Greater accessibility to generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools could potentially increase justice access for low-income Americans. This is according to a recent study, which discovered a notable productivity boost for legal aid lawyers who made use of these tools. Approximately 90% of legal professionals involved in a month-long pilot program reported a rise in productivity, with a quarter indicating a medium to high level of productivity increase.
The comprehensive study was initiated by Colleen V. Chien, co-director at the prestigious Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, and Miriam Kim, partner at Munger Tolles Olson LLP who is also a fellow at the aforementioned center. The initial phase of the study included the participation of 202 legal aid professionals, followed by a field study involving 91 individuals who received free access to paid generative AI tools for at least one month.
Chien and Kim consider this to be the pioneering field research of its kind involving lawyers utilizing generative AI. The pair released the preliminary draft of their paper titled “Generative AI and Legal Aid: Results from a Field Study and 100 Use Cases to Bridge the Access to Justice Gap” on March 14. The final paper is slated to be published in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review.
The study further highlights the critical need to ensure that the use of generative AI does not tilt along traditional gender lines. Available data suggests that women were one-third as likely as men to already be using AI tools at the start of the research. However, by the end of the project, the gender gap closed, indicating an equivalently positive experience for women using AI as well as men.
In an attempt to dig deeper into how generative AI could help foster justice, a randomized subset of participants received additional training and support for these tools, termed as “concierge services”. The group who had access to these services was more likely to report satisfaction and productivity increases, with a whopping 88% reporting positive impacts from using generative AI tools.
For a detailed understanding of the research, the full research report can be assessed in its entirety at Law360.