“Expanding Access to Justice with Online Tools,” my article for the Boston Bar Journal, was published in the Fall 2025 edition. I’m including a few excerpts here.
…
There are many ways AI technology can help reduce the disadvantages experienced by those who are not represented, including:
- Guiding people through completing and filing court forms and other legal documents
- Streamlining routine processes so legal aid organizations can serve more clients
- Helping self-represented litigants access and understand the law
We’re building some of those tools—carefully and responsibly—at Suffolk Law’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab, in collaboration with courts and legal aid organizations across the country. So are other law schools and entrepreneurs in and around Boston and beyond. In this article we will examine several tools that leverage artificial intelligence to increase access to justice:
- The LIT Lab’s Court Forms Online guided interviews for court forms
- Lemma’s AI-assisted intake workflows for legal aid
- Descrybe’s simplified case law summaries
…
Will AI replace lawyers?
But first, let’s briefly address the elephant in the room: will AI-powered tools replace lawyers? Well, maybe someday, but not yet.
…
AI’s “jagged technological frontier” means AI is better than a human at some tasks and worse at others. Similarly, when a human works with AI, together they are better than a human or AI alone at some tasks, but worse than humans or AI alone at others. In other words, sometimes AI is better, sometimes a human is better, sometimes they are better together, and sometimes AI makes both worse. According to the authors of the paper that introduced the jagged frontier concept, “It is clear that the best approaches to using AI are not fully understood and need to be deeply examined by scholars and practitioners.”
…
AI is a powerful and sophisticated tool, but it is still a tool, not a panacea—or a replacement for a lawyer. When used carefully and responsibly, AI can increase the effectiveness of online legal tools, and it offers some new ways to solve old problems. Americans with legal problems are desperately in need of access-to-justice gap fillers, and AI can help meet that need.
Here are three examples that show how.
(Hat tip to Ed Walters for introducing me to the jagged technological frontier concept.)