AI and Access to Justice

On this track, the Legal Design Lab researches how people use AI to deal with their legal problems, what better systems they want, and how to improve the quality and accountability of AI platforms as they operate in the legal domain.

See our main page on AI and Access to Justice.

AI for Legal Help class: AI for Legal Help is a studio course that our Legal Design Lab team has taught yearly since 2023. It is cross-listed at Stanford Law School and the d.school, and attracts students from across many different departments on campus. Students work with our team and with legal aid and court partners on scoping, prototyping, testing, and creating evaluation plans for new AI-powered ways of serving the public’s legal needs.

In 2026, we ran the class as a two-quarter sequence: Winter quarter covered the initial scoping and prototyping of a new solution, and Spring quarter covered setting evaluation standards and refining the solution through extensive testing. Students have partnered with public interest organizations like the Legal Services Corporation, American Bar Association, LA Courts, and legal aid groups around the country. Read the 2026 class report or see the class page.

Workshops on AI and access to justice: Our Lab co-organizes a series of AI and access to justice workshops at the JURIX and ICAIL conferences, which we have run since 2024. The most recent was the AIDA2J Workshop at ICAIL 2026 in Singapore on June 8.

We partner with legal aid groups, courts, and non-profits to design, pilot, and scale innovative new access to justice initiatives.

Justice System Innovation

On this track, the Legal Design Lab creates new services, tech, and policies that can improve people’s access to the civil justice system.

This track includes classes, user research, software and AI development, and peer cohorts.

Main website: Find our Justice Innovation website that profiles methods, projects, and principles to use when developing new efforts to improve the justice system.

Access to Justice Network: Our Lab hosts and stewards the Access to Justice Network, a community of more than 1,300 judges, court managers, attorneys, librarians, researchers, and technologists. It is open to justice professionals worldwide, as well as professionals who work with them to make effective, innovative, and well-designed justice systems.

The Access to Justice Network is the successor organization to the Self-Represented Litigation Network (SRLN). SRLN was formed in 2005, and has been a community of practice for people working on access to justice, civil justice reform, legal empowerment, and human-centered design of the legal system. Beginning in 2025, SRLN’s community of practice and many of its resources were assumed by the Access to Justice Network, hosted at the Stanford Legal Design Lab. The Network runs an email list, working groups on topics including legal forms, legal self-help websites, and access to justice research, and a biannual conference. Join the Access to Justice Network.

Forms and Efiling: With the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession, the Lab has launched the Filing Fairness Project to ease people’s ability to participate in court processes.

Language Access: Our Lab has partnered with state courts and legal aid groups to study how people want language access support through technology and human services. Read the report from our 2019 class to the California Judicial Council.

The Lab has taught classes and run workshops on innovations in the eviction system, expungement and clearing records, guardianships and conservatorship, debt and money problems, and estate planning.

We partner with national non-profits, local and federal government agencies, and justice system professionals to identify & spread the most promising initiatives to prevent evictions & forced displacement.

Eviction Prevention work at Legal Design Lab

On this track, the Legal Design Lab built strategic networks, identified the most promising pilots to prevent evictions, and evaluated what works.

From 2019 to 2024, within the broader category of access to justice innovation, our Lab focused on eviction prevention and housing justice in particular. We continue to build on this work in our current projects.

Eviction Prevention Learning Lab cohort: The Lab worked with the National League of Cities to run the multi-city peer cohort, the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab. It brought city governments, courts, legal aid, and social service providers from over 30 cities together to identify and spread best practices in stopping evictions and promoting access to justice.

Eviction Innovation site: We documented promising practices in the space on our Eviction Innovation platform. This website has case studies, guides, and repositories of resources to help policy-makers and service providers develop better strategies and interventions for preventing evictions.

Legal Help FAQs: The Lab runs a national question and answer website, Legal Help FAQs, for COVID-19-related eviction questions. It built the site in Spring 2020 to provide a clear, authoritative source on local laws protecting people from eviction.

NAACP Housing Navigators: Through our series of classes on Justice By Design: Eviction, our Lab team and our Stanford students partnered with the NAACP to refine and scale their Housing Navigator program. We helped them design their website, social media campaign, and service design & strategy.

ABA Eviction, Housing Stability, and Equity Task Force: Lab Executive Director Margaret Hagan is the chair of the American Bar Association’s SCLAID Task Force working on eviction prevention and housing justice. This group has worked on national standards on housing law and on promoting innovative new services and policies across the country.

Eviction Summons Redesign: We have worked with courts in Ohio, Montana, and more to redesign the notices they send out to tenants who have been sued for eviction. We have worked with them to make these official court documents more engaging, comprehensible, and user-friendly. We are now studying in Los Angeles whether redesigned summons can reduce default rates at eviction hearings.

We make the Internet a better place to find legal help.

Better Legal Internet work at Legal Design Lab

From 2016 to 2022, the Legal Design Lab focused on improving how people find legal help on the Internet. We built key data infrastructure for R&D, contributed to AI and digital analysis initiatives, and led cohorts of practitioners through improvements to their court and legal aid websites.

In this track, our work aimed for a near future when people can go online, ask search engines or social media about their life problem, and get local, authoritative, user-friendly legal help. We continue to build on this work in our current AI and access to justice projects.

Main website: Visit our Better Legal Internet website to find more detailed descriptions of the projects mentioned below, on improving search, social media, website design, and data analysis.

Legal Help Dashboard: This webpage from the Lab guides legal help website administrators through the main steps to improving their website. Check up on your tech, design, content, and search rank. Follow our guides to improve on all four areas. This page provides tools, guides, and ranks to make legal aid and court websites better able to serve the public.

LIST Taxonomy: Our Lab has established a master taxonomy, Legal Issues Taxonomy (LIST), of all the main legal issues that people in the US face. These standardized codes can be used by organizations, tech providers, and others who are trying to better map, categorize, and develop tech about legal needs.

Schema Markup SEO Tool: How do legal aid and court websites show up when people search Google for help? We built a tool to help these websites show up higher and to the right audiences. The Schema Markup tool lets legal service groups create code that tells search bots from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines exactly what is on their website, what jurisdictions it applies to, what legal issues it can help people with, and how people can contact them.

Learned Hands: Our Lab collaborated with the Suffolk LIT Lab to develop a data-labeling game platform, Learned Hands. In this game, law students and others can read people’s anonymized legal problems, spot legal issues, and vote whether a certain kind of issue is present or not. This game play creates a labeled data set that is used to analyze legal needs trends and to build an issue-spotting NLP bot, Spot.

New virtual and hybrid justice systems should work better for litigants, and allow for equal, dignified access.

Virtual Legal Systems work at Legal Design Lab

What do the new normal of online courts, virtual legal aid clinics, and digital legal help look like?

Our team is teaching classes, building resources, and testing new prototypes to help create accessible, fair, and empowering virtual legal systems.

Visit our Court Observation Hub, that provides a national database of court watch and observation groups active in seeing what happens on the ground in courts.

Learn more about our classes here, including collaborations with Harvard Graduate School of Design, MIT, Massachusetts Housing Court, designer Virgil Abloh, and architect Oana Stanescu.

Legal communications should be accessible, intelligent, and empowering

Smart Legal Tools & Communication work at Legal Design Lab

We are designing and testing new ways to communicate complex legal information.

This includes creating new graphic design and tech tools for improved legal forms notices, policies, contracts, process guides, and beyond.

Our goal is to create standard templates, metrics, and examples for visual designs that best engage and empower people with legal information.

Read more here at our Legal Communication Design page, which has resources, examples, guides, and tools.

Text Messaging for Justice: We built Wise Messenger to make it easy for courts and legal aid groups to text reminders, hotlines, procedural coaches, and online intake with the public. Read more about our texting work here.

Natural Disaster Legal Help: The Lab built a natural disaster legal help app, Flood Proof, to help people in Louisiana to clear titles to their homes so they could get disaster relief and find legal help.