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Abstract

How can AI tools be used to address the access to justice gap—the 90% of low-income Americans that lack adequate legal assistance? We conducted the first field study of lawyers using generative AI of which we are aware and a companion survey of 202 legal aid professionals to find out. A cohort of ninety-one people received up to two months of access to paid generative artificial intelligence tools, a randomly selected subset of which also received “concierge” support, including peer use cases, office hours, and assistance. Following the pilot, 90% of pilot participants reported increased productivity, and 75% reported their intent to continue using generative AI tools. While concerns remained, pilot participants managed risks by focusing on lower-risk applications like document summarization, confirmatory or preliminary research, the production of first drafts, and translation, from legalese or English into more accessible formats. Before the trial, women were far less likely than men to use or value the tools. By the trial’s end, men’s and women’s outcomes across various measures were statistically indistinguishable. Participants receiving concierge services had significantly better outcomes than their control group counterparts across a range of metrics.

These results suggest that generative AI tools can significantly enhance the provision of legal aid services, but that how they are introduced matter—though women comprise the majority of public interest lawyers, organic uptake of generative AI tools was much higher among men in our study. Assistance can also improve tool adoption. The participants’ positive experiences support viewing AI technologies as augmenting rather than threatening the work of lawyers. In contrast to equipping lawyers with generative AI tools, legal-aid lawyer-directed technological solutions may have the greatest potential to not just marginally, but dramatically, increase service coverage. We suggest some steps, such as exploring regulatory sandboxes and devising ways to institute voluntary certification or “seal of approval” programs verifying the quality of legal aid bots to support such generative collaborations. Along with the paper, we release a companion database of one hundred helpful use cases, including prompts and outputs, provided by legal aid professionals in the trial, to support broader adoption of AI tools.


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