Here’s How AI and ChatGPT Tools Can Help Scale Pro Bono Work

There’s a story about a grandfather who watches his grandson pick up starfish one by one, after a storm washed them ashore by the thousands. As the boy throws a starfish back into the ocean, his grandfather tells him that his effort won’t make much of a difference. The boy replies, “It made a difference to this one!”

This story offers a useful metaphor for pro bono lawyering. Both the boy and his grandfather are correct. It’s critical to provide free legal aid to individuals who need it, but we should also consider the scale of our efforts. Technology, including Chat GPT and Bard, can help us on that journey.

Help One Person at a Time

For 12 years as a legal aid attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, I helped tenants, one at a time, who were losing their homes to eviction. During my legal aid career, I helped almost a thousand tenants this way, arguing cases in front of judges, filing forms, or reaching a settlement.

That one-on-one work was meaningful. For those I was helping—the veteran with a traumatic brain injury who got to stay in a safe and familiar home, a young mother whose family didn’t have to move—it didn’t matter that only one in 10 tenants in the Boston Housing Court had an attorney.

Despite the overwhelming scope of the problem, I was able to make a difference to real people facing dire circumstances, and help them improve their situations.

Improving Scale

The grandfather in the story was right to question the scale of the boy’s impact. When we are faced with an enormous injustice, it’s not enough to help a few individuals. We need to solve that injustice with efforts that match the scale of the problem.

In 1971, there was one attorney for every 570 residents of the US. In 2021, there was one for every 250. Despite that growth, nearly 90% of low-income Americans each year still go without any meaningful help for their legal needs. We need to shift the rules of the game.

That’s what I did with MADE—Massachusetts Defense for Eviction. After a decade of helping tenants one at a time, I wrote a software program in 2019 to provide the same step-by-step help to tenants across the state, any time day or night.

Since then, MADE has helped more than 1,200 tenants each year—more than I helped in all my years working the old-fashioned way. Last year, the White House and Department of Justice applauded MADE and efforts like it in a joint press release. I call this new approach “grow bono” because of its focus on scale.

An international team of volunteers led by Suffolk Law’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab took a grow bono approach with CourtFormsOnline.org.

Users type in their legal issues in their own words, and then the tool directs them to a TurboTax-style smartform addressing their issue—for example, restraining order, child custody. In its first month, 4,000 tenants across the country used the site to file forms to prevent their eviction.

Some law firms are getting in on this work as well. In 2020, Chapman and Cutler partnered with Legal Aid Chicago to build an app that could help thousands of people with past criminal records for cannabis possession seal their criminal records for free.

Grow Bono, and ChatGPT

At Suffolk, we’ve been trying out ChatGPT, and we’re impressed—although the tool is far from able to safely argue a motion, counsel a client, or even appeal a parking ticket. I’ve witnessed it make nonsense legal arguments and even invent citations from thin air.

That said, ChatGPT is excellent at summarizing and extracting relevant information from documents provided to it, translating legalese into plain English, and helping us quickly analyze thousands of existing court forms so we can identify ways forms can be simplified and made more user-friendly.

It’s clear that ChatGPT’s ability to scale legal work is here, now. Here are a few things you can do to push your organization toward a “grow bono” approach:

If your firm already has an innovation department or staff that automate internal work, consider teaming up with them to build apps to increase access to justice, maybe partnering with a local legal aid organization.

Join or start an effort like Suffolk Law’s volunteer-powered CourtFormsOnline.org. There is room for projects just like it all over the country. You don’t need to be a coder. These projects require volunteer attorneys to bring their specific legal expertise, as well as editors, translators, and project managers.

There may be an access to justice organization in your state that’s willing to work on a grow bono project. If there’s not, you can start one. Local Legal Hackers groups and Code for America brigades may be a good place to start looking for coders.

Helping each individual starfish matters, but we should also be trying to help thousands. Working toward pro bono at scale is critical if we hope to address gaping inequities in access to justice.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

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Lawyer and coder Quinten Steenhuis teaches legal technology and innovation at Suffolk University Law School as a practitioner in residence. His students build mobile apps that help low- and moderate-income people address their legal emergencies.