Opportunity: Expand service

Nonprofit Legal Aid Society of San Bernardino offers pro bono legal services in California’s Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Committed to educating, empowering, and advocating for vulnerable individuals and communities, it takes requests for legal assistance through online applications and a hotline.

In the decades since its 1958 founding by a group of attorneys wanting to ensure justice wasn’t hindered by financial constraints, Legal Aid Society has become indispensable to the communities it serves. Home to a population that’s around 50% Latino — with 25% born outside the U.S. and 30% from limited-English-proficiency households — these counties have shown a high need for assistance in eviction, debt, and domestic violence, with women and Spanish-speaking families being the most impacted.

In 2024 alone, this small, 45-member team provided critical-level services to more than 22,000 people in more than 8,000 households. But the need for free legal help far outstrips what the team can supply. “The hardest part of my job is saying no to some clients. We don’t say no because we don’t care, we have to say no because we don’t have enough resources to help them,” says Executive Director Pablo Ramirez. “That’s not what justice should be about.” 

Of the nearly 27,000 calls to their hotline in 2024, almost 16,000 had to go unanswered. Most of these calls are from people facing urgent issues, such as being in danger of losing their home, facing abuse, or being in a life-or-death situation. Though not every call will develop into a longer-term case, the team’s mission is to give sound, complete legal advice to everyone they talk with. But finding the right resources in the moment — and being certain they’re current and accurate — is a challenge, so calls can sometimes take 30 minutes or more. Callers’ questions also cover a broad range of legal topics, with some requiring specialized knowledge to answer. Doing right by each caller means, in effect, answering fewer calls than the team would like.

Once ChatGPT emerged, the team began to consider how AI might help, but with some reservations. “At first, I was very skeptical about AI, because of the need for confidentiality and the credibility of the platform. But I knew there had to be a better way to continue to serve more people,” says Ramirez. 

Solution: Amplify impact

The Legal Aid Society team began using CoCounsel, a professional-grade AI legal solution, to essentially be their assistant on hotline calls. It offered capabilities they needed with the criteria they required: data security and privacy coupled with reliable, verified information. CoCounsel uses industry-leading security policies, standards, and practices. Its integration with Westlaw and Practical Law content means its answers can be trusted, backed as they are by the expertise of 1,200 attorney-editors. 

They quickly discovered that having CoCounsel on hand as they answered calls allowed them to talk to nearly twice as many people who were calling with urgent issues. Not only that, but it helped the team handle, as Deputy Director Gregory Armstrong says, “many more varied and complex questions, some of which are unusual and would have taken an extremely long time to get thorough and accurate answers for.” Plus, CoCounsel can return these legal research answers in minutes — sometimes seconds.

For some callers, the advice they receive on the phone is enough. Others need additional assistance, such as document handling or preparation, and some may even need representation. CoCounsel proved invaluable there, as well. Because so many of their clients’ needs are urgent, the team came to rely on how quickly the tool can review and summarize documents for specific information, or draft responses to complicated correspondence from opposing counsel — in fact, 90% faster. “CoCounsel’s reply addressed all the issues, with really compelling arguments, which put us on a different footing,” says Ramirez. “We’re a small staff, and we probably wouldn’t have been able to help with certain complex issues if we didn’t have CoCounsel.”

During representation, CoCounsel also made a noticeable difference in how thoroughly and effectively the team could serve clients, enabling the team to devote more resources to each case. For instance, in domestic violence cases, preparing a strong petition for a temporary restraining order requires proving there have been actual threats made. One of the best sources of that information can be social media posts and text messages. The hard part is finding the ones that will make the case and putting them in a timeline. CoCounsel was able to do this in minutes because it understands language that implies a threat, understands tone, and can discern what’s valuable to highlight.

The team has also been using CoCounsel in their work for an initiative designed to get care and prevent homelessness for people with schizophrenia or psychosis. They uploaded the DSM-5 into CoCounsel, then used it to review patients’ medical records, quickly determining whether a client was likely to meet the diagnostic criteria. That information gave them a significant jump start on how best to proceed for their client and what additional resources they might need. 

Outcome: Justice expanded

CoCounsel has enabled the team to handle twice as many of the most urgent hotline calls, and to onboard 20% more cases from the calls that come in overall. They feel more confident in their ability to address a broader range of needs, even in areas of practice that aren’t their expertise, with this professional-grade AI solution at their side.

With CoCounsel, Legal Aid Society of San Bernardino is better equipped to make even greater progress toward its goal of championing the rights of the most marginalized, erasing disparities and securing unfettered access to justice for everyone — with more energy for the human work that a machine cannot do. Says Ramirez, “AI has given our attorneys the ability to move faster without sacrificing care or compassion.”

By allowing this team to use their most precious resource — time — more strategically, CoCounsel has enabled them not only to help more people, but to get that help to them sooner and resolve their problems faster. “In a recent case, it easily saved me 50% of time I would have had to spend, by pointing out the particular highlights in the history that I needed to focus on,” says Armstrong. The time saved means restraining orders secured earlier, evictions prevented, and damaging disruptions to family life avoided. As Ramirez says, “For the clients we serve, justice delayed can mean justice denied.”