AI for Access to Justice Workshop – Jurix 2024

Over the last 2 years, we have seen an explosion of interest in applying artificial intelligence to help solve the biggest challenges in law. Yet many of the best tools remain out of reach of the practitioners on the front line of civil legal needs: legal aid workers and unrepresented litigants.

We invite legal technologists, researchers, and practitioners to join us in Brno, Czechia on December 11th 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 Suffolk LIT Lab will be collaborating with Stanford’s Legal Design Lab and the Maastricht Law and Tech Lab to lead the workshop. The workshop is part of the larger Jurix 2024 conference, hosted at Masaryk University in Brno, Czechia.

The workshop committee is:

Quinten Steenhuis, Suffolk University Law School
Margaret Hagan, Stanford Law School
Hannes Westermann, Maastricht University Faculty of Law

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.

The focus of submissions 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.

Important dates: Workshop on December 11

Submissions are closed.

The workshop will be held on December 11, 2024.

Update camera ready submission via EasyChair

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 Brno time until 18:00 (6 PM).

More about the JURIX conference

The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems (JURIX) is an organization of researchers in the field of Law and Computer Science in the Netherlands and Flanders. Since 1988, JURIX has held annual international conferences on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems.

This year, JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems will be hosted in Brno, Czechia. It will take place on December 11-13, 2024.

Registration required for in-person participation

Attendees who wish to participate in-person will need to register for the Jurix workshop-only conference. Registration includes food throughout the day. Optionally, participants can also participate in the rest of the Jurix conference which will include a number of academic papers on a wide range of developments in AI and law.

Remote participants have the option to register via Zoom, for free.

You may need to contact the local conference chair, Jakub Harasta, to register for in-person attendance.

Workshop schedule

The workshop will be on Central European Time (GMT+1), 6 hours ahead of the LIT Lab’s home time zone on the U.S. East Coast.

This is a full day workshop that start at 9:00 AM and runs until 18:00 (6 PM). Registration and in-person check-in starts at 8:30 AM.

For the complete schedule of the day, see https://jurix2024.law.muni.cz/program

We had a competitive pool of submitted papers and demos, ultimately accepting 22 papers and demos from researchers on 5 continents.

The tentative schedule is as follows:

Accepted papers

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wz8fUxUQ9w2OniBRbvAjPjXVmT7aM79c?usp=sharing

Assigned room

The workshop will be in Room 136, Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, Veveri 70, 61180, Brno, Czechia.

Schedule

Brno, Czechia time zone: 9am-18pm, GMT+1

09:00-10:30: AI for A2J Planning – Risks, Limits, Strategies

9:00: Introduction 1
9:05: LLMs & Legal Aid: Understanding Legal Needs Exhibited Through User Queries: Michal Kuk and Jakub Harašta
9:20: Spreading the Risk of Scalable Legal Services: The Role of Insurance in Expanding Access to Justice, David Chriki, Harel Omer and Roee Amir
9:35: Exploring the potential and limitations of AI to enhance children’s access to justice, Boglárka Jánoskúti Dr. and Dóra Kiss Dr.
9:50: Health Insurance Coverage Rules Interpretation Corpus: Law Policy, and Medical Guidance for Health Insurance Coverage Understanding, Mike Gartner
10:05 Developing and validating a chatbot to deliver guidance and support to address inheritance issues encountered by women in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Sarah Stephens
10:20: Close Out 1

Coffee break 1 10:30-11

11:00-12:00: AI for Legal Aid Services – Part 1

11:10: Utilizing Large Language Models for Legal Aid Triage, Amit Haim and Christoph Engel
11:25: Measuring What Matters: Developing Human-Centered Legal Q-and-A Quality Standards through Multi-Stakeholder Research, Margaret Hagan
11:40: DEMO Digital Transformation in Child and Youth Welfare: A Concept for Implementing a Web-based Counseling Assistant Florian Gerlach
11:50: Close out 2

Lunch 12:00-13:00

13:00-14:30: AI for Legal Aid Services – Part 2

13:00: Introduction 3
13:15: DEMO Green Advice: Using RAG for Actionable Legal Information, DEMO OF REPAIROSAURUS REX, Nicholas Burka, Ali Cook, Sam Flynn, Sateesh Nori
13:25: DEMO Inclusive AI design for justice in low-literacy environments, Inclusive AI design for justice in low-literacy environments, Avanti Durani and Shivani Sathe
13:35: Managing Administrative Law Cases using an Adaptable Model-driven Norm-enforcing Tool, Marten Steketee, Nina Verheijen and L. Thomas van Binsbergen
13:50: A Legal Advisor Bot Towards Access to Justice: Adam Kaczmarczyk, Tomer Libal and Aleksander Smywiński-Pohl
14:05: DEMO: Electrified Apprenticeship: An AI Learning Platform for Law Clinics and Beyond: Brian Rhindress and Matt Samach
14:15: Close Out 3

14:30-16:00: NLP for access to justice

14:30: Introduction 4
14:45: DEMO: LIA: An AI-Powered Legal Information Assistant to Close the Access to Justice Gap, Scheree Gilchrist and Helen Hobson
15:00: Using Chat-GPT to Extract Principles of Law for the Sake of Prediction: an Exploration conducted on Italian Judgments concerning LGBT(QIA+) Rights, Marianna Molinari, Marinella Quaranta, Ilaria Angela Amantea and Guido Governatori
15:15: Legal Education and Knowledge Accessibility by Legal LLM, Sieh-Chuen Huang, Wei-Hsin Wang, Chih-Chuan Fan and Hsuan-Lei Shao
15:30: Evaluating Generative Language Models with Argument Attack Chains, Cor Steging, Silja Renooij and Bart Verheij
15:45: Close Out 4

Coffee break 2 16:00-16:30

16:30-18:00 Data quality, narratives, and safety issues

16:30: Introduction 5
16:45: Potential Risks of Using Justice Tech within the Colombian Judicial System in a Rural Landscape, Maria Gamboa
17:00: Decoding the Docket: Machine Learning Approaches to Party Name Standardization, Logan Pratico
17:15: DEMO CLEO’s narrative generator prototype: Using GenAI to help unrepresented litigants tell their stories, Erik Bornmann
17:30: Analyzing Images of Legal Documents: Toward Multi-Modal LLMs for Access to Justice: Hannes Westermann and Jaromir Savelka
17:45: Close Out 5

Past workshops

2023