants understand and advocate for repairs to which they are entitled under the city’s municipal code.
Finally, leaders from the Innocence Center, an organization that leverages an AI-driven legal assistant to cut down the time to review litigation records and draft habeas petitions, said that in a recent case of a person exonerated after being wrongfully imprisoned for more than 20 years, the Center believes that if it had had this technology earlier in the case, it could have gotten this person released a decade or more earlier.
How to get started
As legal aid professionals embark on the process of incorporating GenAI into their workflows, it’s essential to recognize that success hinges on a thoughtful and intentional approach that includes the following actions:
Select the right GenAI-powered tools — First, legal aid professionals should focus on finding the right solution for their specific needs. It is essential to choose professional-grade AI solutions that are grounded in reliable, authoritative, domain-specific content, and continually tested for accuracy by domain experts.
View AI mastery as a journey — Getting the most out of GenAI in the early stages of experimentation also requires the right mindset, which means seeing AI competence as an unfolding path. Rather than trying to adopt AI overnight, professionals should approach their GenAI journey one step (and one use-case) at a time, and be prepared to invest time and energy in learning how to effectively use the new technology.
To start, most people pick one internal area to improve, such as writing a difficult email or revising a job description. In no time it will be easy to graduate to building a personal GPT — those large language models that can generate text in natural language. In fact, this was something that Summit attendees actually did in small groups together in real time.
Dedication to continuous learning — The path to using GenAI well requires a commitment to skill development. Learning how to craft prompts in AI solutions effectively enables users to create precise and effective instructions that yield desired outcomes. LSO attendees also learned this skill firsthand at the Summit.
Likewise, the essential skill of developing the ability to delegate tasks to AI systems allows for the optimal distribution of work between human creativity and machine capabilities. Adaptability is critical for upskilling that demands practitioners stay updated on new techniques, models, and best practices to maintain their expertise and maximize the technology’s potential.
The future is now
Lawyers in LSOs stand at the threshold of a transformative era in legal practice. The time for adoption to expand access to legal services is now. By embracing AI solutions, legal aid professionals can amplify their impact, serve more clients, and tackle the overwhelming needs that have long challenged the legal aid profession.
Indeed, the legal aid community always has been at the forefront of innovation in service of those in need, and by combining this commitment with using GenAI-enabled tools, community members can create a more just and equitable legal system for all.
You can find more about the impact of AI in legal aid here