Beyond Big Law: The Importance of AI Skills for All Law Students

When law students are introduced to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the law school setting, it is often done with a focus on expensive legal-specific tools like Westlaw’s CoCounsel or Lexis’ Protege. In practice, these tools are typically only affordable for large law firms, leaving many public interest-focused law students feeling like it’s not useful for them to learn the necessary skills to correctly use AI technologies. However, a recent report by Everlaw, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, and Paladin shows us that legal aid organizations are not only embracing AI technology, but are doing so at a higher rate than the rest of the legal profession. These legal aid organizations also indicated promising potential for AI to allow them to serve more clients, which in turn may provide an essential step in addressing our nation’s access to justice gap.

According to the Legal Service Corporation’s The Justice Gap report, low-income Americans (about 50 million Americans whose household incomes fall below 125% of the poverty threshold) do not get any or enough legal help for 92% of their substantial civil legal problems – including protecting basic needs such as housing, education, health care, income, and safety. The World Justice Project’s 2024 Rule of Law Index ranked the United States 107 out of 142 countries for accessibility and affordability of civil justice. This phenomenon is referred to as the access to justice gap or justice gap, and reflects an ever-growing issue in the United States in which the civil legal needs of Americans are not properly addressed by the resources available to meet those needs.

The development and implementation of AI technologies stand to help address this justice gap. Proponents of the adoption of AI in the legal aid environment often stress that these technologies may allow legal aid organizations to work with greater time-efficiency, in turn allowing them to take on more clients and help address the access to justice gap.

A recent survey performed by Everlaw, the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, Paladin, and LawSites looked at the use of AI in the  legal aid society space. This study provided several interesting findings:

1. Legal aid organizations have an AI adoption rate two times that of the wider legal profession. This suggests that legal aid organizations are more likely to consider the use of AI technologies in their practice, and have been quicker in adopting these technologies into their organizational workflows.
2. 90% of legal aid organization respondents indicated that if they were using AI to its full potential to speed up time-consuming tasks, they’d be able to serve more people. Further, 17% of respondents reported that AI would help them better serve over 50% more clients. While it is unclear whether the “full potential” use of AI envisioned by this survey is considering the full use of AI technologies already available or those that may be developed in the future, it is notable that such a large amount of respondents indicated that their ability to serve more clients can be impacted by the use of AI technologies.
3. Finally, 88% of survey respondents indicated that they believe that AI can help address the access to justice gap – 34% of respondents saying they believe AI can address the justice gap to a great extent, 40% saying to a moderate extent, and 14% to a small extent.

Included in the white paper report discussing these survey results is a spotlight on North Carolina’s own Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC). LANC is currently testing a new AI-powered voice agent for initial client intake. This voice agent is capable of handling multiple languages and operates 24/7, better allowing clients to reach LANC at the time and in the manner that works for them. Scheree Gilchrist, LANC’s Chief Innovation Officer, touted AI as a “force multiplier to scale our services.”

While efforts like LANC’s hope to use AI as an effective tool for addressing the access to justice gap, obstacles remain preventing legal aid organizations from embracing the use of AI. Survey respondents noted that data privacy and confidentiality concerns, hallucinations and concerns over the overall quality of AI, ethical and professional responsibility concerns, prohibitive costs, and lack of technical resources remain concerns in the adoption of AI technologies.

What does all of this mean for law students? Every law student, including those hoping to go into big law and those seeking public interest positions, should familiarize themselves with AI technologies and learn essential skills to use these technologies effectively. UNC Law offers courses such as Law Practice Technologies and Advanced Legal Research that allow students an opportunity to learn more about AI tools and how to use them – especially the use of free AI tools for non-legal time saving tasks such as those adopted by LANC.