We may not be all the way there yet, but the Library at LexBlog will start doing its part on the access to justice front.
I hadn’t thought of sharing my thinking on this front until LawDroid announced the LawDroid Hackathon, a virtual, global, open-source competition presented in partnership with Lagniappe Law Lab and the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project. The hackathon challenges the people working closest to the access-to-justice crisis to design and build technology that helps close it.
Tom Martin and LawDroid have been all over AI for what seems like a decade or more. He and the company have a passion for access to justice and putting on good events. I expect this trio’s hackathon to have a strong AI bent. It got me to thinking of the AI-powered Library at LexBlog.
We plan to serve as infrastructure to the law. As a society we have primary law, secondary law mostly limited to publishing by academics, treatises and the like as well as disparate information published digitally.
But we do not have a library committed to preserving and structuring, for AI and citation, the insight and commentary of legal professionals passionate about all sorts of niches in the law, including niches related to access to justice.
Imagine all of the digital publishing on access to justice issues over the last twenty-five years being preserved and structured alongside published works on all the other legal niches.
Have a conversation with Claude, Gemini or ChatGPT, each of which the Library will connect to, and draw on that same body of access to justice publishing. It could be legal professionals or consumers having these conversations.
It hasn’t shipped yet, but preserving and structuring this secondary law is more than an idea. Its construction is well underway at the Library.