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 might technology expand—or curtail—access to justice? In 2023, Professor Engstrom published a first-of-its-kind edited volume, Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice, alongside a series of articles and book chapters (here, , here, here, among others) exploring these issues from multiple angles. In recent years, Professor Engstrom took his ideas on the road in dozens of presentations to bench and bar groups, among them the Ninth and Eleventh Circuit Conferences, the California Judge’s Association, the National Judicial College, the National Conference of Bar Presidents, and the American Law Institute.

Rethinking the Lawyer’s Monopoly

Crushing amounts of unmet civil legal need are leading some states to rethink the usual rules that “only lawyers can practice law” or own (and capitalize) law firms. Liberalizing these rules promises to spur human and non-human innovation in legal services, serving those who currently go without. Professor Engstrom and his team have advised multiple state supreme courts and policymakers on how to responsibly relax legal services regulation. Their 2022 report, Legal Innovation After Reform: Evidence from Regulatory Change, provided the first rigorous empirical evidence as to what types of legal innovation have resulted in the first two states—Utah and Arizona—to institute reform. A follow-up report, Legal Innovation After Reform: Five Years of Data on Regulatory Change, offers an updated look at what happens when states relax lawyer rules. And a recent edited volume, Rethinking the Lawyer’s Monopoly: Access to Justice and the Future of Legal Services, published by Cambridge University Press, pulls together a wide range of views from scholars, judges, and practitioners. For more on the Rhode Center’s work on this topic, see this useful Legal Regulatory Innovation Toolkit.

Court Tech: The Filing Fairness Project and L.A. Superior Court Collaboration

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. Professor Engstrom launched this program alongside co-founders 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. Their latest collaboration, with generous funding from the Stanford Impact Labs, is working 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. The initial report, A Blueprint for Expanding Access to Justice in Los Angeles Superior Court’s Eviction Docket, offers a roadmap for that collaboration. Current work is focused on improving the court’s digital infrastructure, including the incorporation of AI into the Court’s operations in both litigant-facing and internal, court-facing processes.

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 restraining order petitions, and child support enforcement actions. For the next several years, Professor Engstrom has the honor of 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, Prof. Engstrom co-led (with Dan Ho, Tino Cuéllar, and Cathy Sharkey) a pathbreaking project at the Administrative Conference of the United States, entitled Government by Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence in Federal Administrative Agencies. Professor Engstrom continues 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—the early discovery of which 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 either champions or opponents of greater “litigation transparency.” The Rhode Center project, leveraging two enormous datasets that include 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, is shedding much-needed light on a debate that has, to this point, remained largely undisciplined by rigorous empirical inquiry. Two initial papers are being published in what will be a series: Secrecy by Stipulation (in Duke Law Journal) and Shedding Light on Secret Settlements: An Empirical Study of California’s STAND Act (in University of Chicago Law Review). The latter was awarded the National Civil Justice Institute’s 2026 Civil Justice Scholarship Award.

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 casebook, under contract with Foundation Press, aims to bring access to justice more fully into the bloodstream of American law schools by interweaving access to justice with legal ethics. Teaching the two topics in one course is a natural way to place access to justice at the center of the law school curriculum.