I appreciate the invitation from President Ronald Flagg and the Legal Services Corporation Board of Directors to provide input into the FY 2026 LSC funding request to Congress.
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A commonly cited solution to helping bridge the access-to-justice canyon is for lawyers to provide more pro bono work. In that regard, have generative artificial intelligence tools made it easier for lawyers to provide pro bono services?
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Our Professionalism Spotlight series highlights Illinois legal professionals who demonstrate the ideals of professionalism as they work to advance equitable, efficient, and effective justice in Illinois.
In this Professionalism Spotlight, we spoke with Kristen Sonday, the Co-Founder and CEO of Paladin, a legal technology platform that is dedicated to increasing access to justice by helping legal teams run more efficient pro bono programs.
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Kristen Sonday is the CEO and trailblazing co-founder of Paladin, a platform dedicated to providing legal representation and mentorship for low-income communities. Kristen's journey hasn't been linear, and in today's The New C-Suite Gives Good Advice column, she explains exactly how she's maneuvered career path pivots, toed the line between arrogance and assertiveness, and divulged the common missteps she's observed from young professionals. Get into it all down below!
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Legal Services Corporation, which funds legal access for low-income Americans, is seeking to use real-time civil court data so legal aid providers can better help their clients.
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The explosion on the scene of advanced AI chatbots opens a new path to using this technology to help more citizens achieve the access to justice they need to meet their legal needs
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Those seeking to secure funding for justice tech ventures have various ways to accomplish this, even during more challenging economic times: non-profit organizations, for-profit entities, fellowship programs, and law firm subsidiaries.
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Building and scaling justice technology is a responsibility I hold very dear. Especially for justice tech founders like Cami Lopez of PeopleClerk, Sonja Ebron of Courtroom5, Devshi Mehrota and Leslie Jones-Dove of JusticeText, and me, all of whom come from communities directly impacted by the justice gap, we set out to solve justice-related problems because they are deeply personal to us, and deeply important to humanity. Which is why the DoNotPay Twitter debate was so painful to watch.
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I had 15 minutes before daycare pickup tonight, so I started a quick conversation with OpenAI’s new chatbot, ChatGPT, about pro bono and access to justice. Here’s what it had to say.
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Having recently raised an $8M Series A for Paladin, I’m often asked by other justice tech founders how to approach fundraising. Especially as a new category that often serves low income folks, justice tech can be confusing to investors who aren’t familiar with the market opportunity. Isha Marathe of LegalTech News published a great article last month about a few key approaches, and I wanted to expand on the top 10 tips that helped us secure justice tech funding from world class investors here.
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We appreciate the invitation from President Ronald Flagg and the LSC Board of Directors to provide input into the FY2023 LSC funding request to Congress.
As one of few justice technology companies focused on increasing legal aid capacity by boosting private pro bono lawyer engagement, we believe it is imperative that LSC receive sufficient appropriation from Congress to adequately address low income Americans’ civil legal needs and strongly support LSC’s request for an appropriation of over $1B for FY2023.
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As a Latina founder of a social impact company, raising VC money hasn’t exactly been easy. Especially in Chicago, where I’m based, the VC community, while close-knit and easily accessible, is small, homogenous, and focused on later stage investments. On the startup side, of the 65 Chicago-based startups backed by Chicago-based venture capital funds, only 16 (about 25%) have a non-white founder, and only 15 (or 23%), have a female founder, according to Chicago Blend. From firsthand experience, the lack of access to early stage capital as compared to the coasts has an oversized impact on underrepresented founders’ ability to get their startups off the ground in Chicago, skewing survivorship bias and greatly affecting what ‘success’ looks like. Thus, the cycle perpetuates.
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It’s been two and a half years since I published the first data-driven study that analyzed the (lack of) diversity among legaltech founders. I had intended for this update to be as solely data-focused as my last report, but since our collective conversation around diversity as both a country and an industry has greatly shifted since early 2018, this update warrants context about where we are, why all of this matters, and what we can do to make real change.
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For many Americans, the thought of going to court alone is daunting. Yet, nearly 75% of cases have at least one pro se party, according to the Self-Represented Litigation Network. And now, with COVID-19-related legal issues continuing to soar and pro bono attorneys stretched thin, the number of pro se litigants is increasing.
While there are few tech companies solely focused on pro se work, their impact is immense. In particular, technology is essential for helping self-represented litigants understand the technicalities of court processes, navigate the actual experience, and prepare essential documents.
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Among the topics we touched on:
Data from Paladin on how COVID-19 and new racial justice initiatives are affecting pro bono (which Sonday wrote about here).
An update on my 2018 research on diversity among founders of legal tech companies.
Paladin’s partnerships with the American Bar Association, the New York State Bar Association, and the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation to create pro bono portals.
As the first guest on Access to Justice Week on the podcast, I discuss:
My career journey from Princeton grad to the DOJ, international criminal affairs in Mexico and Central America, and founding Paladin
The pro bono opportunities that COVID-19 has created
The pro bono initiative with which Paladin and Clio are assisting the New York State Bar
What lawyers can do to contribute to pro bono efforts
While ATJ legal technology is typically deployed within legal services organizations (such as document assembly tools like Documate), at courthouses through e-filings, and through consumer apps (like DoNotPay), a new champion is starting to incubate ATJ solutions: law firms. This development could potentially be game changing. Not only do law firms’ efforts add high-quality talent to the fight to close the justice gap, but also their work has inherent sustainability.
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Over the past few years, we’ve seen a steady rise in B2C solutions being used to solve legal challenges from complicated divorces to immigration filings to bankruptcy to pesky parking tickets. The benefits are tangible. First, moving legal processes online provides access to more people by meeting them where they are. Second, by automating basic workflows, tech solutions can decrease costs for low-income individuals and increase scalability, ultimately serving more folks in need. Lastly, when done correctly, B2C tools can mitigate risks for clients who might navigate the system alone (or not at all) and end up worse off than before.
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One of the key takeaways from the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference earlier this month is that legal services organizations (LSOs) are not wasting any time in applying new technologies like AI and machine learning to access to justice issues.
Whereas LSOs have found past success in reaching clients through basic tools like texting, they are now moving to more advanced platforms like document automation to better streamline internal processes. Some are even going one step further by embarking on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) projects to determine how they can help address the 86% of civil legal problems reported by low-income Americans that aren’t fully resolved.
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Regardless of your position in the non-lawyers vs. legal professionals semantics debate, one thing is for sure: they are increasingly contributing to the future of the legal industry. In fact, nearly 60% of current legaltech founders do not have a JD. Instead, they come from all kinds of backgrounds: immigrants looking to solve their own legal challenges, scientists turned IP and eDiscovery techies, tech veterans passionate about access to justice issues, and MBAs who see legal as a business opportunity.
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