Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

9:00am EDT

Does It Actually Work? Evaluating AI Tools for Access to Justice

Wednesday October 21, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT

Generative AI has the potential to increase access to justice for self-represented litigants, but only if we engage in responsible use.
To do this, we must thoroughly test our AI tools for accuracy, tone, and outcomes and then iterate models based on results.
This 90-minute session will mix lectures, case studies, and small group exercises to help participants better understand the unique needs of evaluating and testing AI tools, and equip them with knowledge and tools to plan and execute necessary evaluations for all stages of their project.
Topics will include:
- why evaluation is key;
- how to determine acceptable error rates based on use, audience, risk of harm, and other factors;
- how much testing is enough testing; and
- various testing methods and strategies that attendees can use.

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 →

Quinten Steenhuis

Clinical Fellow, Suffolk LIT Lab's Document Assembly

Quinten Steenhuis is the co-director of the Suffolk University Law School’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab and founder and CEO of Lemma Legal Consulting. At Suffolk, he leads the Document Assembly Line project that builds and maintains CourtFormsOnline.org. His work focuses... Read More →

Margaret D. Hagan

Executive Director, Legal Design Lab, Stanford Legal Design Lab

Margaret Hagan is the Executive Director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford University, as well as lecturer at the Law School and d.school. She is a lawyer, and holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, a DPhil from Queen’s University Belfast, an MA from Central European University... Read More →

Joanne Lu

Project Consultant, Community Legal Education Ontario

Joanne is a Project Consultant at Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO), where she consults on AI projects aimed at improving access to justice. Joanne holds an Honours BSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. Prior to joining CLEO, she worked as a senior product... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 9:00am - 10:30am EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Tech

10:45am EDT

Reinventing the Front Door: The Future of Legal Intake and Triage

Wednesday October 21, 2026 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

For most people seeking legal help, their first interaction with an organization is with a triage or intake system. Traditional systems are often checklist-driven processes designed for the organization's convenience rather than the needs of the individual seeking help. The result? Many are left without guidance on what to do or how to go about navigating the legal system pro se, which maintains if not enhances the justice gap. What would it take to put people first? To holistically and effectively identify the needs of individuals seeking services? To prioritize partnerships based on the needs of our client communities?
This session explores triage and intake processes and technologies that put clients first, including how the integration of coordinated intake, collaboration, and AI may each have an impactful contribution to reducing the Justice Gap. Participants will evaluate their own organization's intake systems, identify potential areas of improvement or bottlenecks that may impede access to their services, and begin brainstorming solutions best suited to addressing the applicant/client need.

Speakers

Samantha DiDomenico

Director, Stout Consulting

Samantha DiDomenico is a Director in Stout’s Transformative Change Consulting group. Samantha has 10 years of experience providing consulting services to for-profit and non-profit clients in a variety of industries. She has expertise in understanding large, complex systems and data... Read More →

Teri Ross

Executive Director, Illinois Legal Aid Online

Teresa (Teri) Ross is a leader at the intersection of legal aid and technology, focused on expanding access to justice through thoughtful innovation. As the Executive Director at Illinois Legal Aid Online (ILAO), she supports a team of more than 20 professionals who work to bridge... Read More →

Amy Mix

DC Resource Bridge

Amy is the Director of the DC Resource Bridge, a coordinated intake and referral project that streamlines access for District residents to more than 30 legal services providers. Prior to this role, Amy spent nearly two decades as a legal services attorney and led an Elder Justice... Read More →

Heidi Behnke

Georgia Legal Services

Heidi E. Behnke is the Statewide Pronect Manager for Georgia Legal Services Program. She received her M.Sc. in Development Anthropology from the University of Durham. Ms. Behnke honed her abilities in designing, implementing, and analyzing results from academic and practical projects... Read More →

Brandon Slack

Director of Marketing & Product, Just-Tech LLC

Brandon Slack is Head of Product & Marketing at Just-Tech, LLC, a national legal technology company serving nonprofit legal aid organizations. He co-created JTAI (jtai.law), a purpose-built AI platform enabling knowledge management, agent-based chat intelligence, and intake automation... Read More →

Sarah Coffey Bowes

Executive Director, Civil Justice Inc.

Sarah Coffey Bowes, Esq. is a veteran non-profit manager with a strong background in programmatic growth, sustainability, and strategic planning. Sarah supervised the operation and continuous expansion of the award-winning Maryland Courts Self-Help Centers - a network of legal service... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 10:45am - 12:15pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Tech

1:30pm EDT

AI on Your Team: How Legal Teams Are Actually Using AI Right Now

Wednesday October 21, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

At this session, case studies trace AI through different legal workflows.
A housing defense team at the Legal Aid Society of NYC built HANA, a retrieval-augmented generation tool that helps paralegals and attorneys rapidly research housing law questions and draft responses — with a live demonstration showing how it works in practice, where it saves time, and where human judgment remains essential.
A supervising attorney trainer describes what changes when the people you supervise start using AI for legal drafting: What does quality control look like? How do you train attorneys to verify AI output rather than trust it? How does the supervisor's role evolve when the first draft isn't written by the person whose name is on it?
After each case study, participants pair up to process what they heard: What surprised you? What would break in your organization if you tried this tomorrow?
Then two hands-on exercises:
1. A workflow mapping exercise asks each participant to pick one repetitive legal task in their organization, sketch the current steps, identify where AI could assist, and mark where human review remains non-negotiable.
2. A 90-day pilot plan worksheet makes it concrete: What tool? What workflow? Who supervises? What does success look like at 30, 60, and 90 days? What's the first approval you need?
You'll leave with a realistic picture of AI in legal aid today — not the AI of conference keynotes, but the AI of Monday morning — and a plan for getting started that fits your actual resources.

Speakers

Barbara Michalska

Supervising Attorney, The Legal Aid Society

Barbara (Basia) Michalska, Esq. is a Supervising Attorney at The Legal Aid Society’s Housing Justice Helpline, where she co-created the AI-powered Information Retrieval Tool that was named a grand prize winner in Robin Hood’s AI Poverty Challenge. Selected from nearly 200 national applicants, the tool was re... Read More →

Kimberly Skadan

Housing Attorney Trainer and Supervisor, The Legal Aid Society of New York

Kimberly Skadan (she/her) joined The Legal Aid Society since 2008, first as a Staff Attorney in the Brooklyn Office for the Aging, then as Housing Attorney Trainer and Supervisor in the Civil Practice's Training and Professional Development unit. Prior to joining LAS, she was awarded... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Tech

3:15pm EDT

Upstream Justice: Preventive Legal Tech That Catches Problems Early

Wednesday October 21, 2026 3:15pm - 4:45pm EDT

Cincinnati Convention Center

Too many legal aid systems are built around crisis response — we meet people when the rent is already delinquent, the wage garnishment has already started, the custody conflict has already hardened, or the default judgment has already entered. What if we could reach people earlier? Could we surface legal risk before it becomes a legal emergency?
This session presents three tools that are doing exactly that, each approaching the problem from a different angle. The Legal Wellness Clinic's legal check-up model uses structured preventive screening — a repeatable intake process that surfaces latent legal issues across housing, consumer debt, family stability, employment, benefits, and estate planning, identifying risks that clients themselves may not recognize as legal problems. The design challenge is real: how do you screen broadly without becoming an unfocused "ask me anything" clinic, and how do you convince funders that preventing a case is as valuable as winning one?
Wisconsin's Legal Tune Up tool takes a technology-first approach. This free web-based application automatically searches public records across state agencies to identify license suspensions, evictions, convictions, child support arrears, and consumer debt — barriers that block housing, employment, and economic stability, often without the person knowing they exist. The tool identifies which records are eligible for removal or modification, outlines next steps for reinstatement, and connects users to legal services for items requiring attorney involvement. The session will cover the partnerships that made the tool possible, the data access challenges, and the newest extensions: a legal navigator program and a library initiative.
Chicago Advocate Legal's AJusticeLink introduces the most ambitious upstream intervention: a privacy-first mobile application that provides preventive legal triage for incoming text messages and emails. Rather than offering legal advice, AJusticeLink identifies potential legal issues in everyday communications — eviction notices, employment ultimatums, custody threats, benefits deadlines — assigns a risk level, explains why a message may be legally significant, and connects users to appropriate resources. The tool is intentionally limited to triage and information, not advice, with design choices grounded in ethical restraint around unauthorized practice of law.
After the three presentations, participants will do hands-on design work. Small groups choose one high-yield preventive domain — eviction risk, debt and collections, family stabilization, benefits preservation — and design a preventive intervention: What are the screening questions or digital triggers? What's the triage pathway from detection through self-help, brief advice, referral, and escalation? What's one follow-up mechanism that keeps the person connected? Groups report out and the room stress-tests each design: What breaks at scale? What creates risk? What's realistic with limited staffing?

Speakers

Andrew Sharp

Legal Wellness Clinic

Andrew Sharp, Esq. is the founder and Executive Director of Legal Wellness Clinic, a non-profit legal aid providing free legal check-ups in the Chicago, IL area. Andrew is also the Knowledge Strategy Manager for the Coordinated Advice and Referral Program for Legal Services (CARPLS... Read More →

Chlece Walker-Neal-Murray

Chicago Advocate Legal

Jessie Lutter

Access to Justice Coordinator, LIFT Wisconsin

Jessie Lutter-Long is an attorney licensed to practice law in the State of Wisconsin. She obtained her B.F.A. from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and graduated with her J.D. from Marquette University Law School in 2019. After working as a staff attorney for Legal Action... Read More →

Wednesday October 21, 2026 3:15pm - 4:45pm EDT
Cincinnati Convention Center 537 Elm St, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Tech

9:00am EDT

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

Angela Tripp

Program Officer for Technology III, Legal Services Corporation

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 →

Tech

Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

From $62.13

Tickets

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Access to Justice Network Conference 2026

9:00am EDT

Angela Tripp

Quinten Steenhuis

Margaret D. Hagan

Joanne Lu

10:45am EDT

Samantha DiDomenico

Teri Ross

Amy Mix

Heidi Behnke

Brandon Slack

Sarah Coffey Bowes

1:30pm EDT

Barbara Michalska

Kimberly Skadan

3:15pm EDT

Andrew Sharp

Chlece Walker-Neal-Murray

Jessie Lutter

9:00am EDT

Angela Tripp

Abaigeal O'Brien

Rodrigo Camarena

Grace Spulak

Bertha Hayden

Avani Patel

10:45am EDT

Zoe Dolan

Jessica Frank

1:30pm EDT

Amanda Brown

Toby Fey

Grace Spulak

Molly Wraight

Sarah Song

Emily Deines

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