What is Human-Centered Legal Help in the Age of AI?

Episode Notes

Transcript

Amanda Brown:

This is a human endeavor that we’re on, and we should just be using technology as a tool to facilitate those interactions instead of offloading them.

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 and welcome back to Talk Justice. I’m Cat Moon, your host for this episode. And as co-director of a human centered AI lab within a law school, I spend a lot of time thinking about how we can leverage our most human skills in this age of artificial intelligence and specifically in order to increase access to legal help. So today’s conversation is particularly close to my heart because we’re talking with someone who’s doing that work on the ground every day. Amanda Brown is the founder and executive director of LANAP Law Lab in New Orleans. She is also co-chair of Louisiana’s Access to Justice Commission’s Technology Subcommittee, and she has been a member of the Legal Services Corporations Emerging Leaders Council since its inception in 2020. What caught my eye was her recent post on Justice Rising, which is the emerging leader council’s medium publication. And in this post she offered a really compelling and timely frame for how we can approach legal technology in a human centered way. Amanda, welcome to Talk Justice.

Amanda Brown:

Thanks, KA. Super excited to be here.

Cat Moon:

So in your post, you wrote the number one thing we hear from people using our technologies to navigate legal issues in Louisiana. I just want to talk to someone as someone who studies human-centered design and law, this line really kind of hit me like a lightning bolt. It suggests we might be solving the wrong problem entirely. What do you think?

Amanda Brown:

Yeah, I mean, I’ll couch the answer in typical lawyer fashion and say it depends, but I do generally think, and as the sort of AI revolution unfolds quickly before our eyes, I think I started feeling that way as well. I’ve been practicing legal technology and the access to justice space really almost since I came out of law school. And my initial perception was technology scale more. That’s sort of the vibe that we’re all sort of feeding off of in access to justice and technology, which I think is valid. But again, as sort of things evolve and the feedback that we hear from people, I really realize that this is a human endeavor that we’re on and we’re just using technology or we should just be using technology as a tool to facilitate those interactions instead of offloading them. So I think for me, this is sort of a new ethos philosophy of experimentation, and I’m excited to see where it goes, but I think we’re all feeling this weird pressure from ai. So it just became inherently obvious that I think we need to sort of think about this a little bit differently and that’s where this concept came from for me.

Cat Moon:

Yeah, I agree with you. It feels like there is an exigency to this right now, right? Because things are moving so quickly and it’s like we need to get our heads around this and kind of get in front of it. So let’s start with a core thesis that you have about using technology to maximize human interaction. So instead of making it about the technology first, it’s really about how are you maximizing that human interaction? And so I research and run experiments around this same idea as well and how we can use this to make our legal systems more effective. And I think this ethos you’re describing really feels like a missing piece. And so I’m just wondering from your experience in Louisiana so far building and leveraging technology to solve these really massive problems, what do you think it looks like when we get it right based on the feedback that you’ve been getting?

Amanda Brown:

So as I noted, this is sort of a newer area of exploration and a thesis for me, but I think it really is when I look back on all of my work, it’s really obvious to me that this is always probably a direction that we should look at from my perspective and my practice and designing and implementing technologies. I think the human-centered element of that was always in terms of we are going to adopt this piece of technology. Now you human tell me what’s the best way for you to interface with it. Instead of the paradigm being, I’m going to use this piece of technology to actually connect you to another human being. So it really actually is instead of an endpoint, it’s a throughput is sort of the framing that I’m looking at it through now. And this was really apparent in a number of projects.

One that I have been working on in the past, I think I’ve talked on this podcast about through our legal help access points was using this technology, putting it in community spaces. We did a lot of research, we heard a lot from people, but I think ultimately we were asking the wrong question. So while the design end of it was good, I mean I was really proud of the work that we did. The adoption wasn’t there. I think it didn’t actually get to the heart of what people were wanting and they were stressed out, they were really concerned, they were confused. There’s all these emotions sort of surrounding a legal problem that they have and they just wanted to talk to somebody. And so instead of using technology as an endpoint for somebody and assuming that that’s the most rational route for them to take, not considering, I know there’s a lot of capacity constraints and I’m sure we’ll talk about things like that as we move through the conversation, but again, it’s sort of this concept of using the technology as a throughput and not just delivering a piece of technology that’s well vetted that if it was the right solution for somebody, it is really good.

There’s no denying that. But I think it’s thinking about the bigger picture. And that’s where again, the concept sort of the light bulb went off for me is how can we think about the technologies that we’re developing out of necessity a little bit differently in order to give people what it is they really need and want?

Cat Moon:

So that makes so much sense, and I like your reflection that looking back on it, it seems obvious, but what seems obvious in retrospect can be really hard to realize in the moment. I have to touch on something because I love that you’ve named your organization Lon. I just think I love it fits, but it’s also a little playful and it ties into the culture of where you are. So roughly the magic of something extra and in what I call the AI of law research, how we’re leveraging this technology to improve the delivery of legal services. We often talk about augmentation versus replacement or the AI being the endpoint instead of the throughput, as you were just saying. Right. So I’m thinking, I’m thinking about this connection. It sounds like your really is your version of augmentation is ai, can it be that little something extra that augments us keeping the human connection, or am I stretching that metaphor too much?

Amanda Brown:

No, I absolutely think so. What I like about LANAP specifically as a concept, and it’s evolved with me over the course of doing this again, I think when I joined the access to justice space, it was still sort of very nascent where I say that, and I’m probably insulting people that have been working in the field for years, and I do not mean to do that, but we can’t deny that there’s been a massive shift in the number of people that are engaged in this work. But it was really more about all these little pieces that were being sort of neglected just because of capacity problems. So I would sometimes be in committee meetings and be like, yeah, well everybody, they provide legal services and then we do everything else. And it’s sort of just figuring out how to make all these external pieces come together and fit within the system. But now as we have really grounded ourself in the civil justice system here with all of our networks, it’s become really apparent that it’s not just something extra, which is just, you kind of think of it as being really nice, but it’s also the intentionality behind it

Cat Moon:

All. So this sounds like fundamentally human work that AI really can’t replicate. So how can we go about designing systems that really preserve this space for the human interaction, the human help that can also scale? How are we putting these pieces together?

Amanda Brown:

Yeah, I think personally it seems to me that the first consideration is to just acknowledge that that’s what happens. A lot of times I do caveat and say, I think this is a uniquely access to justice type issue within the broader sense of the legal system. Because a lot of folks that are low income or moderate income and are dealing with civil legal issues or legal issues that we consider within the access to justice space, they are inherently stressful. People are concerned that they’re losing their home. They don’t know how to manage how they’re going to see their children. They’re worried about losing their job because they’re being discriminated against. They’re there so many, the situations that people are in that these legal issues flow from are different than your business transactions, corporate lawyers, really big law type issues. So I do think that there is inherently this access to justice angle on it that maybe the rest of theBar would not agree that these are concepts that lawyers are doing this type of work, they’re doing case management, they’re doing coaching, they’re doing active listening, and trying to really make people feel seen, heard, and understood.

And again, like you say, those are human activities. I mean, I know people do talk to chatbots. You’ve seen the crazy stories that are coming out of it and you realize that that’s out of number one. So there’s something to acknowledge there. But I do think that if we can remember that and center those human experiences in the work that we do, I’m not anti-technology quite the opposite. I really feel like we can offload as much of the routine and repetitive work as possible to these technology tools, but it requires an acknowledgement that we are doing other types of work as lawyers and leaning into that and preparing for that and being good at it, a lot of lawyers are not, but then also recognizing and acknowledging that, yes, a lot of legal work can be very repetitive. So it’s about, I think building infrastructure for your core cases and then creating off-ramps whenever it’s really complicated or whenever there’s an emotional element that needs to be addressed. That’s sort of how I envision what this could ultimately look like long-term is sort of automating and using technology to do the knowledge work and then reserving and preserving and elevating our own skills in these other domains that really support people through the life cycle of the legal issues that they do have.

Cat Moon:

And that leads us brilliantly into talking about your latest project, which just launched. In fact, I learned about it after we had scheduled this conversation and I got so excited when I saw it. So you and your team just launched the Louisiana Legal Navigator?

Amanda Brown:

Yes, yes. Very

Cat Moon:

Exciting. Yes. So congratulations. I’ve been exploring the platform and it is beautiful and it really feels like a perfect case study for all the things we’ve been talking about. Can you walk me through what it is, what it embodies, how it embodies your technology to maximize human interaction philosophy? Tell us about

Amanda Brown:

It. If I’m completely honest, I’ll say that it doesn’t really, but it sort of ties back into the previous discussion that we were having that this is a foundation for getting people through the door. I think in my concept of it, it is a front door, which inherently implies that somebody’s on the other side of that door, and that’s my hope. I think with the technology itself, it’s not really that much different from what you might see in other states on law help websites. I do think that we have uniquely architected it to be foundational, and the intent is for long-term, this is a core piece of an offering that we can then, number one, get people through the door, but also use it to connect with community partners and other folks that are seeing people that have legal issues and connecting them to the right resource.

I think with some of the features on the site, you can start to see the embodiment of this human interaction piece coming through with sort of the heavy emphasis on events and public facing ways that lawyers are going out into the community to actually connect with people. Also, as we sort of plan for the future about the service providers on the page or on the website I should say, looking at one, educating folks about what legal services might actually be and what they might expect, but also sort of doing groundwork to create other opportunities for people to offer services. And this again, being the front door to connecting folks to those people that want to provide those services.

Cat Moon:

Well, we’re definitely going to dive into that topic a little bit more. A couple of points I want to make about the navigator. I did spend some time on it, and I do think you all have done a beautiful job of creating a very accessible, very clean, plain English, very, I enjoyed kind of going through it and exploring it, and I think it’s a very effective front door. And so I was looking at all the resources there, and so I noted that it looks like you all cover 19 different kind of areas of the law that folks might have a common problem in. And then your point about connecting to live events where people who need help can go to connect with lawyers, maybe a pro bono clinic, but also you have a providers page that, I think I counted this correctly, 75

Different providers listed. And then when you click through the front tile on the page, it goes to a really helpful description of who that provider is and how to get in touch with them and the kind of issues they handle. So kudos to that. And I’m curious if you could just share, give us a little insight into the work and effort that went behind pulling all this together, right, because I think a difference in what you all have created is it’s a much more comprehensive one-stop shop than you will find in other jurisdictions. And that seems very intentional on your part, how you create something comprehensive while it’s also accessible and not overwhelming to someone who is looking for this information. And I’m certain there are a lot of people who are listening to this who would be very interested in knowing what it took to put that together.

Amanda Brown:

Well, the first point I’ll make is that it’s years in the making overnight. The website is just the top layer of all the insane amount of work that went to create

Structure, all these types of resources. I’ll say in general, my organization and the strategy that we have adopted for the development of our public facing resources is very catchy. It’s inform, empower, and connect. And I think those are the gateways that you generally see on the website. So there’s all of our legal information and content resources. I have to give a major shout out to Lindsay Dean, my content director, who’s literally been working on developing content for years so that when we launch a nice website, it looks like, oh, we have a lot of stuff, but we really do. There’s I think, covering over 200 civil legal topics. So it’s very intentional, very comprehensive and meant to, I should note that we follow the list taxonomy as part of our content strategy. And so literally for the last couple of years we’ve just been looking in there and say, all right, what do we not have covered?

Let’s write content and try and fill this out. But doing that strategy has also been super helpful for the other pillars of our work, empower and connect because we’re able to look at the legal issues and think about what’s the level, what’s appropriate for these tools of empowerment. So this is our self-help tools sort of gateway, our court forms, any automations that we develop and new concepts that we’re working on, including preparation worksheets that are meant to empower people to take the next step on their journey. And then connecting folks to legal aid, which as you noted in our service provider database, that’s really a lot of organizations that are funded by the Louisiana Bar Foundation who also funds us and do this work. So it’s been a long time in the making in terms of the development of those resources, but also a huge collaborative effort from the funding perspective, from theBar Foundation, from our Access to Justice Commission and committees that we’ve created sort of workflows, collaborative workflows to develop, review, revise forms and automations.

It’s really all hands on deck. So this is just, again, it’s the front door, it’s the gateway to all these resources. But I think thinking of it in terms of inform, empower, connect gave us a really clear vision about what it is we actually needed to create and let us kind of go full force at that. And so when you come to the site, there’s only those three options. Realistically, as a user, what is it that you actually want? Are you just starting and you want to learn about this? Are you feeling ready to take next steps or do you just want to talk to somebody? And that’s where the third piece comes in. But importantly, I think as I mentioned at the outset, this is the foundation for what’s to come. As you noted, it’s sort of very comprehensive. It’s a connected system. And as we continue to work, this is our foundation. We’re not building in silos in new tools, in different environments we’re building, this is extensible. We’re going to be building on top of this. So it’s really exciting to see it all come together and appreciate the amount of work that we’ve already done, but there’s still so much more to do.

Cat Moon:

Well, in my short forays and exploration so far, and certainly listening to you describe how this came to be, I really feel like you all are also creating a template that others can follow and learn from. And we’ll come back around to that in a moment as well. But I want to jump back to a point you made about connecting people who need help with other people who want to provide help and can provide help. And so there is ongoing conversation and it’s really growing around the country about who we are going to let provide legal help and and how that might extend beyond only someone with a JD who also has a license to practice law and what that looks like. And so in fact, in my home state, Tennessee, the Supreme Court just issued an order with a call for public comments to explore this among some other issues.

And I think another thing has just happened in Georgia, so it’s really exciting to see this happening, especially in some states that here two four, there’s not really been any indication that that was kind of percolating. And you, in your article kind of issue, a challenge to our profession’s insistence that lawyers are the only way forward, and boy are we definitely on the same page here and advocating for expanding who can provide legal help. So you see the navigator as also foundational in, you talk about extensible, so maybe that’s part of the extensions from it. Is that an idea that you have?

Amanda Brown:

I would love that

I’m holding my optimism due to my jurisdiction if I can say that kindly, but I am prepared for it. The infrastructure and the architecture is prepared for that. I think that I mentioned, there’s a subtlety, I think in educating consumers through the site about the types of services that are generally available. If you check our service providers page, you’ll be able to filter by the services that are offered, whether that I’ve framed them as a spectrum of services ranging from issue spotting and navigation to actual legal information, legal advice, document preparation, advocacy in and out of court. So ranging a spectrum of services that we know other people are able to provide with the requisite like training and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, I do. I think that one day in Louisiana, maybe we’ll be prepared for that day, but I agree with you. I think the dominoes are falling, so it feels like it’s only a matter of time.

Cat Moon:

Yeah. Well, so I’m going to quote you again. There were so many just brilliant points you made. And one is viewing this as a quote once in a lifetime opportunity to shift the paradigm. And as I’ve said many times on this podcast, and all my guests have said as well, we have a need for civil legal help that human lawyers, as they are currently the number, just the sheer number of legal problems compared to lawyers available to help the one-to-one model will never fit the need. And taking how you even pay for that help completely out of the equation. So from my side, from an academic side, both doing research and also running experiments with LSO and others who are trying to solve this problem, we see an enormous potential. And clearly you do as well, or else you wouldn’t have spent years building this navigator.

But there is also this real institutional and systemic resistance. You say the dominoes are falling. I wonder where you feel the readiness of the system and the profession are in terms of accepting some pretty massive change in this regard. And I would add to that, if you think this explosion of generative AI and how that’s really kind of shaken the paradigm a lot for many people who probably hadn’t thought much about it before, if you see that maybe kind of lighting a fire under people that it might not have without that kind of extrinsic pressure.

Amanda Brown:

Yeah, it’s interesting. I think in terms of readiness, again, the spectrum is wild. I’ll just say that here in Louisiana, the committee that I, or the Access to Justice Commission that I work with recently advanced a proposal for just safe harbor provisions for folks that are maybe providing legal information and to build clarity around this issue of what’s information, what’s advice, what types of services can a non-lawyer actually provide. And there were really interesting arguments against that. I thought safe harbor was we were well past that most of the country anyway. So again, that’s where my, I’m hedging my bets on my jurisdiction to a degree for readiness for more extensive services by other providers like community justice workers or licensed paraprofessionals. But I do, I think, heard someone that I have over the years have pretty hard line stance against these types of people soften that recently.

And I think that’s an indication of this person is very vocally, adamantly historically been against that. But I think it’s obvious now that the tides are turning. I mean, how many states now have these exploratory committees or recommendations? It’s like we’re at least half are, we’re getting close to half at this point. So I think it’s inevitable, realistically, to the question of whether AI plays into that, I’m not actually sure at the risk of potentially insulting people. I don’t think that that’s been the connection. At least that’s not how I’ve perceived. I don’t think that people are thinking about the totality of the circumstances such that AI might feed this particular issue. So that’s just my perspective on what I’ve seen. But it does sort of make sense that if there’s sort of an economic pressure or the risk of ultimately commoditizing a legal service through AI or something like that, that if there’s an opportunity to make money with a lower tier professional, that maybe they would buy into that as an alternative to fully letting it erode, so to speak, with an AI service, if that makes sense.

Cat Moon:

Yeah, no, it does make sense. It does make sense. So I come across this notion that along with different kinds of professionals, there’s also the likelihood probably being built right now that there will be AI tools that could operate. And if we wanted to get really sci-fi about it, if it is some kind of persona in the form of a bot that someone can talk to and makes them suddenly it makes them feel heard and is talking them through their legal issues, as I said, kind of sci-fi. But there certainly is conversation around how leveraging technology as it advances and gets capable of doing that kind of work counseling someone accurately would that be a piece of the puzzle along with different kinds of service providers. So it’s kind of the wild west. So you might end up adding an AI bot to that list of 75 other providers on that. You very welcome a

Amanda Brown:

Little persona. I mean, people are already, again, turning to these tools for, I have some person in my run club, she’s like, oh yeah, I went on chat GPT and made a demand letter for my security deposit. I’m like, oh no. And I mean, I’m sure it was fine, but it’s already happening.

It just depends. I think we could absolutely do that. The question is, should we, and then also we don’t have to do this, I have this overwhelming sense that a lot of people are chasing AI because it’s the hot new thing to do and I’m glad for them to do it because I’m sitting back and I’m just watching, I’m like, I’m going to see how this sort of evolves. But I just think I want to remind people that we don’t have to do that. We don’t need to replace ourselves. We don’t need to continually, I think what I observe is that so because we haven’t stepped back and taken a full stock of all the inputs of the legal system, all the component parts of it and how they interconnect just on a basic level without stripping away all technology, what are those fundamentals that we continue to redesign and iterate on the same things just using new technologies. And that’s part of experimentation and innovation, but it doesn’t feel like there’s much strategy behind it. When I see like, okay, we have a document automation for this, which was an advancement, but then we make a chat bot that does the exact same thing. Are we spending our energy in a way that is actually addressing a problem? And I would just encourage us to consider what we’re doing. And remember, we should be in control. The technology is not in control

Cat Moon:

And

Amanda Brown:

We’re right now just kind of chasing it because I admit that it’s fun, I’ll give you that. But I just would like to see the profession sort of take a breather and maybe think through the implications of that and is it necessary? Is that necessary? Is this actually better than what we’re already doing?

Cat Moon:

So I think your suggestion that we ask the question, should we, before we go down any of these roads is spot on. Should we absolutely should be asking that We should be asking should we with intention? Alright, we are about out of time, but I like to end these conversations to give listeners a takeaway. So my hope folks visit the site, Louisiana legal navigator.org. And I’m certain there are many folks listening who are going to be very curious and we are going to want to know how they can do something similar. So what advice would you have to someone who is interested in doing something like this in their jurisdiction based on your experience?

Amanda Brown:

I think the number one thing that I would suggest is just remember that it’s a long game. We’re not quick fixing overnight. With that said, I think this general sort of inform, empower, and connect framework is really useful framework to guide development of resources and how you kind of coordinate things. And the number one recommendation I have on that is to be intentional about your taxonomy alignment and how you’re categorizing and creating resources so that as you want to build more on top of things, that there’s consistency in the language and the terminology that’s being used. And then I feel like the last thing I will say is that this is not a one person job. It really takes a whole community. And that’s what we’ve done here in Louisiana. I really have to give huge shout out to all of our legal service organizations, Southeast, Louisiana Legal Services, acadiana Legal Services, theBar Association’s, access to justice department, our commissions. There’s so many people involved in sort of guiding the development of this. You’re never going to get to the level of comprehension that we are without that much input. So collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.

Cat Moon:

And what I hear you saying is that you had buy-in from all these folks that enabled the collaboration and that is absolutely critical. Well, kudos to you, Amanda Brown, founder and executive director of LANAP Law Lab and the Brilliant Mind, one of many brilliant minds behind the just launched Louisiana Legal Navigator. Thank you for joining me. This conversation has really reinforced my belief that the most important work we can do right now is that ensuring as legal tech advances, we don’t lose sight of the fundamentally human nature of justice. And also thank you for not just theorizing about human-centered design, but actually building it and showing us what’s possible. And many thanks to all of you, our listeners of Talk Justice, which is brought to you by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation and Legal Talk Network. If you like what you’ve heard, please be sure to rate and review the show and subscribe on your favorite podcast app.

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