June 20th 2025, co-located with ICAIL 2025 in Chicaco, IL
Two years after the launch of ChatGPT, we are just beginning to see a new, experimental wave of tools to solve the legal problems of ordinary people. Our community is in a good position to validate, measure, and suggest new avenues for exploration of this promising trend.
We invite legal technologists, researchers, and practitioners to join us in Chicago, Illinois, US on for a full-day, hybrid workshop on innovations in AI for helping close the access to justice gap: the majority of legal problems that go unsolved around the world because potential litigants lack the time, money, or ability to participate in court processes to solve their problems.
What is the access to justice gap?
Around the world, up to 5 billion people have unmet legal needs. This number represents the access to justice gap. The needs range from survivors of domestic violence, people navigating custody or the right to make basic decisions about their own wellbeing, to people facing eviction from their home, to others dealing with unfair treatment in accessing basic government services.
Approaches to close the access to justice gap range from offering direct legal representation to self-help and DIY solutions that can help individuals at scale.
Who
The workshop is part of the larger ICAIL 2025 conference, hosted at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
The workshop committee is:
- Hannes Westermann, Maastricht University Faculty of Law
- Jaromír Savelka, Carnegie Mellon University
- Marc Lauritsen, Capstone Practice Systems
- Margaret Hagan, Stanford Law School
- Quinten Steenhuis, Suffolk University Law School
Program Committee:
- TBD
Topics
The focus of submissions to the workshop should be on AI tools, datasets, and approaches, whether large language models, traditional machine learning, or rules based systems, that solve the real world problems of unrepresented litigants or legal aid programs. Papers discussing the ethical implications, limits, and policy implications of AI in law are also welcome. Topics may include:
- findings of research about how AI is affecting access to justice,
- evaluation of AI models and tools intended to benefit access to justice,
- outcomes of new interventions intended to deploy AI for access to justice,
- proposals of future work to use AI or hold AI initiatives accountable,
- principles & frameworks to guide work in this area, or
- other topics related to AI & access to justice
Submission format
We invite contributors to submit:
- short papers (5-10 pages), or
- proposals for demos or interactive workshop exercises
We welcome works in progress, although depending on interest, we will give a preference to complete ideas that can be evaluated, shared and discussed.
Papers should follow the formatting instructions of CEUR-WS. (ceurart)
Submissions will be subject to peer review with an aim to possible publication as a workshop proceeding. Submissions will be evaluated on overall quality, technical depth, relevance, and the diversity of topics to ensure an engaging and high quality workshop.
You can download templates for the ceurart style in LaTeX or Microsoft Office formats.
Important dates:
- Submissions due: May 11
- Acceptance Notification:
May 18Delayed to May 23
- Workshop: June 20th
Workshop format
The workshop will be a hybrid event. Workshop participants will be able to participate in-person or remotely via Zoom, although we hope for broad in-person participation.
This will be a full day workshop from 9 AM Chicago time until 18:00 (6 PM), on June 20th 2025.
Accepted papers
Workshop program
Location: Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, Room RB 150
Chicago/Central USA Time Zone | 9:00 AM – 5:15 PM + Networking Hour | Friday, June 20, 2025
Zoom information: https://northwestern.zoom.us/j/95604072094?pwd=d4aoaa8D3S4KFrpzUjITAwJyEqvSlh.1
09:00 – 09:15am
Welcome & Opening Remarks, and Tribute to Karl Branting
Session 1: AI for Legal Aid & Self-Representation
Moderator: Margaret Hagan
09:15 – 10:45am
1. Testing a GenAI Legal Chatbot – Drew Jackson, David Kandestin, Spencer Keene and Chris McGrath
2. In With the Old: Enhancing ‘Classical’ Document Automation with Generative AI – Marc Lauritsen and Hannes Westermann
3. Drawing the Line: Legal Information vs. Legal Advice in AI Tools for Justice – Shivani Sathe, Avanti Durani and Abhishikta Mallick
4. Harnessing Generative AI to Enhance Access to Online Dispute Resolution in Employment Law – Sarah Nason, Ebube G. Ogbonda, Jonathan C. Roberts and Peter W. S. Butcher
5. AI Program for Self-Represented Litigants: Methodology, Outcomes, and Insights – Zoe Dolan and Aiden An Ai
10:45 – 11:15 – Break
Session 2: Legal Research, Writing, and Language Tools
Moderator: Hannes Westermann
11:15am – 12:45pm
- Juxtaposing Legal AI Tools and their Practical Use – Juraj Vladika, Stephen Meisenbacher, Benedikt Thiess and Florian Matthes
- Leveraging LLMs for Efficiency in Family Law Research – Jonathan Su, Lydia Tan, Nicole Daduya, Jayme Loo, Isaac Lu, Bryan Liew and How Khang Lim
- PONK: Tool for Client-Oriented Legal Writing in Czech – Tereza Novotná, Jan Černý, Ivan Kraus, Ivana Kvapilíková, Jiří Mírovský, Arnold Stanovský and Barbora Hladká
- Building Knowledge Graphs from Legal Documents with LLM-based Entity Recognition – Doan Thai Binh Phan, Hien Nguyen and Hung Ngo
- Visualizing Legal Documents with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for Self-Represented Litigants (SRLs) and their Lay Legal Assistants” – Brian Rhindress
12:45 – 14:00 – Lunch Break
Session 3: Systems-Level Innovation and Data Integration
Moderator: Quinten Steenhuis
14:00 – 15:30
1. Bridging Gaps with AI: Dismantling the Cradle-to-Prison Pipeline – Chandra Harsha Bhamidipati, Katherine Stathulis and Erin Stewart
2. Building Transparent AI Systems for Justice: Criminal Reform to Legal Access – Aparna Komarla, Arman Aydemir and Nick Colvin
3. AJusticeLink: Mobile AI System for Legal Risk Detection – Chlece Walker-Neal-Murray
4. An AI-Based Approach to Early Reporting and Justice Initiation in Image-based Sexual Abuse. A Pilot Study – Mattia Falduti and Anca Radu
5. Access to Justice for All – A Novel Roadmap – Bruce Cahan and Yen Kha
15:30 – 15:50 – Break
Session 4: Evaluation, Ethics, and Benchmarking AI
Moderator: Marc Lauritsen
15:50 – 17:10
- Place Matters: Comparing LLM Hallucination Rates – Damian Curran, Vanessa Sporne, Lea Frermann and Jeannie Paterson
- Rabula Benchmark: Measuring Legal Reasoning in Brazil – Eduardo Caruso Barbosa Pacheco and Glauber Machado Pinto, along with mention of additional papers, Scaling Access to Justice through AI-Assisted Precedent Mechanisms and Automated Screening of Legal Aid and Court Fee Waiver Requests
- “Stack Overflow for Lawyers” – Tex Pasley
- Bridging the Justice Gap in Custody Disputes –Hsuan-Lei Shao and Sieh-Chuen Huang
- Designing with Dignity: A Participatory Toolkit for Ethical AI – Spriha Bhandari
17:10 – 17:15 – Closing Reflections
Post 17:15 – Networking Hour