JusticeBench
An R&D Community Platform for AI and Access to Justice
How to Use JusticeBench
JusticeBench is an open platform for legal leaders, technologists, researchers, and community members working on AI to advance access to justice.
Projects
Look at prototypes, pilots, and proposals others are building to find inspiration, collaborators, or models.
Tasks
Explore specific use cases where AI can help improve access to justice. Scope what to work on — and where you fit in.
Datasets
Share or use data to train, evaluate, and improve legal AI projects and performance standards.
New to the Access to Justice Domain?
Are you a technologist, researcher, data scientist, or professional who is new to the world of legal aid, courts, and civil legal problems? Learn the basics of what a person's journey through a legal problem like eviction, debt, or divorce looks like—and how service providers try to assist them.
Learn More about Access to JusticeProjects
What AI projects are already happening in the Access to Justice domain? Many groups are working on new tools to help people & providers dealing with legal problems. Look through these project pages to see who is building what, the data they have to share, how they are measuring progress, and what protocols you might borrow.
Pilots
Projects that are live and in use
Prototypes
Projects that work but aren't operating in the field
Proposals
Visions of possible new projects
Pilots
These projects are live and in use. They are being piloted with real cases and users. This pilot might be a short-term one, or multi-year and ongoing.
Caddy Q&A copilot
Caddy is an AI co-pilot developed by Citizens Advice in England to support legal advisers, helping them deliver faster, supervised answers with trusted information.
JusticeBot
An AI-powered chatbot from the University of Montreal that helps the public in Quebec understand landlord-tenant rights and responsibilities, using trusted legal information.
Beagle+
Beagle+ is an AI-powered legal information assistant developed for British Columbia that uses retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to deliver accurate, jurisdiction-specific legal guidance.
LIA
LIA is a virtual assistant developed by Legal Aid of North Carolina to improve access to reliable legal information through AI-powered, multilingual support on their public website.
LACI
Project LACI (Legal Aid Content Intelligence) helps organizations maintain documents that have legal information.
Missouri Tenant Help Intake Screener
A hybrid rule-based and LLM-powered intake screener developed for Missouri Tenant Help to help determine legal aid eligibility more efficiently and consistently.
Roxanne the Repair Bot
Roxanne is a chatbot that provides NYC tenants with general guidance on how to get housing repairs, based on trusted information from Housing Court Answers.
Prototypes
A group has made an initial version of these projects. They are currently being tested and refined before they are launched for live use.
CLEO's Guided Pathways Legal Narrative Assistant
CLEO’s Guided Pathways Legal Narrative Assistant is a prototype being researched, aiming to help people tell their legal story clearly and effectively
Automated Intake Data Extractor
LegalServer's Automated Intake Mode allows organizations to upload scanned or digital documents and automatically extract structured intake data into their case management system.
Lease Data Extractor with AI
A research prototype to extract structured data from images of Tenancy Agreements (typed, neat, and sloppy) using AI
A2J ImageGen: Visualizing Legal Documents with AI
An AI prototype to help transform complex court forms, fliers, and training materials from text into visual-first, well-designed materials for litigants
Proposals
These projects have been scoped and detailed by members of our community, but they have not yet been prototyped or piloted.
Fines & Fees Data Researcher
An AI-powered agent that helps legal aid teams retrieve and organize fine and fee data across Oklahoma courts to support hardship waiver strategies.
Motion to Set Aside Drafter
Helping tenants rapidly and correctly draft a Motion to Set Aside after an eviction judgment—to re-open their case before they are forcibly set out from their home.
Jury Instructions Copilot for California Tenants
An AI copilot that helps tenants and legal aid teams generate, review, and finalize court-compliant jury instructions and trial documents for eviction cases in California.
Eviction Settlement Reviewer
A language-accessible AI assistant that reviews proposed eviction settlements to flag burdensome terms, explain how the settlement can play out, and support informed, strategic decision-making.
Eviction Warning Notice Analyzer
An AI-powered tool to scan notices from landlords, especially to look for legal defects that can be used to build a tenant's defense in eviction proceedings.
Lease Analyzer for Tenants
An AI-powered tool that helps tenants review residential leases before signing—spotting harmful or unenforceable clauses, translating legalese, and helping them make informed choices.
Learn More about the Access to Justice Domain
What does 'access to justice' mean? How can technology help more people navigate their legal problems and the justice system in order to get to good outcomes? Explore this section to get oriented in this A2J domain.
Common Stages of a Person's Justice Journey
How does a legal problem play out in a person's life? Different legal problems -- eviction, debt collection, divorce, driver's license suspension, or other disputes -- often follow the same 7 stages.
Use this overview to understand where AI might help a person. Then go to the Tasks Section to see the specific AI opportunities at each stage.
As a conflict brews, the person begins to recognize that they might need legal help to deal with it. They begin to seek out help online, through friends, or by contacting a service provider.
The person gets a diagnosis of the exact legal scenario they are in, what the law says about their rights, what options they have, and what services can help.
The person decides how they want to handle the problem. They weigh their goals, rights, and risks. They choose what path to take and get a plan of action -- including paperwork, research, hearings, meetings, and more.
The person drafts documents and forms to file, researches the law, gathers and organizes evidence, responds to requests, makes requests of the other side, and crafts talking points.
The person completes all of the steps, deadlines, and procedural requirements. They file things on time, make payments or get fee waivers, attend required meetings and hearings, and stay updated on their case progress and obligations.
The person presents their case to the judge or decisionmaker, answers questions, and interacts with the other party. They may also negotiate with the other side, and respond to settlement offers.
After a decision or settlement, the person must ensure they understand what the final arrangement is and how to live up to it (or enforce it). They may need to comply with orders, secure what they won, or clear their record to prevent collateral consequences.
Service Providers' Workflows to Suport Better Justice Journeys
Aside from users, service providers are also key stakeholders in advancing access to justice. Legal aid groups, court providers, pro bono clinics, and other providers have certain clusters of activities, that they do to provide front-facing services and back-end operations and strategy.
Outreach & Education
The provider tries to connect with the right audience—raising awareness, providing legal information, building trust, and helping people recognize legal issues and seek help.
Screening & Triage
The provider attempts to understand each person's background and legal issue to determine if and how the organization can help. This includes routing people to services, guides, or referrals.
Tailored Advice
The provider provides the user with detailed, custom advice on their legal options, risks, and next steps. Advice is specific to the user's goals, context, and documents—and designed to support informed decisions.
Work Product & Legal Research
The provider works with the user to research the law, draft and file documents, analyze legal options, collect evidence, and keep them on track with deadlines and next steps.
Coaching & Support
The provider gives ongoing encouragement, legal education, and guidance throughout the justice journey, so users stay involved and making informed decisions.
Administration & Strategy
The provider monitors cases and outcomes overall, manages staff and reporting, spots patterns, operates tech, and identifies areas for service improvement, policy change, strategic litigation, or tech innovation.
Tasks for AI to Advance Access to Justice
Across all different problem types and geographies, what tasks can AI do to improve how people get legal help & how providers serve people?
For the various stages of a person's justice journey, we have documented the main tasks that need to be done. These specific tasks can help people successfully resolve their legal problems, and they can help service providers operate more effectively.
These tasks are all general (across problem types and regions) so that we can find ways to collaborate on common technology solutions.
The 7 main clusters of Access to Justice tasks came from our community brainstorms & workflow mapping. Some of them are tasks that the user does, others are what the service provider (like a legal aid group or a court) would do:
- User: Getting Brief Help
- Provider: Providing Brief Help
- User-Provider: Service Onboarding
- User-Provider: Work Product
- Provider: Case Management
- Provider: Administration, Ops, & Strategy
- Provider: Tech Tooling
Explore each in detail below.
Getting Brief Help
Tools for a consumer to get brief legal answers and assistance for their legal problem. People need these tools particularly during their Awareness stage, when they are trying to understand the problem, and their Orientation stage, when they are trying to get advice and details on what path is best for them. But they might need to get brief help throughout their justice journey, when they need to make important decisions and do tasks correctly.
Legal Q&A
Help people understand their legal situation and next steps through a conversation that gathers context, explains options, and connects them to help.
Help Guide
Help people understand and navigate their legal problem with accurate, plain-language guides that explain the process step by step.
Triage, Referral, Matching
Help people get connected to the right legal information, tools, and services—by guiding them through their situation and matching them with eligible, local resources.
Document Explainer
Help people understand legal documents they’ve received by summarizing what the document means and what to do next—clearly and accurately.
Providing Brief Help
Tools for a service provider to offer quality brief help to consumers. Providers aim to connect with people during the Awareness and Orientation stages to ensure that people know their rights and can make strategic choices to protect their finances, housing, family, and security. They want to provide brief legal help to educate and empower the public, and possibly sign them up for fuller, in-depth legal representation.
Q+A Supporter
Help providers give better answers by supporting them with smart prompts, legal knowledge, and clear, supportive language.
Help Guide Writer
Help legal experts create clear, accurate, and actionable help guides—faster and with greater consistency.
Media Creator
Help legal experts turn written guides into engaging videos, audio, and visual media—quickly and accurately.
Content Reviewer
Help legal experts keep public-facing content accurate, consistent, and easy to use—by scanning for issues and recommending smart improvements.
Law Watcher
Help providers keep public legal help content accurate by detecting legal changes and suggesting timely updates.
Legal Help Translator
Help providers make legal help content available to all, by translating it into users' preferred language clearly, accurately, and usefully.
Service Onboarding
Tools to help a service provider intake, screen, triage, and prepare a client to receive legal assistance. A provider may onboard a person at any stage of their justice journey, but it typically occurs when a person has gone through the Awareness and Orientation stages, and then has reached out to the provider to get help. The provider then needs to understand the person's legal problems, check if they're able to help, and decide which kind of service is a good fit.
Intake Interviewing
Help providers understand who they’re helping and what path to take by gathering and organizing a complete, accurate picture of the person and their situation.
Case Doc Issue-Spotter
Help providers review a user’s legal documents by spotting issues, extracting key fields, and flagging problems for further action.
User + Case Profiler
Help providers quickly understand a client’s situation by gathering and summarizing relevant data from external sources.
Legal Analyzer
Help providers analyze a person’s legal situation and surface the rules, rights, and strategies that apply—faster and more accurately.
Work Product
Tools to create legal documents, do research, craft narratives, file documents, negotiate, review settlements, and other legal tasks. These are used mainly in the Work Product stage when a person must complete and file many documents, but may also be needed during the Present and Negotiate stage when they have to verbally represent what they have filed, respond to questions about what is in the documents, and negotiate potential settlements.
Standard Document Filler
Help people complete standardized legal forms by gathering the right data, checking for fit and accuracy, and making the process fast and user-friendly.
Expert Document Drafter
Help providers and advanced users draft custom, complex legal documents—like motions, complaints, or discovery requests—quickly and accurately, tailored to the case.
Narrative Drafter
Help people tell their legal story clearly and effectively—so decision-makers can understand and act.
Contract Reviewer
Help people evaluate a proposed contract or settlement agreement by checking it against their goals, legal standards, and practical consequences.
Document Draft Checker
Help providers and users catch errors and gaps in drafted legal documents—ensuring they’re complete, clear, and ready to file.
Electronic Filer
Help people and providers file legal documents with courts correctly and efficiently—by handling formatting, submission, and confirmation.
Negotiation Helper
Help people prepare for and engage in negotiation by clarifying goals, understanding trade-offs, and exploring workable resolutions.
Case Management
Tools to help a justice organization to process, sort, schedule, analyze, and track a case. These are particularly important during the Engagement Stage, in which parties may otherwise miss deadlines, delay hearings, make errors, or cease participation in the case. It is also important for the backend administration of justice, to ensure that the case gets 'rightsized' procedure, the dispute can resolve promptly, and staff can operate efficiently and clearly.
Support Coach
Help people follow through on their legal journey by sending personalized messages, reminders, and encouragement—so they don’t fall off track.
Procedure Triage
Help administrators route cases to the right procedural track by analyzing case details and matching them to program rules and service levels.
Filing Screener
Help administrators review legal filings by checking for missing fields and compliance with procedural and substantive requirements—quickly and accurately.
Smart Scheduling
Help providers efficiently schedule meetings and events by balancing team availability, participant needs, and logistical constraints.
Administration & Strategy
Tools for a justice org to manage their teams, their grants, spot trends, create strategies, and build stronger organizations. A court, legal aid group, or nonprofit needs these backend tools to understand what types of cases they have, how to report their work for funding, and how to maintain the key databases and resources they rely on.
Data Extractor
Automatically extract structured, actionable data from court forms, PDFs, contracts, and images to populate case management systems and support legal service workflows.
Grant Reporter
Help providers generate complete, accurate grant reports by compiling data, writing narratives, and formatting results to meet funder requirements.
Service Directory Maintenance
Help providers maintain an accurate, structured list of their services by gathering and updating details from internal documentation and program materials.
Trends Spotter
Help providers spot trends in client needs, legal strategies, and outcomes by analyzing data across systems and delivering actionable insights.
Data Anonymizer
Help providers transform confidential data into usable, secure datasets by removing identifiers and inserting consistent synthetic replacements.
Tech Tooling
Tools to help justice organizations build and manage legal help technology platforms, applications, and other tech. The ops and tech team need help to create and maintain websites, ensure security and privacy, and develop new functions to help with documents, research, analytics, and more.
Form Creator
Help legal aid and court teams build accurate, accessible forms (digital, paper, interactive, or otherwise)—faster and without technical complexity.
Website Administrator
Help providers keep their public-facing websites running smoothly by monitoring performance, security, and updates—and flagging important issues that need attention.
Interview Creator
Help providers generate high-quality, user-friendly interviews that collect the right user data to power legal documents, user profiles, and services.
User Tester
Help providers automatically test new legal help tools & projects for bugs, safety risks, accessibility issues, and fairness—before public release.
Datasets
Are you looking for data to build AI or measure its performance? We are featuring open datasets that can be used for benchmarking quality of AI, or to improve how an AI system works.
Beagle+ Legal Chatbot Testing Dataset
A curated, labeled dataset of 42 real-world legal question-answers used to evaluate the safety and helpfulness of AI-generated answers during the development of Beagle+, a legal information chatbot for British Columbia.
Common Legal Help Questions
A curated, synthetic dataset of common civil legal questions asked by the public—tagged by legal issue and sensitivity—to support research, product testing, and development of legal help technologies.
Learned Hands: Labeled Dataset of Legal Issues in Reddit problem stories
A crowdsourced, expert-reviewed dataset of legal issue labels on real-world problem narratives, created to support machine learning and research on legal needs and access to justice.
Please share datasets with JusticeBench at legaldesignlab@law.stanford.edu
Guides
How can you create an AI plan for your justice organization, and what's the best way to implement new AI developments? Explore our guides for justice institution leaders.
Coming Soon. Please share guide proposals and open-source materials with us at legaldesignlab@law.stanford.edu