In the United States, over 90% of civil legal needs go unrepresented – a staggering justice gap that leaves millions of people facing eviction, domestic violence, wrongful conviction and other urgent legal crises without access to an attorney. For these individuals, the difference between getting legal help or going without can literally be the difference between safety and harm, between keeping a home and losing everything.

One year ago, Thomson Reuters launched its AI for Justice program to help address this crisis by providing legal aid organizations with access to CoCounsel, its professional-grade AI legal assistant, along with specialized training and support. The results have been significant: attorneys are saving up to 15 hours per week, organizations are serving as many as 50% more clients daily, and urgent case materials are being prepared up to 75% faster. But more importantly, these efficiency gains are translating into real-world impact – domestic violence victims receiving protection orders more quickly, wrongfully evicted tenants getting back into their homes before their possessions are destroyed, and innocent people in prison having their exoneration petitions filed years sooner.

In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with two people at the forefront of this initiative:

• Laura Safdie is head of innovation for legal at Thomson Reuters and has been championing access to justice through technology since her days at Casetext, where she was a cofounder.

• Pablo Ramirez is executive director of the Legal Aid Society of San Bernardino, a small organization of 45 staff members serving over 9,000 people a year in one of California's largest counties.

Together, they share powerful stories of how AI is enabling legal aid lawyers to be more efficient and more effective in doing what they came to this work to do – fighting for their clients.

They discuss the three pillars of the AI for Justice program – access, support and scale – and how Thomson Reuters is working to create a blueprint that can be replicated across the legal aid community. They also tackle the challenges that remain, from overcoming fear and skepticism about AI to reaching a highly disaggregated network of small, resource-strapped organizations. And they explore the bigger question: Can AI actually help close the justice gap, or are we just nibbling at the edges of an ever-growing problem?

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