Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

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9:00am EDT

Chatbot or Not? How Self-Help Websites Are Integrating AI

Thursday October 22, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT

For years, the best practices for self-help legal websites were relatively settled: provide clear legal information, usable forms, procedural guidance, and referrals. Then generative AI arrived, and suddenly every organization is asking the same question: Should we build a chatbot? The honest answer is that it depends — on your content, your users, your capacity, your risk tolerance, and whether a chatbot is actually the right tool for the problem you're trying to solve. This session doesn't answer the question for you. It gives you the framework to answer it yourself, by showing the full spectrum of how organizations are integrating AI into self-help websites — and what they're learning about what works, what doesn't, and what they wish they'd known before they started.
Our panel's rapid presentations show genuinely different approaches. Two state court systems launched chatbots with different designs, different user populations, and different results — offering a side-by-side comparison that reveals how much the same technology can look different depending on implementation choices. A contrarian perspective makes the case that chatbots may not be the right default AI investment for most organizations, and that more targeted, less visible AI applications might deliver better results with less risk. A multilingual AI translation project shows what it takes to convert over a thousand pages of legal content into nine languages using AI — not as a parlor trick but as a systematic process with a quality rubric that other organizations can replicate. A consumer-facing worker rights tool demonstrates AI delivered through WhatsApp to reach multilingual, mobile-first populations who would never visit a court website. And an accessibility-focused perspective examines what it means to design AI tools that work for people with disabilities from the start, not as a compliance afterthought.
Before and after the presentations, participants vote on a single question: Should your organization build a chatbot as its primary AI investment? The shift in votes — which consistently moves toward nuance and away from certainty — reveals how the presentations reframed the decision. Then an AI integration decision matrix helps each participant evaluate their own situation: Given your content library, your user population, your technical capacity, your risk tolerance, and your budget, which approach makes the most sense? Chatbot, translation, search enhancement, targeted tool, or wait and see? You'll leave with the decision matrix, a chatbot best-practices guide for organizations that do decide to build, a comparison chart across multiple state approaches, a translation process and scoring rubric, an accessibility checklist, and clarity about whether a chatbot is the right investment for your organization — or whether your users would be better served by something less flashy and more useful.

Speakers

Angela Tripp

Program Officer for Technology III, Legal Services Corporation

Angela Tripp is a Program Officer for Technology with the Legal Services Corporation. She is
responsible for helping legal aid programs implement innovative technology projects that
improve access to high-quality legal assistance for people across the country. She helps manage
LS... Read More →

Abaigeal O'Brien

Alaska Court System

Rodrigo Camarena

Justicia Lab

Rodrigo Camarena is a Brooklyn-based immigrant rights advocate and nonprofit leader dedicated to leveraging technology for social justice. He currently serves as the Interim Co-Executive Director of Pro Bono Net, overseeing Product & Technology and Justicia Lab, Pro Bono Net's immigrant... Read More →

Grace Spulak

Senior Court Management Consultant, National Center for State Courts

Bertha Hayden

Directing Attorney, Bet Tzedek

Avani Patel

Supervising Sr. Program Mngr, Illinois Court Help, Illinois Court Help

Avani Patel is the Supervising Senior Manager of the Illinois Court Help Program at the Administrative Office of the Illinois Courts (AOIC) and a Project Specialist at the Institute for Inclusion in the Legal Profession (IILP). In her role at AOIC, she leads a team of court guides... Read More →

Thursday October 22, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Tech

10:45am EDT

AI in the Hands of Litigants: What Happens When Court Users Bring Their Own AI

Thursday October 22, 2026 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Litigants are already using AI. Not in a pilot program, not with permission, not with guidance — on their own, at home, before they walk into court. In some settings, 70-80% of self-represented parties are using ChatGPT or similar tools to draft motions, research their rights, prepare for hearings, and write letters to judges. Some of them are winning appeals they would never have filed without AI assistance. Some of them are submitting documents full of hallucinated case citations. Most courts have no policy, no guidance, and no plan for a reality that is already here. The question is no longer whether litigants should use AI. The question is whether courts and legal aid organizations will respond thoughtfully or be caught flat-footed.
This session presents three perspectives on what a thoughtful response looks like. At the appellate level, one legal aid organization made the deliberate choice to teach litigants how to use AI effectively — training self-represented appellate clients to use AI tools for research and drafting, with adoption rates approaching 80% and outcomes that drew national media attention. At the trial level, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" or "discourage AI usage" approaches have arisen amidst internal organizational debates on best practices, just as increasing adoption across society tests whether such policies remain tenable.
The tension between these approaches is productive: Should courts teach people to use external AI? Should they provide their own? Should they regulate what comes in the door? The answer may be all three — but the design choices matter enormously.
Against this backdrop, we will discuss developing official guidance and guardrails — not banning AI use, but creating a framework that helps litigants use it responsibly and helps judges evaluate AI-assisted filings fairly. One specific real-world example: a justice technology organization building court-integrated AI tools designed specifically for self-represented users — tools that work within the court's own infrastructure rather than leaving litigants to figure out consumer AI products on their own. Peering into the near to mid-term future, we will ask: How can courts and legal service providers anticipate litigant-facing policies as more autonomous AI agents proactively agument - or even act on behalf of - their human counterparts? At what point would mechanisms like AI agent licensure or other qualification processes start making sense?
A fishbowl discussion opens the floor to the room: What are you seeing in your courts? Are litigants bringing AI-generated documents? How are judges reacting? What problems have emerged, and what has surprised you? Then each table drafts a one-page AI guidance document that their court could issue tomorrow — practical, realistic, and focused on what court users actually need to know: what AI can help with, what it can't, what the risks are, how to disclose AI use, and where to get human help when the AI falls short. You'll leave with a model guidance template, a curriculum for teaching litigants to use AI, a summary of emerging court AI policies, and a clearer sense of how to prepare your court or organization for a reality that isn't coming — it's already here.

Speakers

Zoe Dolan

Public Counsel

Zoe Dolan divides her time between serving as a trial attorney at Eviction Defense Network in Los Angeles, where she studies potential AI applications for tenant empowerment in litigation, and Vybn.AI - a human/AI team exploring the frontiers of AI, law, and AI-augmented human capacity... 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 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Tech

1:30pm EDT

Better Legal Websites Without AI: Content, Design, and Infrastructure That Works

Thursday October 22, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Not every improvement requires artificial intelligence. The majority of legal aid and court self-help websites have not yet solved problems that have nothing to do with AI: content written at a 12th-grade reading level, navigation that makes sense to staff but not to users, forms that are unusable on a phone, and pages that fail basic accessibility standards. These are solvable problems — right now, with existing tools and established best practices — and solving them would dramatically improve the experience of the millions of people who visit these sites every year.
This session walks through the core elements of a self-help website that actually serves its users: how people navigate and find what they need, what makes legal content readable and usable, how forms succeed or fail, how sites perform on the devices most users carry, and what accessibility means in practice for people with disabilities.
For each area, we look at what good looks like, where most sites fall short, and what tools and resources are available to help, including open-source content and guided interview tools that let organizations build on each other's work rather than starting from scratch every time.
We’ll walk through tests and checklists to assess your site in real time, and you'll leave with practical frameworks and tools you can apply to your own site right away without relying on AI.

Speakers

Amanda Brown

Executive Director, Lagniappe Law Lab

Amanda Brown is the founder and executive director of Lagniappe Law Lab. She is the chair of the Louisiana's Access to Justice Commission's technology subcommittee, and is a member of the Legal Service Corporation's Emerging Leaders Council. She is also active in the American Bar... Read More →