Legal Tech and the Future of Legal Services

New digital technologies, from virtual hearings to AI-fired “legal tech” tools, are transforming the legal system.  But debate around legal tech too often zooms out to a nebulous future of “robo-judges” and “robo-lawyers.”  Zeroing in on the near- to medium-term, this project offers a concrete, empirically minded assessment of the impact of new digital technologies on law and litigation.  How far and fast can legal tech advance?  How will new technologies affect courts, lawyers, and litigants, and how should procedural rules adapt?  How can technology expand—or curtail—access to justice?  In 2023, I published a first-of-its-kind edited volume, Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice, alongside a series of articles (here, here, and here, among others) exploring these issues from multiple angles.  More recently, I have taken my ideas on the road in presentations to bench and bar, from the Ninth and Eleventh Circuit Conferences and the California Judge’s Association to the National Judicial College and the National Conference of Bar Presidents.

Rethinking the Lawyer’s Monopoly

Crushing amounts of unmet civil legal need are leading some states to rethink the usual rules that say only lawyers can practice law or own (and capitalize) law firms.  Liberalizing these rules promises to spur innovation in legal services of both the human and non-human (software) sort, thus serving those who currently go without.  My team and I have advised multiple state supreme courts and other policymakers on how to responsibly relax legal services regulation.  Our 2022 report, Legal Innovation After Reform, provided the first rigorous empirical evidence as to what types of legal innovation have resulted in the first two states—Utah and Arizona—to do it.  A new edited volume, Rethinking the Lawyer’s Monopoly: Access to Justice and the Future of Legal Services, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.  For more on the Rhode Center’s work on this topic, see this useful Legal Regulatory Innovation Toolkit.

Court Tech: The Filing Fairness Project

Why is there no TurboTax for poor people facing potentially life-altering legal matters?  The Filing Fairness Project is an ambitious, multi-jurisdictional effort to modernize and standardize court filing systems, widen access to our courts, and improve the administration of justice by leveraging readily available technology.  My co-founders include Margaret Hagan, Director of Stanford’s Legal Design Lab, and Mark Chandler, former Cisco GC.  Two years of work with seven state partners, from Alaska to Texas, yielded the Filing Fairness Toolkit, a unique, interactive guide that provides courts with concrete, actionable recommendations to implement and scale court filing systems.  Our latest collaboration will work with the Los Angeles Superior Court, the nation’s largest, to design new digital pathways that better serve court users in debt, eviction, and child support cases.

American Law Institute: Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication

Over the last several decades, a rising tide of high-stakes but small-scale cases has come to dominate state court dockets:  debt collections, evictions, home foreclosures, domestic violence protection order petitions, and child support enforcement actions.  For the next several years, I am honored to be leading the American Law Institute’s project, Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication, which will offer judges, court administrators, and other policymakers guidance on how to adjudicate these cases while respecting the procedural and substantive rights of all litigants.

The Automated State

Growing government use of AI is poised to transform everything from policing, to regulatory enforcement, to the distribution of welfare and other public benefits.  During 2018-2020, I co-led (with Dan Ho, Tino Cuéllar, and Cathy Sharkey) a pathbreaking project at the Administrative Conference of the United States, Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies.  I continue to expand upon ideas sparked by that seminal effort, including this, this, and this.

Litigation Transparency

In recent years, Congress and state legislatures have pared back litigation secrecy, fueled by revelations of corporate and individual malfeasance, from #MeToo to opioids, that, if discovered sooner, might have avoided further harm or even saved lives.  Appellate courts, too, have expressed thinning patience with overly broad and poorly supported trial court orders that shield information from public scrutiny.  Despite longstanding debate, however, there is surprisingly little rigorous empirical evidence testing core claims by champions and opponents of greater “litigation transparency.”  Our project, leveraging two enormous datasets, including a decade of federal court secrecy orders and a quarter-million cases from the Los Angeles Superior Court, both built using state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, will shed much-needed light on a debate that has to this point remained largely undisciplined by rigorous empirical inquiry.

Casebook: Access to Justice: Law, Policy, and Legal Ethics

As “access to justice” has coalesced into a distinct field of academic study, a growing set of law faculty around the U.S. are teaching courses on the topic.  However, most are seminars that reach only a limited enrollment of students, many of whom already have a strong interest in the core subject matter.  This project aims to bring access to justice more fully into the bloodstream of American law schools via a first-of-its-kind course and casebook that bridges access to justice and legal ethics.  Teaching the two topics in tandem is both a natural fit and a way to place access to justice at the center of the law school curriculum.