Lasting, systemic change begins with bringing the right people together
Highlights
- 92% of civil legal needs for low-income Americans remain unmet despite AI adoption.
- Legal AI reduces intake time by 50%, enabling organizations to serve 20% more clients.
- Effective AI deployment requires ecosystem alignment across tech providers, educators, and law firms.
In the United States today, 92% of civil legal needs for low-income people go unmet —including income, housing, and personal safety. Legal services organizations turn away roughly half of those in need, lacking sufficient lawyers, hours, or resources. Even when they can assist, only about 56% of cases are fully resolved.
At the same time, AI is already deeply embedded in legal practice, with more than a million professionals in highly regulated fields — including over 20,000 law firms, legal departments, and government and nonprofit agencies — using CoCounsel to work faster, improve quality, and serve more clients.
A recent Thomson Reuters panel explored that question by bringing together three legal industry practitioners from different professions. What emerged was more than a discussion of technology — it was a case study in what becomes possible when legal tech providers, legal educators, and major law firms align around a shared mission. It also highlighted shared beliefs, positions, and values related to AI, regardless of profession — demonstrating why those beliefs are durable and can be trusted.
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Three keystones of an AI for justice ecosystem
What meaningful AI deployment looks like
From tools to a true ecosystem
Three keystones of an AI for justice ecosystem
- Amy Groff, partner at K&L Gates, oversees the firm’s global pro bono practice, which spans local and international initiatives aimed at expanding access to justice.
- Vivek Sankaran directs the Child Advocacy Law Clinic, the Child Welfare Appellate Clinic, and the AI Law and Policy Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, partnering students with courts, nonprofits, and community organizations to apply AI to real justice challenges.
- Andrew Shulman leads the Thomson Reuters’ AI for Justice program, working across the access-to-justice ecosystem — from law school clinics to nonprofits to government agencies.
Individually, each does work that makes a difference. Together, they represent a pipeline: from tool development and access to legal education to high-capacity deployment in service of people with nowhere else to turn.
What meaningful AI deployment looks like
The panel made clear that AI’s impact on access to justice work isn’t theoretical. Groff explains that in innocence cases, attorneys upload trial transcripts and their own summaries into CoCounsel specifically to see what they might have missed, such as unidentified witnesses or overlooked issues — using AI to improve the work product, not just save time. And in veterans’ benefits matters, AI helps manage large document sets, build timelines, support research, and generate early drafts.
Shulman shared where AI delivers immediate value: high-volume tasks like intake, resource-intensive work like reviewing discovery across multiple matters, and what he called the “I don’t want to” tasks: internal training materials, volunteer guides, and documentation that repeatedly get deprioritized.
One example stood out. A legal organization cut hotline intake time from 30 minutes to 15 minutes. On its face, that’s an efficiency win. The real impact came later: attorneys were ultimately able to represent 20% more clients. Fixing one bottleneck unlocked capacity several steps downstream.
Sankaran added an often-unspoken dimension: lawyer well-being. In legal aid work especially, burnout is treated as inevitable. AI, he argued, offers a chance to change that — freeing lawyers not just to serve more clients, but to be more present with the ones they have. As he put it: Could it help lawyers do the most human parts of their job better?
The effective AI mindset
One of the panel’s most consistent themes was that AI fluency isn’t a technical skill — it’s a mindset. Sankaran, who readily describes himself as “not a tech person,” framed the real superpower as the ability to recognize opportunities in your own workflow. Not following a script, but scanning your day and asking: Where could this help?
That mindset is especially important for law students entering a profession evolving faster than any curriculum can track. The panelists agreed: start early, experiment broadly, and resist the idea that AI is something you “learn once.” This isn’t Microsoft Word. It’s an evolving landscape.
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From tools to a true ecosystem
The promise of this moment in the legal profession lies not just in how powerful AI has become, but in how deliberately it’s deployed. Meaningful progress doesn’t come from tools alone — it comes from applying them systemically, with an understanding of where technology amplifies human judgment and where it shouldn’t replace it. As Groff noted, there are pro bono matters — particularly those involving deeply personal harm — where the lawyer’s most important role is simply to listen. In those moments, trust, empathy, and human presence matter more than efficiency, and AI might not be the right fit.
That discernment is what separates isolated use cases from a true ecosystem. When legal professionals align around shared principles — using AI to reduce friction where it exists while preserving the human core of legal work — extensive, durable change becomes possible.
The panel illustrated how that alignment takes shape across the legal landscape: Thomson Reuters’ AI for Justice program extends beyond software access to include training, incubator support, and hands-on implementation guidance, helping organizations move from experimentation to sustainable change. At Michigan Law, the AI Law and Policy Clinic embeds design thinking into legal education, sending students into courts and communities to identify real workflow bottlenecks before proposing technological solutions. And at K&L Gates, that alignment shows up in practice through firmwide encouragement for lawyers to use AI in pro bono matters, hands-on application in innocence and veterans’ cases to improve the quality and completeness of legal work, and collaboration with legal aid organizations to test AI use cases and think through responsible deployment.
Individual heroics matter. But no single lawyer, clinic, or firm can close a gap this large alone. A connected system — where tools are safe and accessible, new lawyers arrive fluent in the AI mindset, and major firms bring real capacity to bear with care and intention — offers a path toward lasting, systemic change.
And it starts with conversations like this one.
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