Can A.I. Solve the Justice Gap?

Illustration of hands using a smartphone with various legal icons displayed above.

Fri, 12/12/2025 - 04:00

Although a long-standing and well-known issue, the Legal Services Corporation (LSC) published a report in 2022 on a study that sheds new light on the nature, scope, and urgency of the ‘justice gap.’ The justice gap refers to “the difference between the civil legal needs of low-income Americans and the resources available to meet those needs (LSC Report).” Low-income litigants navigating criminal courts can expect support from the state government in the form of a public defender and other resources. However, civil litigants facing issues as vital to their livelihood as medical debt, housing, or probate, receive no such support, and must use private funds to retain the services of a private attorney or defend themselves in court alone. This issue cannot be brushed under the rug as according to the study, “74% of low-income households experienced at least one civil legal problem in the past year [2021].”

The LSC does its part by funding legal aid organizations and supporting the education of civil litigants to seek out those resources. The Riverside County Law Library also does its part by making available expensive legal resources usually only available to law firms and schools, like legal textbooks and database subscriptions to Westlaw and Lexis Nexis. However, these measures still only make small contributions to closing the vast justice gap as described in the report. The legal field has been one of the most shaken by the development of AI. A lot of noise is made about the bad effects of the technology on the field: lawyers citing cases that ChatGPT hallucinated, pro per litigants using forms that were poorly filled out by AI, etc. On the quieter side, top law schools are carrying out and publishing new research about the possibilities of AI being used to help close the justice gap.

Both perspectives might be selling a dream, a story that plays on our hopes and fears about the future. A more realistic approach takes into consideration the parties that would be using the new technology: consumers, attorneys, and the courts. Aside from the invention of the internet itself, technological innovations tend to revolutionize how one of these groups interacts with the legal system at a time. For example, at the turn of the century, Westlaw and Lexis released their legal databases, profoundly simplifying the process of legal research. However, this was mostly a change that impacted attorneys, making their work more efficient. As opposed to hunting through encyclopedias and court reports, they can simply search for cases with key words, and further, they can find the decision history of that case without consulting yet another book. Making legal research a bit more like a Google search than a trip to the Library of Congress certainly makes it more accessible for consumers to partake in the practice. But the average person still has a hard time knowing what to do with cases while filing paperwork, even if it is easier to locate them. Both Lexis and Westlaw currently only offer corporate subscriptions to their databases. They seem to be aware of their real market.

On the consumer side, technology has been developed for the purpose of self-help. For example, “a service called DoNotPay, run by a then-undergraduate student at Stanford, made headlines in 2016 when it helped overturn 160,000 parking tickets (Simshaw).” However, these software solutions have an ambiguous legacy due to, “a landscape of regulatory uncertainty ... For example, DoNotPay, which has evolved from helping consumers challenge parking tickets to assisting self-represented litigants in small claims court, has been on the receiving end of both awards for access to justice and lawsuits (Simshaw).”

COVID-19 saw courts around the nation rapidly implement technological innovations like e-filing and Zoom hearings. However, the timing of these changes indicates that the courts change procedure according to necessity, or in reaction to emergencies, as opposed to an interest in streamlining processes for consumers and lawyers.

AI, not unlike the internet, seems to be a revolution that can and will impact all three of these domains at once. However, it already looks like AI will simply exaggerate tendencies that already exist in the current configuration of the techno-legal sphere. Starting with consumers, technology cannot replace an attorney for dire civil legal needs, so AI can only be used for smarter and more interactive versions of the self-help software that currently exists. As will be discussed below, technology is good for forms of mediation that help consumers avoid going to court. This can be software that helps one fill out, say, a living trust on the internet. Once a case must go to probate court, it is too late for AI to help as the problem has become too complex and delicate to be handled by anyone else but a professional.

Another problem concerns the way technology makes legal services easier to perform, but does not lead, necessarily, to the expansion of access to those services. Much like Westlaw and Lexis Nexis, “it is now widely recognized that AI has the ability to increase the efficiency of legal tasks ranging from intake to eDiscovery, to legal research, to developing case strategy, and even to assisting with drafting legal documents, though not without high-profile misuses. But much of this development is happening in-house at the largest corporate law firms. And the most impactful generative-AI developments, like Harvey AI—essentially a more dependable and tailored ChatGPT for lawyers—are designed for and marketed to large firms (Simshaw).” What incentive does a big law firm have to donate time to low-income Americans, just because the work of its lawyers has become more efficient?

On the level of the courts, technology tends to have to do with digitizing processes which otherwise remain complex. However, some courts have gotten on board with technological forms of mediating conflicts that prevent litigants from needing to file in court. The Yale Law Review reports that:

many jurisdictions appreciate that a truly efficient ecosystem is one in which technology can help prevent many cases from needing to reach the courts in the first place. Indeed, alternative dispute resolution—the process of settling disputes without litigation—has blossomed into online dispute resolution (ODR) through the use of algorithms to overcome the cost and limited availability of human mediators. When courts nevertheless become involved, some have also embraced ODR as an option for a wide range of processes at this stage, sometimes turning to private-sector-developed ODR resolution systems.

On the level of civil procedure, reform seems to be more about coordination. Insofar as isolated counties and districts adopt technology, without wider co-operation from state and federal courts, technology proves to be more of a burden and source of confusion. As of now, “there is no leadership or centralized national coordination among courts in the United States on the implementation of court-oriented technologies, which can be a major impediment to the adoption of novel technologies (Simshaw).”

At the start of the AI revolution, the prospects of closing the justice gap seem as grim as they ever were. However, one should not lose out hope that an opportunity for expanding access to justice is upon us, if we could just grasp it.

Written by Yanis Ait Kaci Azzou, Library Assistant

Sources:

"The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-income Americans"

"Interoperable Legal AI for Access to Justice" by Drew Simshaw, Yale Law Journal