Talk Justice, an LSC Podcast: What is Human-Centered Legal Help in the Age of AI

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WASHINGTON-Lawyers discuss how to keep legal services human-centered in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) on the latest episode of LSC's "Talk Justice" podcast, released today. Host Cat Moon is joined by Amanda Brown, founder and executive director of Lagniappe Law Lab in New Orleans. Brown also co-chairs Louisiana's Access to Justice Commission's technology subcommittee.

In May, Brown authored a piece for the Justice Rising blog, "Using Technology to Maximize Human Interaction." She wrote that while legal services organizations are increasingly looking to AI to lower the burden of certain tasks, human interaction between attorneys and clients must not be lost for the sake of efficiency.

"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," Brown says. "For me, this is sort of a new ethos [or] philosophy of experimentation, and I'm excited to see where it goes, but I think we're all feeling this weird pressure from AI."

Brown explains that often when legal tech developers talk about creating human-centered tech, they are designing the tech to solve a problem and then studying the best way for users to interface with it. Now, she sees the potential for a new paradigm, where the purpose of the technology is to help humans connect.

Brown says that the nature of access to justice work is different than that of corporate and private attorneys because legal services lawyers are interfacing with low- and moderate-income people who are experiencing very personal, stressful situations like child custody or housing cases. She says that these attorneys try to help people feel "seen, heard and understood."

She explains the importance of creating tech infrastructure that helps attorneys offload routine, repetitive work to technology tools, and creating "off-ramps" that bring the more complicated or emotional elements of the work back to the lawyer to address as only humans can.

"How I envision what this could ultimately look like long-term is 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," says Brown.

Guided by the principles "inform, empower, connect," Brown's team recently re-launched the Louisiana Legal Navigatorwebsite. It now covers more than 200 civil legal topics and features a comprehensive collection of local resources. She says the site will function as the "front door" of legal help in the state, where users can find the information, resource or person they need for their issue.

Talk Justice episodes are available online and on Spotify, Apple and YouTube. The podcast is sponsored by LSC's Leaders Council.