David Freeman Engstrom

David Freeman Engstrom is the LSVF Professor of Law at Stanford and Co-Director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, the premier academic center shaping the future of legal services and access to the legal system. An expert in civil procedure, administrative law, and law and technology, Engstrom focuses his current work on the future of courts and legal services in the AI age. His projects have spanned court use of technology in MDLs, lawyer use of “legal tech” tools to serve clients, and technologies that assist individuals without lawyers. Engstrom has published numerous articles on these topics, and he is the editor of Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice and, with Nora Freeman Engstrom, a forthcoming volume, Beyond the Lawyer’s Monopoly: Access to Justice and the Future of Legal Services, both with Cambridge Press. He also co-founded the Filing Fairness Project, an ambitious collaboration with seven states to modernize court technologies. In its latest venture, the Project is partnering with the L.A. Superior Court, the nation’s largest, to redesign digital pathways serving court users. Finally, much of Engstrom’s work focuses on access to justice in the millions of low-dollar but consequential cases, including debt collection, eviction, and child support actions, that shape Americans’ lives each year. He is leading the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication project, which will offer courts guidance on the urgent challenges these cases raise. He is an elected member of the ALI, an appointed member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a faculty affiliate at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. A longtime litigator, Engstrom has represented clients before the U.S. Supreme Court and other courts and agencies. He has a J.D. from Stanford, an M.Sc. from Oxford, and a Ph.D. from Yale.