September 26, 2025
By Bob Glaves | CBF Executive Director
When I kicked off this short series with my June post, I talked about the very real sense of “AI Overwhelm” many of us feel when this subject comes up. Following the news and latest developments these days, someone can easily get the impression that the solution to access to justice and virtually any other problem is AI–just ask it!
We of course know better, but putting the hype aside, there actually is real potential for AI to improve access to legal help. Not as a replacement for lawyers and other legal professionals who serve the public, but as an important complement to making legal assistance more efficient, effective, and accessible.
Part One of this post focused on some of the practical ways that AI can meaningfully improve procedural access to the court system, an essential element of any real access to justice solution. Now I want to turn to the equally important ways AI can improve access to the continuum of legal help that people may need, depending on their circumstances.
Start with the definition of access to justice
As I noted in Part 1 of this post, any time we are talking about anything as a potential solution for access to justice, we should start with the definition. Yogi Berra’s immortal words ring true: “If you don’t know where you are going, you might end up somewhere else.” The CBF definition is:
Everyone facing a legal issue (1) has timely and affordable access to the level of legal help necessary for them to get a fair and efficient outcome on the merits of their legal issue, and (2) objectively can believe they were treated fairly in the process.
As this definition makes clear, getting the right result on the merits of course is necessary for someone to receive justice, but particularly when the stakes are higher, it matters just as much how that result is delivered, or procedural justice. Access to the right level of legal help is crucial on both fronts.
With that in mind, below are a few ways to think about where AI has the potential to make a much greater impact to improve access to legal help.
Starting with What People Need: The Continuum of Legal Help
It is hardly groundbreaking to note that people have varying kinds of legal problems and need varying levels of legal help to resolve their problems fairly and effectively. But what does that mean in real life, and how can we ensure that people have access to the right level of legal assistance they need when they need it?
To achieve this goal, we need to have an integrated and properly supported continuum of assistance available that gives all people access to the level of legal help they need. That ranges from legal information and self-help solutions on one end of that continuum to full representation on the other, with many service options in between.
We clearly have a long way to go where legal assistance is realistically accessible for everyday people to fully cover the continuum of legal need. That said, a continuum of legal assistance, tiered to the merits and circumstances of each case, should be our goal to provide the right level of legal services to ensure someone can reach a fair and effective resolution for their legal issue.
With the above principles in mind, AI can help in different ways depending on where the appropriate solution resides on the continuum.
Better Access to Legal Information and Self-Help Solutions Along the Continuum
On the left side of the continuum–where someone is just looking for legal information or where self-help is a reasonable solution for someone to resolve their problem (typically a simpler, lower-stakes matter), AI clearly has the potential to make these solutions more realistic and accessible.
The areas where self-help solutions are appropriate are the types of legal issues where people generally do not need a lawyer to reach a fair and efficient resolution, like a small claims case where both parties are unrepresented individuals, or where someone needs to modify a child support order due to changed circumstances. Enabling someone to handle some of the more routine aspects of their case so that a lawyer can more realistically and affordably handle the other areas on a limited scope basis is another way self-help can be a meaningful part of the solution.
While AI already is being used to provide legal information and self-help assistance along these lines, there are still real questions about whether it is providing reliable and accurate information on a consistent basis. We all know about the hallucination stories, and AI just produces a lot of incorrect or unhelpful information today.
A recent article by Margaret Hagan at Stanford Law School offers a practical game plan for tackling this challenge and helping these tools live up to their real potential to improve access.
Helping People Connect and Find Their Place on the Continuum
Another area where AI can really improve access to justice is by making it easier for people to find reliable legal resources and connect to the appropriate sources of legal help for them along the continuum.
While we can all agree there is not nearly enough affordable and accessible legal help to go around, people in need face the additional challenge of not knowing where to find the help that is available, how to know what level of legal help they realistically need to resolve their problem effectively, and how to know if the help they find is any good.
Chatbots like Rentervention are early examples of what can be possible using AI tools, allowing people to ask legal questions in plain language and automatically get connected to resources and assistance that may be appropriate.
The Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois is leading a new and innovative “Illinois Access Initiative” that aims to tackle this challenge on a larger scale. The project has an ambitious goal to reimagine the way people in need connect to legal help by building a comprehensive, coordinated system of resources to help them resolve their legal problems. While AI is just one component of this endeavor, it is expected to play an integral role in connecting people seeking help to the larger ecosystem of resources and assistance.
Improving Access to Lawyers and Legal Help Along the Continuum
The other major area where AI can make a difference is by making lawyers and legal assistance more efficient, affordable, and accessible.
Again, when someone needs a lawyer to reach a fair and effective solution to their problem, AI is not going to replace the need for that lawyer. But it does have great potential to help lawyers serve more people more cost-effectively.
I am not even going to try to cover the many ways AI already is or has the potential to help lawyers be better, which is far beyond the scope of one post. Rather, I want to offer a few suggestions and examples for how to think about AI in this context, which I will expound on in the new year.
Ditch the Billable Hour
My views on the billable hour are well known to readers of this blog, and whatever place it may continue to have in the corporate market going forward, AI is going to accelerate its demise in the consumer and small business markets.
Rather than waiting for that to happen, for those in private practice focused on those markets, this is a good time to make the shift. Time has always been a poor proxy for the value that lawyers deliver, and with the huge leaps in efficiency that AI is going to make possible, that is only going to become more true.
The future is now for moving to value-based pricing that focuses on the core value that lawyers bring to their clients.
Evaluate Where AI Can Improve Efficiency in Your Day-to-Day Practice
Once you have freed your mind from the billable hour, or if you work in a context like legal aid or government where it never clouded your thinking, there are many ways that technology, generally, and AI specifically, can improve your efficiency and effectiveness.
You can find some good and practical food for thought on how to do this from two successful practitioners in the consumer and small business markets: Lauren Lester and Mathew Kerbis.
And just as I was finishing up this post, I read legal writing guru Bryan Garner’s latest column in the ABA Journal about how lawyers can use AI in drafting legal documents, which is well worth your time and will really get you thinking.
A Bigger Role for Limited Scope Representation
The other big way AI can improve access is by making limited scope representation a realistic solution for a much wider scale of the public. The improvements in procedural access that AI makes possible, which I covered in Part 1 of this post, will make it much more practical for everyday people to handle the more routine aspects of their legal matters.
These advances will enable lawyers to offer limited scope representation to a wider segment of the public who otherwise cannot currently afford or access legal assistance, a win-win for all concerned.
Looking Ahead
Critically thinking about how AI can improve access to justice does not have to exacerbate the “AI Overwhelm” so many of us are feeling. It is really just a matter of breaking down access to justice into its core components and evaluating the very real ways that AI has the potential to make a big difference.
While most of the potential for AI in this context is either very much a work in progress or not yet ready for prime time, it is moving very quickly, and I hope this will be a helpful roadmap for considering how we collectively should think about it in our ongoing quest for access to justice for all.