Stanford Law School’s Legal Design Lab received a grant from the Gates Foundation to spearhead a new artificial intelligence initiative. The project, called Developing AI Co-Pilots for Eviction Defense and Reentry Debt Mitigation, is leveraging AI to assist legal aid organizations in two areas—eviction defense and re-entry debt after incarceration—focusing on designing, piloting, evaluating, and refining AI tools, or “co-pilots,” to support attorneys and staff.

“Legal aid organizations are on the front lines of assisting people with these issues, yet their resources are stretched extremely thin,” says Stanford Legal Design Lab Executive Director Margaret Hagan, JD ’13. “This generous support will help us address these gaps by empowering legal aid providers with cutting-edge AI tools that enhance their capacity to serve more clients effectively and at a larger scale. We have found opportunities for AI systems to speed up or automate lawyers’ tasks along their entire workflow, from case intake to preparing important litigation documents and strategies.” SL