Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

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12:30pm EDT

Best Practices for Online Court Forms

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Speakers

Sam Glover

Clinical Fellow, Suffolk LIT Lab

Sam works with courts, orgs, and the Suffolk LIT Lab team to build online tools that make legal processes more accessible.

Early in his legal career Sam defended consumers from abusive debt collectors and landlords. He also founded Lawyerist, where he focused on legal innovation, access to justice, technology competence, and community building. Sam has been recognized as a legal innovator by the American... Read More →

Lisa Colpoys

Senior Consultant, AI Initiative, Lawyers Trust Fund of Illinois

Lisa Colpoys is a public service leader with over three decades of experience creating new ways to help people solve legal problems. She is passionate about designing user-centric systems, simplifying processes, and transforming legal aid organizations, courts, and the practice of... Read More →

Jessica Frank

User Researcher and Project Manager, Free Law Project

Jessica Frank is an attorney, legal technologist, and Director of Justice Initiatives at Free Law Project, a nonprofit building open legal data infrastructure. She works at the intersection of access to justice, generative AI, and public-interest technology, and speaks regularly at... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Conversation Hour

12:30pm EDT

Getting Our Heads Out of the Sand: AI's Environmental Costs and What the Justice Community Can Do

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Speakers

Sandy Ambrozy

SRLN Governance Leadership Team, Urban Institute

Sandra Ambrozy is a nonresident fellow for the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute in D.C. Previously, Ambrozy was a senior fellow and senior program officer at The Kresge Foundation, where she developed strategic and layered investments to address critical... Read More →

Maya Markovich

Justice Tech Alliance

Claudia Johnson

Western Washington University

Eduardo Gonzalez

Executive Director, NuLawLab

Eduardo Gonzalez is a civil justice strategist working at the intersection of access to justice, civic engagement, and public interest technology. He has led national initiatives that connect courts, legal aid organizations, community groups, and academic institutions to improve how... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Conversation Hour

12:30pm EDT

Holistic Legal Assistance to Sexual Violence Survivors

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

A sexual assault survivor walks into your office. She needs a protection order — but she also needs help with housing because her landlord is trying to evict her for calling the police. She's lost income and doesn't know about crime victim compensation. Her ex is using the family court system to maintain control. Her school mishandled her Title IX complaint. Her name and address are in public court records. Each of these is a separate legal problem, handled by a separate part of the legal system, and most survivors never get help with more than one — if they get help at all.
The OAESV Legal Clinic has built a model for holistic legal assistance that addresses the full range of civil legal needs arising from sexual violence: protection orders, victims' rights, compensation, Title IX and civil rights claims, housing, family law, and privacy. Caitlyn Benzo will briefly introduce the clinic's model and share data on what they're seeing — which legal needs survivors present with, which ones they don't know they have until someone asks, and where the biggest service gaps are.
One issue the clinic is addressing more often is the application of Marsy's Law now that several years have passed since its passage & implementation. Also included is how victim's representation within the criminal legal process is a vital piece of the holistic framework.
The conversation hour will continue with a group discussion: What barriers do survivors face in accessing legal help in your jurisdiction? How do you handle the intersection of trauma and legal process when a client can barely talk about what happened, let alone navigate a courtroom? What does collaboration look like between legal aid, victim services, prosecutors' offices, and housing providers — and where does it break down? Bring your own experiences serving survivors or your questions about how to start.
This session is for legal aid attorneys, victim advocates, court staff, and anyone whose clients include people whose legal problems started with violence. Leave with a clearer picture of available civil remedies, connections to peers doing this work, and practical ideas for building holistic capacity in your own organization.

Speakers

Caitlyn Benzo

Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence Legal Clinic

Caitlyn is an attorney with the Ohio Alliance to End Sexual Violence Legal Clinic, providing trauma-informed legal services across the state. Admitted to the Ohio bar in 2016, Caitlyn has dedicated her career to supporting those impacted by gender- and power-based violence. Caitlyn’s... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Conversation Hour

12:30pm EDT

Keeping Legal Documents Current: Project LACI Case Studies

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Keeping legal information up to date is a constant challenge for legal aid organizations, especially when laws and policies frequently change. Lone Star Legal Aid (LSLA) developed Project LACI (Legal Aid Content Intelligence) to address this issue by using technology to streamline the review and maintenance of self-help materials—web content, brochures, videos, and more. Since launching in May 2024, LACI has helped LSLA modernize its content workflow.
With TIG support, Idaho Legal Aid Services and Texas Legal Services Center are now adapting LACI to manage their statewide legal information. In addition, other organizations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, and elsewhere have been using their own funding to evaluate and adopt LACI in their own states. In this session, LSLA will partner with Legal Services State Support, a project of the Minnesota Legal Services Coalition, to share how they each previously maintained materials, what drew them to LACI, and their experiences so far. Participants will gain insight into practical approaches—manual and automated—for keeping public legal information accurate, accessible, and aligned with current law.

Speakers

Luigi Bai

Managing Attorney, Lone Star Legal Aid

Luigi is a managing attorney at Lone Star Legal Aid. Their teams help appeal evictions, publish disaster content, and make legal information accessible to self-representing persons (SRLs) across the state of Texas. SRLs have had access to legal interviews and document assembly, text... Read More →

Amanda Sauber

Legal Technology Project Manager, Legal Services State Support

Amanda Sauber is the Legal Technology Project Manager of Legal Services State Support. She manages developments on LawHelpMN.org and supports statewide LegalServer online intake. She is a 2010 graduate of the Western Michigan University Cooley Law School (FKA Thomas M. Cooley Law... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Conversation Hour

12:30pm EDT

Neighborhood Stabilization: Community Land Trusts, Tangled Titles, and the Abandoned Home Crisis

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Speakers

Kristie Ortiz

Managing Attorney, Advocates for Basic Legal Equality

Kristie Ortiz, Esq, is currently the Managing Attorney with the Housing Community Economic Development Program at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality. We are currently working on the areas of housing, prison reform, legislative advocacy, neighborhood stabilization work and environmental... Read More →

Kara Jennings

Yellow Springs Inc

Kara is an Attorney at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Toledo. She is a member of the Housing and Community Economic Development practice group. After graduating from BGSU, Kara worked as a VISTA Volunteer for the Ohio Coalition on Sexual Assault in Wood County. While attending... Read More →

Emily Seibel

One Street at a Time

Charlotte Lawson

Advocates for Basic Legal Equality

I am One Street at A Time, founder and senior leader. I started the organization 3 years ago I needed to become a voice for a divested community. Opposed to complaining I needed to do something.

Athena Bowen

Housing Advocate, Advocates for Basic Legal Equality

Housing Advocate with the Housing and Community Economic Development Practice Group at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Inc., working to support equitable housing access and community development.

Michael Loudenslager

Staff Attorney, Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Inc.

Michael Loudenslager is a staff attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Inc. (ABLE), a non-profit law firm that serves people with low incomes in Western Ohio. Michael works in ABLE’s Housing and Economic Development group out of its Dayton, Ohio office. His practice focuses... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Conversation Hour

12:30pm EDT

Trauma-Responsive Practice: Building Skills for Sensitive and Effective Advocacy

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Speakers

Nick Caprino

Attorney, Children's Law Center KY

Sasha Naiman

Executive Director, Children's Law Center KY

Sasha Naiman is the Executive Director of Children’s Law Center, a nonprofit legal organization serving children and young adults across Ohio and Kentucky. She leads the organization's advocacy, strategic growth, and interdisciplinary collaborations to improve outcomes for youth... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Conversation Hour

12:30pm EDT

Unlocking the Courthouse: Opening Access to Court Data

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Sixty-six million cases flow through state courts every year, generating data that could reveal how well the justice system is performing, where it's failing, and who is being underserved. In theory, this is public data. In practice, accessing it requires navigating a gauntlet of technical barriers — robots.txt files with crawl delays measured in days, anti-bot technology designed to block the exact kind of automated analysis that would make the data useful — and legal barriers — terms of service that prohibit machine learning, court policies that actively deter technology use on public documents. The result is that the public's own court data is effectively locked away from the researchers, advocates, journalists, technologists, and even practitioners themselves, who could use it to improve the system.
This conversation hour opens with a live demonstration of what becomes possible when court data is open: a dashboard built from South Carolina probate court records showing how estate processing efficiency varies dramatically by county — visualized through geospatial mapping that makes performance differences impossible to ignore. The demo shows both what the data reveals and what it took to get it. Then the conversation turns to the barriers. A deep dive into the technical and legal obstacles — the specific mechanisms courts use, intentionally or not, to prevent public access to public data — surfaces a problem that most access-to-justice professionals don't know exists until they try to build something that requires court records. A collaborative model involving multiple organizations across criminal and civil court data shows one pathway through the barriers.
This session is for anyone who has tried to work with court data and hit a wall, anyone building tools that depend on court records, and anyone who believes that measuring court performance is a prerequisite for improving it. Bring your own court data access stories — the barriers you've encountered, the workarounds you've found, and the questions you can answer and those you still can't because the data aren’t accessible. Leave with a clearer picture of the landscape and use cases of available data, connections to others working on the problem, and strategies for advocating open data in your jurisdiction.

Speakers

David Caraway

Measures for Justice / Code with the Carolinas (The Social Good Fund)

Dave Caraway is a self-represented litigant and technologist. Dave organizes the OpenCourts project, a volunteer-run project dedicated to making court data accessible. He brings twenty years of experience leading software teams and previously served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 12:30pm - 1:25pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Conversation Hour

Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

From $62.13

Tickets

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Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

12:30pm EDT

Sam Glover

Lisa Colpoys

Jessica Frank

12:30pm EDT

Sandy Ambrozy

Maya Markovich

Claudia Johnson

Eduardo Gonzalez

12:30pm EDT

Caitlyn Benzo

12:30pm EDT

Luigi Bai

Amanda Sauber

12:30pm EDT

Kristie Ortiz

Kara Jennings

Emily Seibel

Charlotte Lawson

Athena Bowen

Michael Loudenslager

12:30pm EDT

Nick Caprino

Sasha Naiman

12:30pm EDT

David Caraway

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