Last week, the disparities between the two worlds of legal tech were laid bare at two separate conferences. The first, Legalweek in New York City, celebrated the advancements in big law tech. The other, the Innovations in Technology Conference in Charlotte, focused on how tech can improve access to justice for low-income Americans.
This dichotomy highlights an overlooked justice gap that exists in legal tech – the disproportionately small portion of resources allocated to tech serving low-income Americans compared to the abundance of financial support for tech targeting large law firms and corporate legal departments.
While an alarming 92% of civil legal problems encountered by the roughly 50 million low-income Americans receive no or insufficient legal help, money continues to pour into big law and corporate law sectors. For example, legal tech investments in 2023 were estimated to be around $1.4 billion and $2.2 billion in 2022, almost exclusively channeled into products designed for large law firms and corporates.
Contrastingly, the main funding source for legal services tech, the LSC’s Technology Initiative Grants program only had $5 million available for 2023, with most individual grants under this program being less than $40,000. Despite these disparities, certain firms, such as Relativity, an e-discovery company, are creating initiatives to provide tech to social justice programs. Their Justice for Change program is a prime example.
While it’s commendable that such programs exist, one can’t help but imagine the potential impact of diverting even a fraction of the billions being invested in big law tech to access to justice (A2J) tech. Numerous for-profit companies, a part of the Justice Technology Association, are dedicated to increasing access to justice and are proof that profit can be generated in the A2J sector.
Various methods have been suggested to bridge this legal tech justice gap. They include intentional allocation of funding to A2J tech by venture capitalists and private equity, donation of tech to A2J programs by large legal tech companies, and more efforts from law schools to study A2J tech. If these recommendations are executed, the imbalance in legal tech could be offset and the justice gap narrowed.
This justice gap in legal tech mirrors the broader justice gap in our society, illustrating how skewed the distribution of wealth and resources is. Gathering contributions from the booming legal tech sector could help shrink the gap, delivering justice to a greater populace.
Read the in-depth analysis at LawNext.