With the demand for legal services rising in recent years, Legal Aid of North Carolina reached an inflection point. Even as a relatively large statewide organization with about 400 employees deployed at 23 offices, the amount of requests became unmanageable.

The organization's legal hotline was at one point receiving over 300,000 calls a year from people in need — too many for its under 200 lawyers to handle.

So when the opportunity arose to deploy artificial intelligence to help divert at least some of the call volume, Scheree M. Gilchrist, the chief innovation officer at Legal Aid of North Carolina, thought it was time to take a leap of faith.

The AI and Access to Justice Summit at Stanford Law School, one of the country's primary sandboxes for legal innovation, provided the perfect jumping off point. Legal Aid walked out of the summit's inaugural event in October 2024 with a connection to K&L Gates, which was looking to partner on a pro bono project.

The collaboration helped deliver an AI-powered tool that provides users with a wealth of information they can use to either solve their own legal issues or seek attorney help when necessary.

"Access to justice begins, really, with access to information," Gilchrist told Law360. "Without information, people really do not know or understand what their legal issues are, what their legal rights are."

The tool, called Legal Information Assistant, or LIA, is a legal chatbot that lives on Legal Aid's website. It operates 24/7, giving users information and suggestions on possible next steps based on the input. It can also communicate in different languages.

People use LIA for a wide variety of questions, from the simple to the complex. For instance, users might ask for the address of the closest Legal Aid office or the courthouse. Or they might ask very detailed questions about a subject that requires consulting a legal professional.

Common topics include domestic violence questions, such as how to obtain a protection order, or housing law questions, such as how to fight off an eviction. Sometimes questions are vague, because people don't know how to ask them.

"They might put something as simple as, 'I'm being kicked out. What do I do?'" Gilchrist said. "LIA is able to sort of take that information and align it with the appropriate subject area, and give a response to hopefully guide them in the right direction."

LIA uses an AI technology called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, that retrieves information from external data sources and generates responses. Developers made LIA "AI agnostic," meaning that it's not confined to one specific AI model. Since its inception, LIA has toggled between OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, Gilchrist said, to maximize accuracy and user experience.

While LIA is one of the first legal chatbots to surface in the United States, it is not the only one, and the idea isn't unique. Last year, New York University School of Law professor Sateesh Nori developed a bot called Roxanne that helps tenants navigate housing issues. Chatbot technology is being replicated elsewhere on a wide range of legal applications.

With the rapid evolution of both artificial intelligence and the way users interact with LIA, the chatbot's developers face the challenge of having to continuously update the knowledge base it taps into.

That's where K&L Gates comes in. Lawyers at the Pittsburgh-based firm work pro bono on LIA's back end, working on both input and output: They develop prompts on different areas of law and come up with questions users might ask. Then, they review the chatbot's answers by checking them against the source material to ensure they're accurate, clear and understandable. The attorneys also provide crucial feedback that developers can use to refine the tool.

Gilchrist said K&L Gates' assistance is "enormously valuable."

"In a time where we're facing cuts and reductions in our funding, just being able to tap into a resource like the one that K&L Gates has offered us is sort of a lifeline to keeping LIA available to so many communities in need," she said.

Amy Groff, a partner at K&L Gates' office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said the joint project has given the firms' lawyers a closer look at the inner workings of some of the commercial AI tools they routinely use.

"It's been interesting for us to be able to see what goes into a tool like this," she said.

At its core, Gilchrist said, LIA is about "democratizing" access to information.

"When we launched our lab, we decided to take a hard look at AI and how AI could help us remove barriers," she said. "One of the low-hanging fruit was that it could distill really difficult information into easy, plain language and sort of simplify the legalese that exists as part of the work that we do."

Gilchrist said that even when people face a problem that can potentially be resolved through the legal system, they usually don't default to seeking out an attorney, either because they don't know the issue has legal implications or because they think they can't access the court system.

Sometimes, the opposite is true: People might think they might need a lawyer, when in reality they could, if pointed in the right direction and with some knowledge, figure out a course of action on their own.

LIA helps people in both of those situations, Gilchrist said.

Around six months into LIA's launch, Legal Aid of North Carolina had recorded about 50,000 user conversations with the bot. From those interactions, the organization was able to identify the highest needs people presented to the bot.

As time went by, the nonprofit retrieved even more granular data about areas of the law in critical need. The K&L Gates team helps turn user feedback into new knowledge-based materials.

"That gives us more insight into perhaps what areas to prioritize," Gilchrist said. "We also are seeing some things that people are asking that we weren't anticipating. And so, that helps us develop new knowledge-based materials."

Allison Constance, the director of pro bono programs at Legal Aid of North Carolina, said the partnership with K&L Gates is showing how BigLaw and nonprofits can work together to reach ordinary people who struggle with legal access.

Unlike more traditional forms of pro bono, where firms take on a case or help staff a legal clinic, Constance said, the joint work on LIA is an example of how volunteering lawyers can help scale up access to the justice system, particularly for people who are most in need.

"What the K&L Gates team is doing is really helping us build a foundation that will help lots of people," she said. "Having them work with us on a structural, foundational-related project is extremely impactful."

--Editing by Marygrace Anderson.