January 30, 2026
By Bob Glaves | CBF Executive Director
AI is seemingly everywhere today, and whether we are ready or not, it is already starting to disrupt the consumer market for access to legal help at a time when our profession is just asking to be disrupted. My 2026 Resolution for the Legal Profession is to recognize this reality and use it as an opportunity to help shape a better future for both lawyers and the people who depend on our services.
This post is the first part of a five-part grand plan to carry out this year’s Resolution. Recognizing the scale and scope of the dysfunction in today’s market for consumer legal services, the starting point for this grand plan necessarily must start with the perspective of the people in need of legal help.
The full five-point plan follows below, and each of the remaining prongs will get its own post over the next several months:
- Start from the perspective of the people needing legal help (Today’s post)
- Leave the billable hour in the rearview mirror (February)
- Focus on the unique value we provide as lawyers (March)
- Responsibly build AI into the practice of law (April)
- Give people reliable and vetted tools to find appropriate legal help for their issues (May)
The backdrop for the Resolution and Five-Point Plan
As I noted in more detail in last month’s post, the backdrop for this year’s Resolution is the fact that at a time when we have a record number of lawyers practicing in Illinois and throughout the country, the majority of Americans struggle to find affordable legal help when they need it. As I said then, it is almost like our legal profession is asking to be disrupted, and here comes AI to do just that.
Start From the Perspective of People Looking for Legal Help
Recognizing the enormous gap in affordable access to help today, we need to be clear-eyed about when people can effectively do things on their own, when they most need the help of a lawyer, and how much lawyer they need. “Access to justice” is not one problem we are trying to solve; it is a wide range of legal problems of varying degrees people face every day that should be met with a corresponding continuum of potential solutions.
Diagnosing What People Need
How do we break down what people need? If you are a regular reader of this blog, this next part will be familiar, starting with defining what we mean by access to justice. 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.
The next step is to assess the nature of the legal problem that a person is facing. Understanding the legal issue, its impact on the person involved, and related dynamics is essential to determine the right legal intervention.
The graphic above is a basic way of visualizing two of the biggest factors in the analysis of when people need lawyers most: the stakes and complexity involved (larger gavel means higher importance for a lawyer to be involved). Other important factors— especially unequal power dynamics that may be at play and the relative merits of their case–also influence when people need a lawyer and how much lawyer they need.
Given the range of legal solutions that may be appropriate for a given problem, depending on the above analysis, 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 when they need it.
The level of assistance someone may need 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.
The Range of AI Disruption and Opportunity
Recognizing the range of legal problems and the continuum of legal assistance that may be appropriate for a particular circumstance is the necessary starting point for thinking about how AI will both disrupt things and offer new opportunities to better meet these varying legal needs. However, identifying the appropriate level of legal assistance is not enough on its own; that legal help needs to be realistically affordable and accessible to them. And we know that too often that is not the case for most people today.
That leaves plenty of room for disruption from AI, but it doesn’t fundamentally change the level of legal help on the continuum that someone needs to get a fair and effective outcome for their case.
So, if people just need information or self-help resources to handle a routine legal issue, or a simpler or lower-stakes legal matter in courts—say a traffic ticket, name change, or an agreed change to a visitation schedule after a divorce—people already should be able to do that on their own, and generally already do. AI has great potential to make it much easier and more efficient for them to do so, for everyone’s benefit.
Similarly, the procedural aspects of a court case or other legal matter (e.g., filing administrative appeals, or preparing and filing motions and other court papers) often have required the help of a lawyer to navigate in the past, but that should never be necessary just for the procedural steps. AI already is showing great potential to make it easier for people to do those tasks on their own, which will make the legal system more accessible and affordable for people to navigate and enable lawyers to expand the number of people they can help with limited scope representation.
And when it is a higher-stakes matter where someone really needs a lawyer, there is much more that AI and other technologies can do to make the lawyer’s services more affordable and accessible, offering great potential for lawyers to be able to serve many more people who currently are not able to access legal services when they need them. The next posts in this series will delve further into how our profession can embrace this tremendous opportunity in a way that is a win-win-win for clients, lawyers, and the legal system.
To fully realize AI’s potential to expand access though, we also need to give the public better legal tools to navigate the matters they should be able to handle on their own, and to recognize and connect with lawyers when they want or need them. We know people are already turning to the public AI tools out there, often with poor results (hallucinations, incorrect information, etc.) since these are not legally vetted tools that are fit for this specialized purpose.
As a profession, we can do a lot better by giving people practical resources and guidance to help them understand their legal issues and options and connect them to the appropriate level of legal help (including proceeding on their own where appropriate). This should include realistic guidance for using AI and legally vetted AI tools that they can have confidence in turning to for assistance, and I will touch on that more in the concluding post for this series.
Onward in the Series
This is the first stop on the road for this year’s Resolution, and the next three stops will look at how lawyers can use AI and other technology to more efficiently and effectively meet the needs of the people we serve. That starts with the need to move on from the billable hour, the subject of next month’s post.
Yes, predictions of the death of the billable hour have been greatly exaggerated for some time now, but will AI finally put the stake in it? As a Hall of Fame announcer for the Cubs famously said when there was a deep fly ball, “It could be, it might be…”
Stay tuned for the answer in February, and thanks as always for reading along.