Can Tech Simplify Pro Bono?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Linda Warren Seely:

But there’s so many options and opportunities for the volunteer attorneys to step in and help to make the process just a little bit easier for people if they just adopt some of the technology that’s out there.

Announcer:

Equal Access to Justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice an An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the General Public Talk. Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Cat Moon:

Hello, Linda and Zac, and welcome to Talk Justice. It is so good to have you both here to talk. Today we have a big theme we’re going to address and dig into the big theme being how might we use technology to support and scale pro bono efforts? And you two come to this and come at this from kind of different places and what I call the legal spectrum. And I would love to kick off by hearing from you both about some of the pro bono projects you’re involved in that are integrating technology and helping support this very important work. So let’s talk about some of those projects. Linda, would you like to kick off for us?

Linda Warren Seely:

Sure, I’ll be glad to. Just by way of introduction, I worked at a legal aid office for about 25 years and then went to work at the American Bar Association as the director of a section of dispute resolution. And when I returned to Tennessee in 20 21, 1 of the projects I got involved in pretty quickly was through the A DR Commission, the Alternative Dispute Resolution Commission because I had worked on creating an online dispute resolution platform through the New York State Court system. And it had a lot of work at my time at the A BA in the ODR field. So when I sit on the A DR commission and I’m on the online Dispute Resolution task force, and one of the things that was created was a medical debt free suit online dispute resolution process using a specially designed platform to assist medical debt people who owed medical debt and Erling Erlinger Hospital.

And so it’s proven to be quite beneficial. It’s got high rates of usage for medical debt owes, and the hospital has found that it has saved them considerable amounts of money and time and effort in collecting debts. And they’ve been able to reach settlements very easily using this particular platform. We’re really hoping that we can take this across the state to use it for other medical debt resolutions and also to maybe scale it up for use through the general sessions courts, particularly for some of the pro se litigants. That’s really been one of the areas where I’ve focused a lot of my attention and time because I do feel very strongly that we don’t make good use of a lot of the alternative dispute resolution processes. There’s some great programs out there. There’s a whole ODR Cyber week that’s going to be starting up here really soon that I’ve signed up to take part in.

There’s a lot of use of a DR and technology in other countries. Unfortunately, the United States is pretty far behind in that particular arena. I’ve also worked with West Tennessee Legal Services. We do conservatorships for families who have young adults who are in need of a conservatorship. They’re aging out being minors and their families have to make decisions for them. They’ve got a lot of automated document preparation software that we use to create the petitions and file the petitions and things like that. So I’m very interested in what we can do to take more of the processes online. I know that it’s really hit or miss in Tennessee, which is where we all live and work, but I’d really like to see if perhaps the administrative office of the courts could push some of these judges to be a little more amenable to taking the court system more online.

I mean, there’s still some rural areas where there’s not electronic filing. There’s one jurisdiction that’s just recently come online and you’re thinking, where have you been for the past 10 years? So I also am the chair of the Tennessee Bar’s Access to Justice Committee, and we’ve created a technology committee. And what we’re looking at is just some different options, things like intervention that I think that’s being used up in New York. There’s a lot of really interesting and fun platforms that we’re taking a look at to see what we think. And then there’s that. North Carolina, we did their driver’s license restoration project, which was really a lot of fun because that also used another kind of innovation that we’re pretty far behind, and that is using paralegals to actually deliver assistance. So I’m really interested in this and I’d really like to see us scale up as best we can. And I think what Zac’s got to talk about is really fascinating.

Cat Moon:

So I’d love to hear from Zac and then maybe we can pull some threads through.

Zachary Oswald:

The main project that we’re working on, Kat is with our reentry program at Legal Aid of Middle Tennessee. And one of the benefits that we’ve had recently is the addition of Vince Morris, who is infamous in the LSC Innovations and Technology world, who came on staff with us last year. But what we have created to help with people who are coming out of incarceration is an AI model that allows us to quickly go through and create expungement petitions. So that works in conjunction with chat GPT where we have trained our subscription chat GPT model. We upload somebody’s criminal record, it creates for us then a spreadsheet based on rules that we’ve taught it to look for, what’s been dismissed versus what’s retired, what’s a diverted charge or what’s a conviction? Puts those into a spreadsheet that we then dump into an Excel sheet using our Microsoft Office subscription.

Then using Zapier, it takes the Excel sheet that we’ve got, throws that through Zapier, who then connects to Gavel, which is our document automation system, and it automatically generates those petitions. So if somebody comes in and talks to us and they say, Hey, I want to get my criminal record expunged. They’ve got 15, 20 dismissed or retired charges, which is not uncommon amongst our clients, we can generate those 20 petitions in five minutes or less just by grabbing the record from the internet, dropping into chat GPT back into Excel, zap over to gavel, those get printed. It takes longer for the clients to sign the petitions than it actually does for us to generate them. It’s really, really excellent.

Linda Warren Seely:

I think that is so exciting. I was at the expungement clinic at Belmont and had a chance to work with Savannah on some of those expungements, and we had a nice little group of lawyers that we actually made the law students do most of the work. We just took the petitions in front of the judge. I think WTLS uses Gavel as their document creation software too.

Cat Moon:

Since you mentioned that, Linda, and that caught my ear too, Zac, you were describing a tech stack. So you have found a way to layer the LLM, the generative AI on top of this to get the desired result, but that’s only one piece of the stack that actually makes it happen. And so there are these other pieces of technology that frankly have been around for a while. So Zapier, which connects different technologies and kind of creates the if then this automation obviously gavel as an example of document automation that has been around for a long time. I’m curious, Linda and I always like to talk about this fact because generative AI is so in our faces right now, and it is super cool, and I think we’re figuring out more and more ways to make it useful to the work we do for helping clients, for helping clients help themselves. And there are a whole lot of other pieces to this tech puzzle which make these things work. And Linda, I’m curious if you can speak to that point as well, because the medical debt platform that you’re talking about, which is in the Chattanooga area, correct? The Erlanger Hospital. That’s right, yes. Yeah, so that obviously predates generative ai. My sense is there’s probably not a generative AI piece to that. So that really stands out as an example too of Yeah, it does now. Cool, cool. Well, tell us about that.

Linda Warren Seely:

What the program does is it actually, it’s asynchronous, but you can, and it’s a negotiation process between the debtor and then the hospital, but there’s the opportunity to bring in a rule 31 listed mediator to help the parties, and that too, it’s still asynchronous and tax-based. I think the hardest part for the clients is, first of all, they weren’t sure if they really should trust this. That was a real tough piece when we first got started. So that’s why we brought in the Hamilton County court system. So it had the imper of the court, and I think people felt that it’s more safe using it. And then there’s the text-based issue because that can be kind of difficult for some of the clients who aren’t quite as tech savvy. But what we’ve been talking to the mediators about is using AI to generate options, which is something that mediators will use it for or to maybe map out a kind of strategy for what they’re looking for to do.

And I think that having that mediator who’s actually using AI to help generate options to help create different paths moving forward, is really an interesting way to do it. Now, I’m a big fan of the chatbots too, and we’ve been very involved in the free legal Answers program. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but that too is asynchronous and text-based. But it uses volunteer lawyers and I think personally that we ought to have a chat bot and then have the volunteer lawyers go back and take a look at what the chat bot says, and then if it gets a thumb up, thumbs up, then it goes out. But I can think of a lot of different things that we don’t take advantage of that we should be taking advantage of that would make it so much easier for the SE litigants. And I bet, Zac, you can talk a little bit about that big justice gap that exists for people. I mean, people will have a legal problem, don’t do anything, they don’t know what to do and where to turn.

Cat Moon:

It’s actually 51% according to, well, there’s an aisle study that it talks about, and I’m sorry, Zac, I jumped in because I was just reading rereading this. So there’s 51% of legal problems just across the board. So not just experienced fellow income Americans, but 51% of folks don’t access any meaningful legal help. So all kinds of statistics. So Zac, what would you add to the points that Linda was making?

Zachary Oswald:

I mean particularly where that se gap comes in there. One of the things that we’re trying to do is just a lot of document automation for people. And that’s not new, that’s not sexy technology in terms of what we’re talking about in 2024, but it’s what people need. And so we’ve created actually for Tennessee a certificate of restoration automation process that people can go through. There are almost 500,000 people that have lost their civil rights because they’ve been incarcerated who could get them restored if they knew the process to go through. And it’s unfortunately, it’s a two-step process. You have to go through the courts, then you have to go through the Secretary of State. There’s multiple layers of paperwork. But again, just creating a simple document automation project, and again, we used gavel for that, that lets people answer the questions using plain language.

What’s your name? What’s your address? Why is it that you think that your rights should be restored as opposed to tell me what the statutory reasoning is for why you might, things like that that we can pump it in then to a petition for them so that they can file and get those. It’s just so much opportunity there to allow people to access justice if we can just simplify it and create it for them rather than having to actually make sure that they know how to do a caption that’s got parties up at the top of a screen

Linda Warren Seely:

So that available to anybody in the state of Tennessee, or do they have to be eligible through your program?

Zachary Oswald:

That is available for anybody in the state of Tennessee, and it is on our website@las.org. You can find the certificate of restoration information that’s there if somebody gets into trouble and they do need, perhaps they have to show up for a hearing or something like that. We actually have partners throughout the state Legal Aid of East Tennessee Free Hearts, west Tennessee Legal Services who then can represent somebody if they’ve got to be there. So we’ve also got the representation backup for people who may not be able to do it pro se.

Linda Warren Seely:

Well, one thing I’m really interested in, because I am the pro bono counsel at a large law firm, is to get the attorneys to use the technology and the things that are available to them as assist in delivering pro bono legal assistance. I mean, I keep telling them it’s really not this hard. I had this new associate who’s been with the firm for about a year. She’s never gone to court. I finally convinced her to take on a conservatorship case right now. That’s pretty easy to do. And I arranged to have the hearing by Zoom, and she was so scared to do a Zoom hearing, and I’m like, this is really easy. I promise you, you can’t mess this up. I will walk you through. I will hold your hand through this whole thing. But there’s so many options and opportunities for the volunteer attorneys to step in and help to make the process just a little bit easier for people if they just adopt some of the technology that’s out there. I think adoption on the part of the legal profession is the hardest thing, quite frankly.

Cat Moon:

So right. Technology is easy. Humans are hard. I say that a lot. However, you both have this really incredible experience being part of these projects, part of creating these tools, and you are seeing the positive impacts. So I’m curious, based on this experience that you’ve had so far, what is some specific advice you might be able to offer to others? So Linda, I’m certain that there are other pro bono partners situated in law firms that are kind of struggling with the same thing. And then Zac, you have counterparts in other legal aid organizations across the country who no doubt are seeing these cool things happening, and how can we jump in and do some of this stuff? Because as we’ve made the point, a lot of the things that you all are involved in are technologies that have been around for a while. The gen AI chat bots are cool, but there’s foundational stuff. So what is some advice that you can offer to folks based on what you’ve been doing,

Linda Warren Seely:

Stop being so afraid of your computer. I can remember writing an article for the Memphis Bar Association Journal when I became, I was the president of the Memphis Bar in 20 13, 20 13, and the first sentence in this article was attorneys that giant thing on your guest that is a tool. Learn to use it. Stop having your secretary, print off your emails. Use this tool, learn how to use it. And I really think that this idea that lawyers should be averse to technology and not use it appropriately is just so fallacious. And it’s been just such a big burr under my saddle for years that here’s this wonderful tool. There’s ways that we can use it and then they won’t use it. And I don’t know how to best encourage it other than to just demonstrate if I can do it, anybody can do it.

Cat Moon:

Well, you are an incredible role model, Linda. So no, I don’t know. Absolutely. Zac, what have you got? What are some takeaways that you have from the work y’all have been doing?

Zachary Oswald:

I mean, I think that the main takeaways that I would say in terms of the pro bono projects that we do can fit into three categories, and that is nerves, humans, and return on investment. And Linda already touched on the first one is a lot of times when we’re trying to recruit pro bono attorneys, they want to help, but they’re really nervous about it. This is outside of their comfort zone. They do transactional law, they do construction law. How am I going to talk somebody through getting an expungement, getting a will, doing a power of attorney? And so I think being able to have the tools like we do with this expungement tool that says, this is going to do the work for you. All you’re going to do is compare it. We’re going to be right beside you, and then you’re going to explain it to the next person.

And that’s the second part of this is the human interaction. Part of it is when you’re dealing with pro bono projects, what somebody is wanting as a pro bono attorney is something that feels like they accomplish something for a person. And so making sure that we can provide an opportunity for them to have a real discussion with the client that they’re serving is the most important part about making sure that they feel like it was valuable. So if we can take the paperwork out of the process, or we can automate that to make it quicker so that they can spend more time talking to John Doe, to Jane Doe, who’s right in front of them, they’re going to feel like they actually accomplished something because they got to speak to a human instead of sitting and scribbling or typing for a few hours. And the last thing is return on investment.

And that is making sure that your pro bono attorneys actually know what was accomplished as a result of that day. Don’t just bank ’em as they walk out the door. Make sure and remind them, here’s the stack of expungements that you did, the clinic that Linda was talking about, that we together at Belmont just two weeks ago, we expunged 187 records and had no, sorry, $531,000 in court cost waived in one day’s worth of work. That’s an incredible accomplishment. And it’s something that you can feed to a pro bono attorney that gets them to come back because they realize that they actually contributed to changing people’s lives. And those are the three things that I would focus on.

Linda Warren Seely:

And I know because when the attorney, I was talking about the one that had never been to court, she had never had a chance to talk to a client because in my firm it’s so big. So the associates, they’re just working on little tiny pieces of litigation or transactions. This was her first time to actually talk to a client, and she was so excited to do that. She was scared to go to court, but she was excited to do that piece.

Cat Moon:

So these are amazing stories. So Zac, just the impact, the return on investment that you just described for the project that you and Linda were involved in the expungement clinic. And Linda as someone who once was that new attorney looking for those opportunities, I can imagine how powerful that was for the young attorney in your office to be able to have that human connection. And this is what I’m hearing that interestingly, and maybe a little counterintuitively, using technology the right way actually improves and increases the opportunity for this human lawyer to client interaction and connection by taking out of the interaction, all of the busy work and those things that actually can detract and distract from two people being fully present and being able to have that connection. And I can imagine too that it can improve actually the quality, right, of those conversations if the technology is kind of doing this heavy lifting around that. So I really,

Linda Warren Seely:

I would say that’s exactly right. I mean, I teach the a DR course at the University of Memphis, and they’re all third year law students. And I tell ’em, I said, you’ve had two years of law school. You’ve had two years of learning how to not be a human. Now we’re going to talk about being a human again, because that’s what you need to be for your clients. You need to be that human, not just that automaton who’s spiting outlaw. Your client could care less if you write the world’s greatest brief in your citations or Blue Book. Perfect. They just want you to fix their problem.

Cat Moon:

Amen. And be there for that human connection. Linda, I explained that same opportunity that we have to my students as well, that all of the technology isn’t going to replace that very human connection. And so how are we leveraging the technology so that we can really focus in on that?

Linda Warren Seely:

That’s really exciting what Zac and LAS have been able to do and make that process so much easier for the pro bono lawyers because they don’t know what they’re doing. They really don’t in that particular space, that’s not their area. So anything that a legal aid office can do to make it easier for them is going to be very, very welcome.

Cat Moon:

I’m curious to know, are there any projects that you guys have in the works or anything that you are curious to try with respect to technology and empowering either clients or lawyers in the pro bono process? Kind of anything on their horizon?

Linda Warren Seely:

Well, what I’d like is I would like a program that kind of like what chat GPT will do, which is to basically where you go in and you say, okay, give me the statutes for the state of Tennessee around landlord tenant. And then especially where there’s been no notice given that you’re in arrears or that you’re in having any problems. But I’ve been developing a bunch of research documents based on the different states where we practice and we have offices all across the United States from Albuquerque to Boston. And so having either the ability to help them use a kind of AI tool to condense what they’re trying to figure out down into something that’s more manageable, that can help point them along the way without having to use a big AI system. I want more legal research focus, and I know there’s stuff out there, I just don’t know if we can afford it or if I can build it.

Cat Moon:

I like the sound of that, Linda, you’re going to build something. Alright, Zac, what about you?

Zachary Oswald:

Our focus right now is on expanding the current tool that we’re working on to include convictions. And that gets really complicated in Tennessee, depending on whether the conviction was before 1985 from 1985 to 96 after 96. But to continue to optimize that project and then to bring in something else that we did actually at the Belmont Clinic. And that is that we actually virtually hosted a satellite site that we did where not only were we doing these expungements and court cost waivers at Belmont Law School, but we actually had a second site set up at the Tennessee Justice Center in North Nashville to allow people who had transportation issues. Because transit in Nashville is not always the easiest to navigate because parking is not the easiest to find in Nashville or just because they simply can’t make it because they’re elderly, disabled, or don’t have transportation, but still need access to these resources.

So we were able to have an option available kind of in Midtown Nashville and in North Nashville at the same time. And the reason we were able to expand upon that again is because we had a product that allows us to expedite the process. One of the things that was really excellent because we’ve got assistance from the Davidson County criminal court clerk who allows us to go through and get these expungements and they’ve got staff available for us, is that we had buy-in from the judges Judge Rachel Bell and Judge Cynthia Chapel were both there present. And we had, again, judge Bell from general sessions Judge Chapel from criminal court who was there and they were able to focus, give expungements and court cost waivers to people who were there, present in front of them, and then turn immediately to the screen next to them and talk to our satellite site at the Tennessee Justice Center and go ahead and expunge records there. So having buy-in from those judges was really, really excellent.

Cat Moon:

That’s phenomenal.

Linda Warren Seely:

Well, and that goes back to that whole issue of how do we convince the members of the judiciary that doing these kind of bread and butter, relatively simple kinds of legal processes online, it’s really okay, it’s not going to ruin the judicial system. We can do this.

Cat Moon:

Well, I’ll point out another theme I see when it comes to integrating technology generally in how we work in the legal system and how we work as lawyers and how we help clients. And that requires leadership and it requires collaboration kind of across systems and within systems. And I think the projects, both of you all are describing those partnerships and leadership were critical to making these projects work. So I think that’s an important takeaway as well. If folks are considering how they can be much more innovative and frankly much more aggressive, I think we need to be aggressive at this point in bringing technology into this work. One reason why I love hosting folks like you for conversations on Talk Justice is I also think we need to shine a light on the work that people are doing because it’s much easier to get ideas when you can look and see examples of projects that are working in very similar circumstances.

And I must say just a little moment to celebrate the fact that these things are happening in Tennessee where Linda, as you note, we are all situated. So it always makes me excited when these really cool things are happening in Tennessee. Those are examples of both leadership and collaboration right there that made that work. That’s really phenomenal. I want you to come have one of those clinics at my school, Zac, let’s work on that. Alright, so I have a little imagine question for you. Alright, so we’re all going to imagine that it’s 2030, which by the way will be here in about five years, which is crazy. Alright, so only five years from now it’s 2030. And imagine that at that point generative AI is really integrated into the world as much as electricity is right now, we don’t even think about all the things that electricity helps us do. It just is. And at that point, how do you imagine this integration of generative AI into scaling pro bono looks in 2030? What are some things that you hope to see go, Linda?

Linda Warren Seely:

I think that what you’ll see is a proliferation of pro state litigants who are actually able to handle some of their more routine legal needs without having to have an attorney jump in. Now as it becomes more complex, I can see that the attorneys would have to jump in or maybe provide a little bit of guidance. But what I’d like to see is for people to be able to handle routine legal matters in a efficacious, expeditious fashion online using generative AI to both complete forms to get the forms in front of the right people, to get them approved. I mean, just have it as seamless as possible. And then what lawyers would focus on would be more along the lines of policy or maybe large scale litigation where you’d use AI all the time to try to help draft their pleadings or to go through discovery. I think there’s a lot of ways that it could make everyday people’s lives so much easier that we have to be willing to adopt those models and the court system has to be willing to change to let people do it that way.

Cat Moon:

Sounds like a really exciting feature, Linda. Zac, what have you got?

Zachary Oswald:

The thing that, again, I keep coming back to in terms of pro bono enlistment is the nerves of it all, right, what am I going to do? How am I going to accomplish this case in an area that I don’t normally practice? And so what I see is kind of the evolution of guides and CLEs using generative AI to basically a case manual for individualized cases that can kind of be somebody’s OB one Kenobi law partner that works with them. You’ve got a conservatorship here for a disabled adult who’s an 18-year-old. They’ve got these parents, they’ve got these situations going here for this specific case, here’s what the timeline looks like, here are the pleadings that you’re going to need to file. Here are the potential pitfalls that are going to come up. And we can do that now in the general sense, but the more individualized we can make that, the more prepared we can make the attorney not only for what’s going to happen in a court, but again for those conversations that they’re going to have with the clients so that we make sure that expectations are correct and so that we can make sure that what the client’s goals are really match up with what we can do for them on an individualized basis.

That would be my dream is let’s continue doing what we’re doing, but let’s make it more focused on what the client’s needs and what the client’s going to be able to do so that we can teach the attorney how to do it specifically. And again, give them that confidence so that they will be more willing to associate with us and do pro bono activities because they know that we’re there to support them.

Linda Warren Seely:

So you’re looking at your law firm being Oswald and Kenobi when you go out,

Zachary Oswald:

Something like that.

Cat Moon:

Well, I think that is a fantastic way to frame it. I actually love the metaphor of generative a I being like the force and we become Jedi masters and we need training. We need to have faith, but it’s ultimately how can the force help us do our best human work? And I think Zac, that’s what you’re describing. So, so many good ideas. I think we’re going to have to have a follow-up conversation, Jess, because I know you all will continue to do amazing work and create these really, I think Pathbreaking, you are doing the kind of work that we need to be doing the experimentation and you are showing how with the leadership and the collaboration with the humans and the technology, we can really scale. And it’s just really exciting and I’m so glad that you both came here today to talk with me about this. I hope to see you both. We’re going to host little hacking pro bono event in April at Vanderbilt, and it’ll be a chance to share more examples and learn from others as well. In the meantime, do you guys have any places you would like to point people if they’re interested in looking at more of your work online, Linda?

Linda Warren Seely:

Well, so for lawyers, if you are on LinkedIn, there’s a gentleman named Robert Ambrogi who I would recommend that you follow. There’s a number of Chase Herzl who used to work at the A BA with me and he was in the Innovations program. There are so many platforms, there are so many people doing absolutely fantastic work, and I know most private lawyers aren’t going to do this, but if you can go to the LSC Tech conference, then that place is so cool.

Cat Moon:

Yes, there are innovations in Technology conference, which is coming up very shortly. I will confirm those dates. Zac, what you got?

Zachary Oswald:

Well, I am going to be presenting about this particular product at the Innovations and Technology Conference. So if anybody wants to see Kat, I think it’s January 13th through 15th in Phoenix. But what I would tell people is go to our website, www.la.org. You can sign up to volunteer there if you are in the Middle Tennessee area. And I hope that what you heard here is that we are creating the supports that are there for you to be a pro bono attorney so that you can have what you need to feel confident to go and help people. And then otherwise, I want the rest of the legal technology community to know that we’ve got a director of legal technology, we’ve got a senior deputy director and an executive director who are really interested in this sort of work. And so we want to collaborate with you so that you can see what our work is so we can see what your work is. We can share it with each other and we can make it better.

Linda Warren Seely:

Zac, I’m going to have to have you come to the Butler Snow Offices in Nashville and do this for me.

Zachary Oswald:

Happy to be there.

Cat Moon:

All right. Sharing is caring. And on that note, thank you both for so generously sharing your time today and I’m grateful and I’m certain that listeners are as well. And I look forward to hearing more from both of you very soon. And Zac, I’ll see you at ITC in Phoenix very soon. Thanks guys.

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