Using Technology to Maximize Human Interaction
By Amanda Brown
Since the Legal Service Corporation began its “Technology Initiatives Grant” (TIG) program in 2000, technology has taken a stronghold on Access to Justice, promising to be a key input for shrinking the Justice Gap. In the Age of AI, we see this even more acutely.
Automating processes. Increasing efficiency. Scaling services. As a justice technologist, these are the terms even I find myself speaking in every day.
But frankly, none of that matters when you’re standing face-to-face with someone experiencing domestic violence, who’s desperate to find a better way of life. Or someone that just lost their job who was one missed paycheck away from losing their apartment. Or someone who’s engaged in the most gut-wrenching battle for the safety and care of their child.
Efficiency — manifesting as the failure to acknowledge a genuine need for human interaction — should not be our north star.
It’s personal.
People experiencing legal issues are not just looking for a “resolution;” they need to feel heard, supported, and validated. The number one thing we hear from people using our technologies to navigate legal issues in Louisiana? “I just want to talk to someone.”
It’s become increasingly obvious that, with very few exceptions, technology-only solutions continue to miss the mark and fail to gain widespread adoption because legal issues are inherently stressful and deeply personal. And people experiencing stress — no matter the kind — crave guidance from someone who understands what they’re going through, and validation that they’re on the right path.
Of course, I’m not advocating for the elimination of efficiency gains, self-help technology, or other tools of empowerment. Those things — and the incredible amount of work we’re doing to understand, standardize, and systematize the way people access the legal system — are absolutely fundamental in our journey to expand access to justice. We should be offloading as much as humanly possible to these systems where it makes sense.
But if we want to meaningfully give people a sense of justice, we have to design services that put their humanity first. A technology-only approach for justice is doomed to fail because our humanity is messy and complicated and infinite. And it takes an extreme amount of discernment to comb through that messiness and turn it into action. The only chance we truly have at meeting people where they need us to be, is to leverage technology to maximize human interaction.
And it’s time to catch up.
The reality is that our legal system is not structured to support this. We need to align our systems, our professionals, and our assumptions with the world we say we want to build.
While I sense that we are in a “professional awakening” of sorts, we still do not have a cohesive and shared understanding of our service delivery systems from start to finish. This is impeding our ability to identify leverage points for these technologies, and how human touchpoints could be a centerpiece to even the most highly automated service areas.
We’ve also not truly reckoned with what it would mean to be “needed” in a different way by people in crisis. We have to prepare the people that make up the service delivery system to actualize their highest human value, finding their strength in sense-making, soft skills and strategy.
Most importantly, access to justice is oppressed by economic systems that treat legal help as a luxury, and our profession’s insistence that lawyers are the only way forward. Lawyers need to wake up and accept that other “types” of service providers can provide value and are a necessary augmentation to the failing system we’re currently perpetuating.
At the end of the day, we all agree that legal technology and AI is not going to replace lawyers or humans. But it will and fundamentally should change the way we work, and how we define who does what in our system.
We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shift the paradigm — bridging technology and humanity to reimagine the legal system. If we don’t take it, it will be painfully obvious that the legal profession does not truly enable — or even value — justice. Let’s build a future of law that’s worthy of the people it’s meant to serve.
Amanda Brown is the founder and executive director of Lagniappe Law Lab, a justice technology nonprofit based in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is the co-chair of the Louisiana’s Access to Justice Commission’s technology subcommittee, and has been a member of the Legal Service Corporation’s Emerging Leaders Council since its inception in 2020.
