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Chatbot or Not? How Self-Help Websites Are Integrating AI
Thursday October 22, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center
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
AT

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 →
AO

Abaigeal O'Brien

Alaska Court System
avatar for Rodrigo Camarena

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 →
GS

Grace Spulak

Senior Court Management Consultant, National Center for State Courts
BH

Bertha Hayden

Directing Attorney, Bet Tzedek
avatar for Avani Patel

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

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