How Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Access to Law—and Access to Justice
For decades, the access-to-justice movement has focused on a stubborn problem: millions of Americans encounter legal problems but cannot afford—or cannot find—the professional help they need to resolve them.
Artificial intelligence may be the first technology powerful enough to change the economics of that problem at scale.
AI will not eliminate the need for lawyers, courts, legal aid organizations, or other trusted institutions. Nor should it. But AI is rapidly reducing the cost of finding, understanding, organizing, and applying legal information. That development could fundamentally change who has meaningful access to the legal system.
The American Bar Association itself now recognizes that AI has the potential to make understandable legal information more widely available, simplify court forms and processes, and allow legal aid lawyers to serve more people.
The transformation requires us to distinguish between two related but different ideas:
Access to law means being able to understand the legal system, legal rights, legal procedures, and available options.
Access to justice means being able to use that knowledge—and obtain the appropriate level of assistance—to achieve a fair resolution of a legal problem.
AI has the potential to dramatically expand the first and, if developed responsibly, help us move much closer to the second.
The Traditional Access-to-Justice Model Has a Scaling Problem
American law has historically been organized around an assumption that people with serious legal problems will consult lawyers.
For millions of people, that assumption simply does not reflect reality.
Hiring a lawyer can cost hundreds of dollars an hour. Legal aid organizations have limited resources. Courts routinely confront large numbers of self-represented litigants. And even people who could afford some professional assistance may not need—or want—full representation for every legal problem.
The result is an enormous middle ground between two traditional alternatives:
Hire a lawyer or handle the problem entirely yourself.
Technology has been gradually filling that space for decades through legal information websites, standardized forms, document automation, online dispute resolution, limited-scope representation, and other forms of legal self-help.
AI dramatically accelerates that evolution.
From Searching for Legal Information to Having a Conversation With It
The Internet made legal information widely available.
But availability and accessibility are not the same thing.
A consumer facing a legal problem might find statutes, court rules, government websites, articles, court forms, and hundreds of search results. The harder problem is figuring out what all of that information means and where to begin.
Generative AI changes the interface.
Instead of requiring someone to formulate the perfect search query and navigate dozens of webpages, an AI system can potentially allow a person to describe a problem in ordinary language:
“My landlord says I have to leave in three days. What happens next?”
“My spouse and I agree on everything. How does an uncontested divorce work?”
“My mother died without a will. What should our family do first?”
The technology can then help organize information around the user’s question, explain terminology, identify relevant resources, and direct the person toward the next appropriate step.
That is an important shift.
The Internet gave people access to legal information. AI can help people navigate that information.
AI Can Make Law Understandable
Legal systems were largely designed by lawyers, judges, legislators, and administrators. Not surprisingly, they often communicate in the language of lawyers, judges, legislators, and administrators.
AI can become a translation layer between institutional legal information and ordinary people.
A statute can potentially be explained in plain English. A complicated court instruction can be broken into steps. Legal terminology can be defined instantly. Long government documents can be summarized. Information can increasingly be delivered in multiple languages and at different levels of complexity.
None of this requires AI to become a substitute for a lawyer.
It requires AI to become a better interface to the legal system.
That distinction is critical.
AI Can Transform Legal Self-Help
The next development goes beyond information.
AI can potentially help users move from learning about a legal problem to doing something about it.
Consider the progression:
Learn → Prepare → Get Help
A person can first learn about a legal issue.
Technology can then help that person gather information, complete questionnaires, organize documents, prepare standardized forms, identify filing requirements, and understand procedural steps.
When professional judgment is necessary, technology can help the consumer identify an appropriate lawyer, mediator, legal aid organization, court self-help center, or other authorized provider.
The objective should not be to automate lawyers out of the system.
It should be to create a system in which people receive the appropriate level of assistance for the particular problem they face.
Document Automation Is Becoming Intelligent Document Automation
Traditional document automation asks structured questions and uses the answers to assemble documents.
AI can make that experience substantially more accessible.
A user who does not understand a questionnaire can receive an explanation of what a question means. Complicated terminology can be translated into plain language. Missing information can be identified. Apparent inconsistencies can be flagged.
The underlying document can still be based upon carefully designed templates and predetermined rules.
In this model, AI does not need to invent a legal document from scratch.
Instead, it can make a structured document-automation system easier for ordinary people to use.
That combination—expert-created content, structured automation, and conversational AI—may prove far more important to consumer legal services than simply asking a general-purpose chatbot to draft a legal document.
AI Can Also Expand the Capacity of Lawyers and Legal Aid
Access-to-justice technology is sometimes described as a contest between lawyers and machines.
That is the wrong framework.
AI can dramatically increase the capacity of lawyers themselves.
It can assist with document review, summaries, research, drafting, intake, administrative work, and other repetitive activities. An ABA report on AI and access to justice highlighted a legal-aid field study in which 90% of participants with access to paid AI tools reported increased productivity.
If technology allows a legal aid lawyer to serve substantially more clients, that is an access-to-justice innovation.
If it allows a small law firm to profitably offer a $500 limited-scope service instead of requiring a $5,000 engagement, that is an access-to-justice innovation.
If it allows lawyers to spend less time processing information and more time exercising professional judgment, counseling clients, negotiating disputes, and appearing in court, that benefits both lawyers and consumers.
AI therefore has the potential to expand both consumer self-help and professional capacity simultaneously.
Courts Are Beginning to Confront the Same Transformation
The change is already reaching the courts.
The National Center for State Courts has specifically examined how AI tools can assist self-represented litigants and how courts and legal aid organizations should respond as members of the public increasingly use general-purpose AI systems.
NCSC has also identified possibilities such as user-friendly court chatbots and interfaces that help self-represented litigants navigate court services.
This matters because access to justice is not simply about creating more legal services.
Sometimes the system itself needs to become easier to navigate.
AI creates an opportunity to redesign courts around the reality that many people entering them will not have lawyers.
But AI Creates Real Risks
The access-to-justice potential of AI should not obscure its limitations.
General-purpose AI systems can make mistakes. They can hallucinate cases or legal rules. Information can be outdated. A system may fail to appreciate an important factual distinction. Privacy and cybersecurity concerns are significant when people disclose sensitive information.
NCSC has specifically warned legal professionals about fabricated citations, distorted holdings, and incorrect procedural information produced by AI systems.
Those risks argue for responsible design—not for abandoning the technology.
Consumer-facing legal AI should increasingly be built around identifiable authoritative sources, structured legal content, jurisdiction-specific information, transparent limitations, appropriate privacy protections, and mechanisms for human assistance when professional judgment is required.
The question should not be whether AI is perfect.
No human institution is perfect either.
The appropriate question is whether a particular system is accurate, transparent, appropriately limited, and demonstrably useful to the people it is designed to serve.
Regulation Must Evolve Too
AI also presents a challenge to traditional regulation of legal services.
Unauthorized-practice-of-law rules were largely developed in a world in which legal assistance was provided by one human being to another human being.
That framework becomes more complicated when legal information is delivered through software, automated questionnaires, expert systems, document assembly platforms, and AI.
In 2025, the National Center for State Courts’ AI Policy Consortium urged state supreme courts and bar associations to modernize unauthorized-practice rules to accommodate responsible AI-enabled legal services. Among the approaches it identified were permitting vetted technology tools, creating regulatory sandboxes, and reconsidering existing definitions of unauthorized practice.
Consumer protection remains essential.
But regulation should distinguish between technology that harms consumers and technology that helps them understand and navigate the legal system.
Protecting the public should not mean protecting complexity.
The Biggest Transformation May Be Economic
For generations, legal knowledge has been expensive partly because extracting and applying it required substantial amounts of professional time.
AI changes that equation.
A recent ABA analysis describes generative AI as simultaneously affecting both the demand and supply sides of legal services: making legal intelligence more broadly available while dramatically increasing productivity in legal work.
That could ultimately be AI’s greatest contribution to access to justice.
Legal information that once required an hour of professional time may eventually be delivered in seconds.
Routine legal processes that once required repeated office visits can increasingly be completed online.
Lawyers may be able to provide limited professional intervention at precisely the point where judgment is needed rather than handling every step of a transaction.
The result could be an entirely new legal-services continuum:
Free legal information → AI-guided self-help → automated documents → human assistance → limited-scope legal services → full legal representation.
Consumers could move up or down that continuum depending upon the complexity and risk of their particular problem.
That is a much more realistic model than assuming every legal problem requires either full representation or complete self-reliance.
Access to Law Comes Before Access to Justice
There is a broader principle at stake.
People cannot meaningfully participate in a legal system they cannot understand.
Before someone can decide whether to hire a lawyer, file a court action, negotiate a dispute, prepare a document, contact legal aid, or simply do nothing, that person needs enough information to understand the problem and the available choices.
That is access to law.
And access to law is one of the foundations of access to justice.
For the first time, AI gives us the possibility of making vast amounts of legal information conversational, understandable, personalized to the user’s questions, and available at extraordinarily low marginal cost.
That is not the same thing as guaranteeing justice.
But it is an extraordinary step toward making the legal system genuinely accessible.
The JusticeXpress Vision
At JusticeXpress, we believe technology should expand access to the legal system rather than create another barrier to it.
The future we envision is not one in which AI replaces lawyers.
It is one in which people can understand their legal problems earlier, obtain reliable information more easily, prepare routine legal documents more affordably, navigate procedures with greater confidence, and connect with qualified professionals when professional assistance is actually needed.
AI should complement lawyers, courts, legal aid organizations, mediators, document automation systems, self-help centers, and other parts of the justice ecosystem.
The goal is not artificial intelligence instead of human expertise.
The goal is intelligent access to human expertise, legal information, technology, and the justice system itself.
For more than a generation, the access-to-justice community has asked how we can close the enormous gap between the legal needs of the public and the legal assistance available to them.
AI does not automatically solve that problem.
But it changes what is possible.
And that means the most important question facing the legal profession may no longer be:
“Should artificial intelligence be part of the legal system?”
It already is.
The more important question is:
“How do we use it to build a legal system that works for everyone?”
That is the opportunity before us.
