How AI Is Helping Legal Aid Serve 50% More Clients: Thomson Reuters’ AI for Justice Program One Year In
Release Date: 10/15/2025
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Martin Luther King famously said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." My guest today quoted his words in her 2024 book, . But now, two years after that book's publication — at a moment when many see the rule of law under strain and speak openly of democratic backsliding — it is fair to ask: Are we still arcing toward justice? That is the question LawNext host Bob Ambrogi put to at the start of today’s conversation. Jefferson is a professor of law and the Joanne and Larry Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, and her work...
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Last month, when Anthropic, developer of the popular AI assistant Claude, announced , much of the coverage in the media and the buzz on social media focused on what the announcement meant for law firms, in-house legal teams, and the legal tech ecosystem. But the less talked about side of the story was potentially the more impactful – Anthropic’s explicit commitment to access to justice, highlighted by a direct partnership with the and its free legal research platform. Suddenly, anyone with a legal problem and a chat window could access verified, authoritative legal materials,...
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Amy Juers and Valerie Chan on Marketing Legal Tech in the Age of AI Search
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Once upon a time, a legal tech vendor’s goal in getting seen by potential customers was to rank on the first page of Google search. But in the age of AI, that is no longer enough. Now, when a potential buyer asks ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to recommend a vendor, what matters is whether the company shows up in the answer the AI generates. And that, increasingly, depends on who is quoting you, citing you, and treating you as the authority in your category. On this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with two legal marketing and communications leaders who are seeking to help their...
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, the CEO and cofounder of , was last on this podcast . In the dog years of the legal industry’s AI age, that feels like a long time ago. Our conversation then was about law firms still feeling their way around generative AI. But now, as you will hear in this episode, the focus is about what it actually takes to put AI to work at scale — and iManage's answer is that it starts with what Neil calls a knowledge foundation: the content, context and governance layer that makes AI responses not just fluent, but relevant and trustworthy. Two weeks before we recorded this episode, iManage ...
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Recorded live at the annual meeting of the in New Orleans, this episode features a conversation with , president of the LMA and director of client intelligence at Sidley Austin, where she has spent 17 years building out roles at the intersection of marketing, business development, knowledge management and data. Earlier this year, Rachel was named a recipient of ALM's . Rachel and host Bob Ambrogi discuss how AI is reshaping the work of legal marketers, and why she believes the marketing community is uniquely positioned to help law firms move past the "I'm curious, I want to click the buttons"...
info_outlineIn the United States, over 90% of civil legal needs go unrepresented – a staggering justice gap that leaves millions of people facing eviction, domestic violence, wrongful conviction and other urgent legal crises without access to an attorney. For these individuals, the difference between getting legal help or going without can literally be the difference between safety and harm, between keeping a home and losing everything.
One year ago, Thomson Reuters launched its AI for Justice program to help address this crisis by providing legal aid organizations with access to CoCounsel, its professional-grade AI legal assistant, along with specialized training and support. The results have been significant: attorneys are saving up to 15 hours per week, organizations are serving as many as 50% more clients daily, and urgent case materials are being prepared up to 75% faster. But more importantly, these efficiency gains are translating into real-world impact – domestic violence victims receiving protection orders more quickly, wrongfully evicted tenants getting back into their homes before their possessions are destroyed, and innocent people in prison having their exoneration petitions filed years sooner.
In this episode of LawNext, host Bob Ambrogi talks with two people at the forefront of this initiative:
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Laura Safdie is head of innovation for legal at Thomson Reuters and has been championing access to justice through technology since her days at Casetext, where she was a cofounder.
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Pablo Ramirez is executive director of the Legal Aid Society of San Bernardino, a small organization of 45 staff members serving over 9,000 people a year in one of California's largest counties.
Together, they share powerful stories of how AI is enabling legal aid lawyers to be more efficient and more effective in doing what they came to this work to do – fighting for their clients.
They discuss the three pillars of the AI for Justice program – access, support and scale – and how Thomson Reuters is working to create a blueprint that can be replicated across the legal aid community. They also tackle the challenges that remain, from overcoming fear and skepticism about AI to reaching a highly disaggregated network of small, resource-strapped organizations. And they explore the bigger question: Can AI actually help close the justice gap, or are we just nibbling at the edges of an ever-growing problem?
Thank You To Our Sponsors
This episode of LawNext is generously made possible by our sponsors. We appreciate their support and hope you will check them out.
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Paradigm, home to the practice management platforms PracticePanther, Bill4Time, MerusCase and LollyLaw; the e-payments platform Headnote; and the legal accounting software TrustBooks.
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Briefpoint, eliminating routine discovery response and request drafting tasks so you can focus on drafting what matters (or just make it home for dinner).
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Eve, taking care of the tasks that slow you down so you can operate at your highest potential
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