Legal Technology & Artificial Intelligence
The rise of ChatGPT and generative AI chatbots has introduced important questions about equity in the legal system.
How can courts innovate new technologies that increase accessibility and efficiency for backed up courts, while also regulating its usage and ensuring fairness? How can technology even the playing field, while protecting people with fewer resources?
A convergence of forces — the rapid maturation of generative AI, the emergence of trained community justice workers as a new category of legal helper, and growing pressure on bar regulatory frameworks — presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to fundamentally restructure how legal knowledge reaches those who need it most. Generative AI tools can now perform tasks — triage, document assembly, and guided legal information — that were previously the exclusive domain of licensed attorneys, while community justice workers are changing how front-line legal assistance reaches underserved populations. This demands serious scholarly and practical engagement from the legal academy.
But AI tools are not without significant risks and negative impacts. Hallucination — the tendency of AI systems to generate confident but factually incorrect outputs — poses particular dangers in legal contexts, where a misstatement of law can result in missed deadlines or waived rights. Bias embedded in training data can reproduce and amplify the structural inequities the access to justice movement has long fought to dismantle. Privacy and confidentiality concerns are equally urgent. A "two-tiered AI" problem looms as well — where well-resourced adversaries deploy sophisticated tools against litigants who lack equivalent access, widening rather than closing the justice gap. Beyond the courtroom, the environmental costs of large-scale AI systems — enormous energy consumption and carbon output — raise serious questions of sustainability and equity. And the displacement of legal workers, paralegals, and support staff by automated systems threatens livelihoods and risks hollowing out the institutional knowledge that effective legal services depend on.
The Center on Civil Justice explores these important issues through research, events, and programming.
Model Protocol for Electronically Stored Information (ESI)
The Center has partnered with the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), one of the world's largest standards-setting bodies, to develop an ESI Protocol that helps attorneys and judges select and use AI-based e-discovery software in a way that meets the Law Committee of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems' four principles of the trustworthy adoption of AI: Effectiveness, Competence, Accountability, and Transparency. We hope this protocol will improve both the selection of the right AI tools to match a given case's discovery plan and the proper use of these tools.
Events
Check out our past events on legal technology and artificial intelligence!
Sateesh Nori, a tenant's lawyer with 20 years legal services experience and author of Sheltered: Twenty Years in Housing Court, will discuss the challenges and inhumanity of Housing Court in New York City, the crisis of eviction, and his thoughts on how to reshape the dynamic between landlords and tenants. He will reflect on the role of technology and the possibilities organizations like JustFix offer tenants through the creation of technology tools to empower tenants and fight housing displacement. The Honorable Jean T. Schneider, recently retired supervising judge for the New York City Housing Court of New York County will lead what is sure to be a dynamic and informative discussion.
See more here.
Breakthrough innovations in artificial intelligence (AI) are poised to change society, commerce and every profession. This conference examined how AI will affect the law and the legal profession. Leading experts, professors, scientists, regulators, and lawyers considered how AI will affect and shape our future. With generative AI, large language models becoming proto-artificial general intelligence, AI programming other AI, and more advances, we are entering a new AI era.
How will this new era impact the legal profession? Can synthetic intelligence replace judges and lawyers? How will social justice be served or shaped? Can the court system be augmented by AI? What new AI ethics or policies should we consider?
See more here.
Artificial Intelligence is already appearing in our courts and law offices. Like any tool, automated decision systems require a degree of competence to be used responsibly. As the legal profession increasingly interacts with and relies on artificial intelligence, it becomes increasingly important that members of the profession understand it.
At this conference, we unveiled two different ways to provide an introductory level of education on some of the key issues, one focusing on technical competence and statistical literacy and the other focusing on key ethical issues. Last, we hosted a discussion dedicated to the important issue of ensuring that our judiciary understands the automated decisions systems that are already appearing in both civil and criminal cases.
See more here.
We are witnessing the rise of artificial intelligence in every aspect of our society and its institutions. A mix of increasing technological capabilities is now coupled with growing recognition that the world needs a set of norms for governing AI. From warfare to welfare, and from the boardroom to the courtroom, intelligent machines make decisions that affect the life, liberty, wellbeing and right to opportunity of human beings. The summit is aimed at identifying frameworks that could support a set of actionable ethical principles, policy frameworks, new codes of conduct, and regulations, to help society benefit from technological advancements, while mitigating their risks.
See more here.