LSC Issues Blueprint for Narrowing the Justice Gap through Technology Innovation in Civil Legal Services

By Bob Ambrogi on February 3, 2026

In 2013, the Legal Services Corporation published the landmark study, Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice. The report forcefully made the case that technology could be a powerful – indeed, essential – tool in narrowing the justice gap, and its recommendations helped shape the last decade of legal innovation in the United States.

“Technology can and must play a vital role in transforming service delivery so that all poor people in the United States with an essential civil legal need obtain some form of effective assistance,” that report presciently asserted.

Now, marking its most comprehensive technology initiative since that seminal report, the LSC has released a new report, The Next Frontier: Harnessing Technology to Close the Justice Gap, which represents the findings of an extensive two-year Technology Summit process that kicked off with LSC’s 50th anniversary in 2024.

Like its predecessor, this new report offers an ambitious roadmap for leveraging technology to narrow America’s justice gap. It presents seven detailed recommendations aimed at helping the nation’s 130 LSC-funded legal services organizations adopt cutting-edge technologies – particularly artificial intelligence – to expand access to justice for low-income Americans.

A Collaborative Process

The report, which was published in December, is the end result of a deliberative process that started when more than 50 technology leaders, legal services practitioners, court personnel, and other stakeholders participated in a full-day workshop in Charlotte, N.C., in February 2024, ahead of LSC’s Innovations in Technology Conference that year.

(I was among the 50 who participated that day.)

The process continued over subsequent months through four focused workgroups that examined:

Supporting more legal services organizations to adopt baseline technologies.
Supporting more LSC grantees to adopt advanced technological practices and processes.
Supporting LSC and its grantees to use technology to measure impact more effectively.
Supporting LSC and the field to identify and promote innovative solutions including AI technologies, to drive efficiency improvements that would result in greater impact.

The initiative also included extensive stakeholder interviews, focus groups with field experts and grantees, and strategic conversations among LSC leadership about strengthening the LSC’s Technology Initiative Grant (TIG) program – which has awarded 923 grants totaling more than $92 million since 2000.

Seven Recommendations to Narrow the Justice Gap

The report opens with sobering context: LSC’s 2022 Justice Gap Report found that low-income Americans received inadequate or no legal help for 92% of their civil legal problems. Whether facing eviction, unemployment, child custody issues or domestic violence, too many low-income Americans navigate the legal system alone.

Despite this need, LSC grantees had to turn away one of every two requests for help they received in the prior year due to limited resources.

To help address this justice gap, the summit produced seven interconnected recommendations that LSC characterizes as “a call to action” for accelerating transformative technology use:

Reframe Technology as Core Mission

The report’s first recommendation is that LSC should support grantees in treating technology investments as essential to their core mission – not as a luxury – by providing training, technical assistance and resources that help leadership prioritize and integrate state-of-the-art technology into service delivery.

The report notes that legal services organizations often struggle with a “scarcity mindset” that causes them to eschew potentially game-changing technology investments. The report cites a 2024 survey that found that 45% of nonprofits said they spend too little on technology, with “lack of available budget” cited as the most common barrier.

The report identifies several ways in which LSC can encourage and support LSOs to embrace “culture change” on issues of technology. Among them:

Documenting compelling stories about technology investments that dramatically improved efficiencies and impact.
Conducting surveys of grantee technology practices to highlight priorities and opportunities.
Integrating comprehensive technology assessments into LSC’s oversight visits.
Providing training on using dashboards and data visualization for strategic planning, operational decision-making and service delivery.

Streamline Access to Resources

The second recommendation is that LSC should create user-friendly, centralized resources to help grantees meet and exceed the LSC Technology Baselines – a guide to the key technologies LOSs should have in place – while also fostering innovation, including facilitating replication and scaling of successful technology projects.

The report acknowledges that while LSC, LSNTAP (Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project), and others provide various resources, grantees need “curated information and guidance” to cut through what one participant called the “firehose” of technology developments.

To that end, the report recommends that LSC:

Develop a centralized, user-friendly hub for technology resources, case studies and promising practices.
Coordinate with LSNTAP and stakeholders to ensure consistent messaging and reduce duplication.
Share information about commonly used technology products.
Promote replicable projects through webinars, case studies and shared toolkits.
Create clear guidance on data collection and evaluation expectations.

Explore New Funding Approaches

The report’s third recommendation is that LSC should explore alternative funding models for technology projects to better match the pace of technological change and grantees’ evolving needs.

The current TIG process – from application to grant approval to beginning work – can take 10 months to a year. “Sometimes there’s a sense that you are designing a tech project and then you have to twiddle your thumbs to fill time,” said Eli Mattern of Community Legal Services in Orlando.

The report recommends several activities LSC can pursue to explore new funding approaches and ensure that the TIG program remains a key driver of technology innovation. Among them:

Implement rolling application deadlines throughout the year.
Fast-track planning grants or “proof-of-concept” grants for initial research.
Allow flexible implementation periods for grantees to adjust strategies.
Create “sandbox environments” for collaborative experimentation on common challenges.
Fund cohorts of grantees working on similar challenges to promote collaborative innovation.
Prioritize projects with high replication and scalability potential.

Promote Data-Driven Decision-Making

Fourth of the recommendations is that LSC should invest in tools, guidance and infrastructure that enable grantees to maximize their available data for strategic planning, operational decisions and service delivery, the report recommends.

The report highlights success stories such as Legal Aid Society of Cleveland’s discovery through website analytics that driver’s license suspensions related to unpaid fines was a major concern, leading to research and a report that helped change state policy.

However, the report says that summit participants identified an array of barriers that keep them from making data-informed practices more central to their work. These include:

Resource constraints and cultural resistance among lawyers.
Lack of standard measures across organizations.
Data quality issues and confidentiality concerns.
Difficulty accessing and using court data.

To address these issues and encourage more data-driven decision making, the report says that LSC should:

Fund TIG projects that advance data-informed practices (dashboards, automated data collection, performance analytics).
Modify reporting requirements to support streamlined, automated data collection.
Provide technical assistance on interpreting and applying data.
Identify and share effective data use examples.

Modernize TIG’s Evaluation Approach

The next recommendation is that LSC should modernize its evaluation approach for the TIG grant program by developing a flexible, adaptive evaluation framework that supports innovation, measures impact and informs future investment, the report says.

Current evaluation requirements can feel like “rote compliance” exercises. The report calls for evaluation formats that better match project scope and complexity. These might include:

Iterative/rapid assessments for short-term grants and pilot projects.
Rolling report models capturing midcourse learning.
Developmental evaluations for projects with evolving goals.
Longitudinal or post-grant evaluations of selected projects.

In addition, the report recommends that LSC:

Ensure TIG awards include adequate evaluation funding.
Create a repository of proven evaluation techniques and templates.
Incorporate findings into grantmaking decisions and technical assistance.
Fund projects exploring new technology methods for data collection.

Lead Responsible AI Innovation

The sixth recommendation is that LSC should coordinate responsible AI innovation and broader technology adoption by promoting experimentation, collaboration and development of shared tools, policies and practices across the access-to-justice community.

This is perhaps the report’s most forward-looking recommendation. While acknowledging concerns about AI accuracy, ethics and privacy, summit participants expressed strong support for LSC helping legal services organizations identify the best current AI uses while exploring safety and security issues.

The report cites survey data from LSC’s AI Peer Learning Labs (which had enrolled 570 legal aid providers as of summer 2025) showing significant openness to this. Eighty-five percent of participants rated their organizations as moderately to very open to working with AI, although 70% cited “lack of knowledge about AI and how to use it” as a barrier.

To advance the responsible use of AI in legal services, the report says, LSC should:

Leverage its convening power through regular collaboration among providers, technologists and courts.
Establish a centralized repository of AI case studies, trusted platforms and implementation guidance.
Create model data privacy and governance policies.
Share and promote commonly used AI platforms with safety guidance.
Invest in standardized, trusted technology projects implementable across jurisdictions.
Establish sandbox environments for safe experimentation.

The report highlights several promising LSC-funded AI projects, including:

Lone Star Legal Aid’s development of a suite of customized AI-powered chatbots providing 24/7 legal information.
Southeast Louisiana Legal Services’ AI-driven legal needs screening integrated with the Louisiana 211 network.
Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Justice Hub with AI-enabled mobile-friendly intake.

Strengthen Self-Help Tools

The report’s final recommendation is that LSC should support development and modernization of high-quality self-help tools that leverage emerging technologies to improve access for self-represented litigants.

The report quotes David Bonebrake, deputy director of LSC’s Office of Program Performance, who said that, with LSOs turning away half of all help requests, low-income people are not just

facing an access-to-justice gap. “There’s also a self-help gap where people lack high-quality,

usable tools to navigate the legal process themselves.”

To address this, the report recommends that LSC:

Fund emerging technologies such as AI-driven chatbots, intelligent document assembly and triage systems).
Encourage user-centered design with self-represented litigants involved in tool development.
Facilitate collaboration and knowledge-sharing on successful self-help models.
Encourage integration among self-help platforms and other systems, such as courts, libraries and referral networks.
Provide guidance on improving usability, accessibility and equity.
Support multilingual resources and accessibility features.
Explore how self-help tools can support community justice workers and other non-lawyers.

Technology Spotlights

Throughout the report, LSC highlights successful TIG-funded projects demonstrating the potential of these recommendations. They include:

Bay Area Legal Services (Florida) integrated document automation and case management firm-wide, training more than 100 staff in business process improvements and automating 29 commonly used documents.
Kansas Legal Services enhanced the statewide DLAW platform and legal information website with mobile-friendly design, better navigation, and a chatbot – improvements benefiting legal aid organizations in other states using the same open-source platform.
Community Legal Services of Mid-Florida developed a guided navigation chatbot that had more than 11,500 unique visitors and more than 3,000 conversations in just three months.
Legal Aid of North Carolina is creating an AI-enabled Justice Hub as a mobile-friendly online intake and client portal to serve 3 million eligible residents.
Lone Star Legal Aid (Texas) has emerged as a national leader with guided online interviews that have helped over 100,000 individuals, a Legal Aid Content Intelligence platform that automatically monitors legal changes, and a suite of AI-powered chatbots.

Comparing the Summit Reports

While both the 2013 and 2025 summit reports share the goal of transforming legal services delivery through technology, they reflect dramatically different technological landscapes.

The 2013 report focused on then-emerging technologies such as mobile access, cloud computing and statewide legal information websites. It proposed ambitious visions for document assembly, triage systems and data integration, many of which have since been implemented.

The 2025 report builds on that foundation but reflects the AI revolution. Where the 2013 report discussed basic automation and information access, the 2025 report grapples with generative AI, chatbots capable of real-time legal guidance, and intelligent systems that can draft documents and analyze case patterns.

The new report also places much greater emphasis on:

Data-driven decision-making and evaluation (receiving dedicated recommendations).
User experience and design thinking.
Replication and scaling of successful projects.
Cultural change within organizations around technology adoption.
Responsible innovation given AI’s risks and uncertainties.

Perhaps most significantly, the 2025 report is more action-oriented and specific. Where the 2013 report was more a visionary blueprint, this latest report is more an operational roadmap. Rather than painting a broad vision, it provides detailed, implementable recommendations with concrete suggested actions for LSC.

As one summit participant, Margaret Hagan, executive director of the Legal Design Lab at Stanford University, said in the report: “Now is the time to strike. More and more people are open to using these technologies as they hear more about their potential.

“If our goal is to close the justice gap and get more legal services to more people,” she continued, “then it’s time to demonstrate the power and effectiveness of these AI tools in making that happen.”

What’s Next

LSC has pledged to act on these recommendations “in ways that support its grantees in leveraging technology in civil legal services to ensure that more low-income Americans can find the legal advice, support and representation they need.”

But the organization acknowledges that it cannot and should not do it alone – funders, courts, law schools, technology vendors and others must play important roles in a field-wide effort, it says.

For legal aid organizations, technology vendors, and access-to-justice advocates, this report provides a thoughtful roadmap for the next phase of legal services innovation.

Its emphasis on AI, data-driven practices, and user-centered design reflects the route we should all follow to meaningfully narrow the justice gap.

“Technology alone will not close the justice gap in the U.S. today,” the report says, “but it can and must play a vital supporting role.”