Practical Innovation to Fight America's Justice Gap
She admitted feeling "a little bit embarrassed" that Paladin, the legal tech platform she co-founded nearly a decade ago, isn't using more AI. Paladin streamlines the typically cumbersome pro bono process of spreadsheets and emails into a centralized tool that allows legal aid organizations to input client information and instantly share it with law firms and corporate legal teams, massively decreasing administrative time and increasing pro bono engagement.
In a tech landscape obsessed with generative AI and blockchain, Sonday said that her team focused on getting the fundamentals right first, not just "Frankenstein building" AI tools for the sake of it.
Then she delivered her thesis: Change doesn’t have to be revolutionary, but often comes from “incremental innovations.” For millions of Americans currently facing eviction, debt, and other crises without legal help, the most meaningful innovations may be the smallest—a clearer form, a timely text message, an interface that explains legal options in plain English.
Practical innovation was a unifying theme at LITCon 2025, where Suffolk Law's LIT Lab and LIT Center gathered access-to-justice advocates to confront an uncomfortable reality: according to Legal Services Corporation studies, the vast majority of low-income Americans' civil legal needs go entirely or inadequately addressed.
The question weaving through presentations wasn't whether AI can solve the justice gap, but rather how some combination of AI, design, and process management can incrementally deliver tangible results for people in legal trouble who can't wait for technological perfection.
Sonday's keynote offered compelling evidence for her approach. She shared how a redesigned court summons form—clearer, with better layout and plain language instructions—reduced missed court appearances by 13%. With simple text message reminders added to the mix, no-show rates decreased by a total of 36%, she said. These aren't the kind of innovations that make headlines, but their impact is undeniable.
Students filling the gap
The conference showcased how Suffolk Law students are already bridging legal information gaps and taking the kinds of practical, sustainable approaches their professional colleagues on stage were championing.
The student projects in Suffolk Law’s LIT Lab range from redesigning court forms for Virginia tenants to guided interviews that walk users through the creation of an Appeals Court brief on a phone or laptop. One project designed for efficient eviction record sealing will launch in May 2025, potentially transforming thousands of lives by removing barriers to housing and making job searches less fraught.
The bar isn’t very high
When someone has a housing issue like no heat, said Sateesh Nori, a veteran legal services housing attorney, they often turn to Google, where the top results are rarely from courts or legal aid organizations. "Reddit is apparently the top source for legal information in America," he observed wryly, noting that when he searched for landlord advice, a Buzzfeed article ranked second.
His benchmark for legal tech innovation was not particularly high: "The goal of these tech innovations, it does not need to be perfection, it just needs to be progress. We have to be better than Buzzfeed." Nori demonstrated a legal information chatbot called Roxanne, which helps tenants access crucial information about their rights and options.
Ben Jackson of Upsolve revisited the stakes of the legal information vacuum. His organization helps Americans buried under debt access bankruptcy protections through a user-friendly online platform. The results are impressive. Users become $118,000 better off over ten years, “a 211 times return on investment,” he said.
The real innovation isn't just making legal forms available online, he argued, but rather understanding the psychology behind why people generally don't avail themselves of bankruptcy protections. Jackson calls it the need for "conviction"—the belief that legal solutions are available, appropriate and that it’s reasonable to use them. "It took me two years to build the conviction through conversations with friends... to ultimately decide to file bankruptcy," Jackson said of his own experience with credit card debt. Upsolve's AI-powered tools don't just complete forms; they engage users in discussion, helping them overcome their fears.
Meanwhile, Jack Cushman from Harvard's Library Innovation Lab delivered a pointed critique of legal education. "We've been doing education the same way for 175 years," he observed, noting that many law schools are still using teaching methods invented in 1850. "If you say, 'Wow, 90% of needs are unserved, and we have a guild that doesn't let you compete with us, and we do education the same way we did 175 years ago,' it kind of looks like we don't care."
This “guild mentality” faces mounting pressure as AI makes legal information more accessible, Nori argued. Unauthorized Practice of Law (UPL) regulations should be updated to reflect the value of new technologies, he argued. When UPL was codified, “there was no concept that technology could develop to the point where it could give context-specific legal advice and information to people."
Jessica Frank, from the Free Law Project, a nonprofit that builds open-source legal data tools, advocated for courts to partner with nonprofits and embrace open-source technology, noting that courts are often "locked into expensive, long-term contracts with proprietary software vendors" that limit their ability to control or modify their own systems. She showcased a litigant portal/efiling project as an alternative that allows courts to maintain control of their systems while offering transparency.
Free Law Project AI developer Rachel Gao explained the project's CourtListener database, which makes legal research more accessible through natural language queries, allowing users to "find precedents faster and easier."
Inaugural LIT Award launched
The day culminated with Suffolk Law's inaugural LIT Impact Award, given to legal innovator Marc Lauritsen, a world-leading expert in legal document assembly who teaches Lawyering in the Age of Smart Machines, 21st Century Lawyering, and Decision Making and Choice Management at Suffolk. Lauritsen was instrumental in establishing Suffolk’s LIT program, serving as the inaugural co-chair of the board of directors for the initiative.
"Marc has either directly or indirectly likely helped more people in need get legal assistance than any other single person in the world," noted Professor and Assistant Dean of Innovation Gabe Teninbaum during the presentation, recognizing Lauritsen's pioneering work in document automation.