By Andrew Braun, PBI Intern
Pro bono and legal aid initiatives continue leveraging technology to provide and enhance crucial services. From expanding access to legal resources, to streamlining administrative tasks, lawyers are exploring technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) to transform impactful pro bono and legal aid work to serve more clients. Fostering innovation in these technologies remains integral for organizations working to bridge justice access gaps. The access-to-justice field continues committing resources toward understanding the strengths and limitations of technologies like AI and discussing how to bring underserved clients greater access to legal help.
Prioritizing technology
Integrating technology is a growing priority of legal efforts striving to expand access. The Legal Services Corporation (LSC), the largest funder of civil legal aid initiatives in the United States, leads the way in equipping and supporting gateway technology use among legal aid service providers. Since 2000, LSC has awarded hundreds of Technology Initiative Grants (TIG) totaling over $95 million. In its 2024-2025 Tech Summit report, “The Next Frontier: Harnessing Technology to Close the Justice Gap,” LSC outlined its seven recommendations for incorporating and innovating technology into serving clients.
“Why are we focused on technology? Two words: justice gap,” President of Legal Services Corporation Ronn Flagg told Law.com. “We really need to leverage those relatively scarce resources we get … to make those resources go further to make our legal aid programs more efficient.” In December 2025, LSC awarded $4.2 million to 32 TIG projects facilitating access to legal services. Although these funds represent LSC’s lowest annual grant total in four years, these will power important tools across the nation’s legal aid services. This year’s grants will help organizations like Anishinabe Legal Services build important tutorials for users navigating probate and guardianship cases in Tribal Courts, while Nevada Legal Services will enhance its network of legal kiosks located in libraries with an AI search tool.
Through LSC funding, technology continues filling both front-facing and administrative roles that boost client accessibility. Resources like mobile apps are broadening access to essential information for new audiences with engaging and navigable content. Previous LSC grantees include Bay Area Legal Services’ (BALS) FosterPower app, a first-of-its-kind resource educating Florida’s foster youth about their legal rights, that earned BALS the 2023 Outstanding Non-Profit Champion for Children Award. Automation technologies also continue supporting legal services’ administrative tasks. Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services’s (SMRLS) TIG-funded project is innovating with automation to improve its workflow, eliminating redundancies and mistakes occurring between their document automation and case management processes. Investing in these technologies to perform these tasks frees up legal professionals to spend time with clients completing more labor-intensive tasks.
AI Closing the Justice Access Gap
AI is now leading transformations in legal work that support underserved communities. Trends in AI use have attracted research, including the study, “The AI Advantage: How Technology Can Help Bridge the Justice Gap,” a survey of 112 legal aid professionals conducted by Everlaw alongside the National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA), Paladin and LawSites. The survey found that 74% of legal aid organizations now report using AI in their daily work — nearly double the rate of AI adoption in the wider legal profession, according to another Everlaw survey.
These trends come as lawyers begin recognizing AI as particularly powerful for helping close the justice access gap. In fact, 88% of respondents surveyed by Everlaw and its partners now say they believe AI can now be harnessed in some way to close the access to justice gap. Joanne Sprague, Senior Director of Everlaw for Good, notes legal services’ use of AI marks a major shift in attitudes toward embracing new technology.
“There’s this sort of stereotype or bias that public interest and nonprofit organizations are laggards when it comes to tech adoption,” said Sprague in a recent interview. “And in this instance, and particularly with legal aid professionals, we’re seeing that really being flipped on its head.”
Adapting to use AI is especially important for lean organizations. LSC reports that legal services organizations turn away about half of the eligible applicants who seek their services, leaving low-income Americans not receiving enough support for 92% of their substantial civil legal problems. AI tools offer legal services, in comparison with larger, better equipped “big-law” firms and in-house legal departments, a flexible and scalable resource to meet their individual needs. These resources have become integral for expanding legal aid and pro bono initiatives’ capabilities and improving the quality of their services to help close these margins.
Other experts, meanwhile, say shying away from AI threatens to expand the justice access gap even further. In a recent episode of “Proof Over Precedent,” a podcast of Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab, Assistant Director of Research Innovations Mandy Mobley Li says legal services organizations should follow the lead of law firms in adopting generative AI. The A2J lab is building a platform, OpenJustice, to address pressing legal needs, such as landlord and tenant issues, that it plans to test out with Pro Bono Ontario.
Principal Program Analyst for the State Bar of California Office of Access & Inclusion Jennifer Zelnick tells LCS there is now an urgency for legal aid professionals to understand and harness AI in order to close this widening gap. “If legal aid doesn’t [use this technology],” said Zelnick in a recent episode of LSC’s Talk Justice Podcast. “…the chasm between the services that legal aid can provide versus what private law firms can provide will continue to grow.”
AI Fuels Pro Bono Legal Efforts
AI has become crucial in streamlining fundamental steps of legal service like the intake process. The same study from Everlaw and its partners found that 90% of surveyed legal aid organizations believed AI would help them cut costs and serve more clients. Tools like chatbots on Kansas Legal Services’ (KLS) website are already connecting clients with appropriate resources. Legal Aid of North Carolina’s (LANC) mobile-friendly JusticeHub platform, meanwhile, features an AI-powered Legal Information Assistant (LIA) that provides users with legal information and answers their questions. Providing these quality resources to clients upfront affords legal aid and pro bono professionals more time working with clients and allows them track intake metrics on their websites.
“I’m optimistic about the potential for AI to help with workflow management, particularly in freeing up legal aid attorneys’ time to focus on higher leverage tasks,” said Kristen Sonday, Co-Founder and CEO of Paladin, a service connecting volunteer pro bono attorneys with legal services organizations and volunteer opportunities. “For example, intake and triage, issue spotting, document summary, reporting, and resource matching are all areas where AI can play an important part.”
Law firms are also utilizing AI in their pro bono work with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) looking to cut costs. Pro bono attorneys at Linklaters Asia helped the Hong Kong-based labor rights group Migrasia build and use AI-based chatbot PoBot to process questions and requests from clients. In Singapore, Baker McKenzie* attorneys used Microsoft’s Copilot AI to save time uncovering children’s rights laws and handle sensitive information during a firm pro bono project. Baker McKenzie Global Pro Bono Partner and Executive Director of Global Pro Bono Angela Vigil noted that much of the project’s time was still dedicated to verifying the AI’s findings, but that using AI reduced potentially weeks of work.
Discussions on AI
Despite legal aid and pro bono professionals thriving with the support of AI, questions remain over the efficacy of this emergent technology to close the justice access gap. The legal profession in particular faces ethical questions when integrating these technologies that rely on and process clients’ especially sensitive information. Those surveyed by Everlaw and its partners reported being most severely concerned with data privacy and confidentiality in AI, as well as ethical dilemmas it poses. Others remain cautious of this nuanced technology’s quality performing certain tasks, an obstacle potentially putting pro bono legal efforts at a disadvantage.
Certain AI tools also still face obstacles on the road to helping more clients. Technologists say AI-powered self-service legal products in particular require oversight from legal teams to sort through the complexities of legal information, while the perceived risk of AI’s error might curb initial use.
“The risks of hallucinations and the nuance of the law create clear limits,” Sonday said to Law.com. “Self-help tools work best when they’re constrained, supervised, and paired with human-in-the-loop processes.”
Courts and legal aid professionals also continue discussing the value of AI as a tool for clients. During a recent Artificial Intelligence Webinar Series, panelists for the Thomson Reuters Institute/National Center for State Courts AI Policy Consortium for Law and Courts distinguished the capabilities of purpose-built chatbots developed by legal services from consumer, general-use AI. The panelists urged courts and legal organizations to caution self-represented litigants from using these everyday AIs, and communicate a more complete picture of these tools’ purposes, strengths, and limitations before recommending them to provide absolute legal advice. The NCSC and TRI have also collaborated to gather resources for courts and organizations developing AI policies, technologies, and strategies for clients.
Learn About AI and Technology Innovations at the PBI 2026 Annual Conference
Join the PBI 2026 Annual Conference March 4-6 in Washington, D.C. to hear numerous speakers explore applications for technology and AI across pro bono and legal aid legal efforts. Several Pre-Conference and Conference sessions will feature perspectives from industry professionals on integrating technology and addressing ethical questions about innovations like AI, including:
- Building the Commons: Open-Source AI Tools for Legal Help | March 4, 2026 | 3:45 PM – 4:45 PM (ET)
- Justice Disrupted: The Ethics and Urgency of AI in Pro Bono | March 5, 2026 | 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM (ET)
- Subsidizing Legal Tech & AI for Pro Bono – Partnerships, Models, and Impact | March 5, 2026 | 3:30 PM – 4:45 PM (ET)
- AI for Access: Using AI to Train and Empower Pro Bono Attorneys | March 6, 2026 | 9:45 AM – 10:45 AM (ET)
- Latest AI Innovations for Access to Justice: Emerging Technologies and New Possibilities | March 6, 2026 | 11:00 AM – 12:15 PM (ET)
- Virtual Pro Bono: Data, Best Practices, and Successful Models | March 6, 2026 | 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM (ET)
- Human Ingenuity, Digital Scale: The Future of Pro Bono in an Era of Co-Intelligence on Demand | March 6, 2026 | 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM (ET)
* denotes a Law Firm Pro Bono Challenge® signatory
** denotes a Corporate Pro Bono Challenge® signatory
† denotes a Law Firm Pro Bono Project® member