Article by Jenifer Whiston: “At Free Law Project, we believe the law belongs to everyone. But for too long, the information needed to understand and use the law—especially in civil rights litigation—has been locked behind paywalls, scattered across jurisdictions, or buried in technical complexity.
That’s why we teamed up with the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse on an exploratory grant from Arnold Ventures: to see how artificial intelligence could help unlock these barriers, making court documents more accessible and legal research more open and accurate.
What We Learned
This six-month project gave us the opportunity to experiment boldly. Together, we researched and tested AI based approaches and tools to:
- Classify legal documents into categories like motions, orders, or opinions.
- Summarize filings and entire cases, turning dense legal text into plain-English explanations.
- Generate structured metadata to make cases easier to track and analyze.
- Trace the path of a legal case as it moves through the court system
- Enable semantic search, allowing users to type questions in everyday language and find relevant cases.
- Build the foundation of an open-source citator, so researchers and advocates can see when cases are overturned, affirmed, or otherwise impacted by later decisions.
These prototypes showed us not only what’s possible, but what’s practical. By testing real AI models on real data, we proved that tools like these can responsibly scale to improve the infrastructure of justice…(More)”.
