Legal aid organizations, courts, and technology partners across the country are working together to define what legal help AI should do, how to test it, and what quality standards it should meet. The Legal Help Commons is where that shared work lives: reference architectures, conformance standards, evaluation tools, and implementation playbooks that any team can adopt.
Legal aid and court teams are identifying the technical solutions they most need to increase their impact. The Commons is developing these as functional agendas: clear, specific descriptions of what a system should do, what tasks it should handle, and what outcomes it should produce for organizations and the people they serve. This is the kind of clear wishlist that can motivate great, aligned technical development.
See the functional agendas →For each workflow, the Commons is developing conformance standards that define what a technical solution should be able to do in order to meet quality, safety, and sustainability requirements. These standards set the goalposts so builders are aiming at the right targets, public money is being spent wisely, and legal aid teams and their evaluators can tell whether a technology is actually living up to the hype.
See the conformance standards →For each workflow, the Commons is developing reference architectures, implementation playbooks, interactive courses, and case studies drawn from real implementations. These are hands-on resources that an internal team or a vendor can follow to borrow from what other teams have already figured out about building effective, safe, and sustainable AI-powered legal help solutions.
Browse the workflows →Resources to help your team go from "what should we build?" to a deployed, evaluated, and maintained AI tool.
Technical blueprints for specific workflows: technology stacks, data flows, integration points, prompt strategies, and decision logic.
Step-by-step guides covering planning, staffing, procurement, data prep, testing, launch, and maintenance for specific AI workflows.
Protocols and methods for measuring whether a legal AI tool is accurate, safe, jurisdiction-correct, and useful, before and after deployment.
Reusable classifiers, prompt libraries, data pipelines, and integration components that organizations can adopt or adapt.
View the common tools →Procurement language, budget frameworks, and staffing models so organizations can plan and fund AI projects realistically.
Interactive classes on how to build, test, and deploy specific legal AI workflows. Designed for mixed teams of legal staff, technologists, and leadership.
Browse courses →Standards and guides for structuring your legal help content (articles, FAQs, service directories, forms, and legal authorities) so that AI tools can use it reliably. Every AI workflow depends on structured, jurisdiction-specific content.
Read the Knowledge Standard →Tested UI/UX patterns for common justice AI interactions: intake flows, document explanation, multi-step navigation, and more.
When the field builds together, effort compounds instead of scattering, and good work travels from one team to the next.
Build a tool once and the whole field can use it, instead of every organization solving the same OCR, classification, and accuracy problems alone.
Shared benchmarks let any team check whether a legal AI tool gives accurate, safe, jurisdiction-correct answers, so the field builds with instruments instead of in the dark.
When a team in Illinois learns that a prompt strategy fails for debt collection intake, that lesson reaches the team in Texas facing the same thing.
Shared infrastructure lets a small or rural office stand up capable tools, not only the well-resourced states and organizations.
Each workflow is an end-to-end scenario where AI can help people with a specific legal problem. Working groups of practitioners, technologists, and researchers are developing the shared agendas, standards, and blueprints for each one. Join a cohort to help shape what gets built.
Help people who call a legal help hotline get screened, triaged, and routed to the right service through a voice-based AI assistant that works alongside human staff.
The functional agenda and conformance standards are published as drafts and open for community feedback. The reference architecture and courses are in development by the cohort.
See the workflow and join the cohort →Help tenants facing eviction understand their notice, identify defenses, and prepare a legally sound answer within the court deadline.
The functional agenda is published as a draft and open for community feedback. Conformance standards and reference architecture are in development.
See the workflow and join the cohort →AI tools for tenants and advocates dealing with eviction, repairs, lease disputes, and housing instability. Help define the shared agenda for housing workflows.
Join the Housing cohort →AI tools for people facing debt collection lawsuits, including documentation review, defense identification, and response preparation. Help define the shared agenda for debt workflows.
Join the Debt cohort →AI tools for people with criminal records seeking expungement, record sealing, and other remedies. Help define the shared agenda for reentry workflows.
Join the Reentry cohort →Resources that span multiple workflows. Use these to compare approaches, plan implementations, and learn from work already done.
Functional agendas and conformance standards for each workflow. Use these for procurement, evaluation, or planning.
Browse standards →Reusable components that multiple workflows share: PII masking, issue classification, document reading, and more.
Browse tools →Masterclasses on building, testing, and deploying legal AI workflows. Browse the catalog and signal your interest.
Course catalog →Implementation playbooks, research findings, and guides produced by the working groups.
Browse reports →JusticeBench is the discovery and evaluation platform for AI in the access to justice field. The Commons builds the workflows and tools. JusticeBench catalogs who is building what, hosts evaluation datasets and benchmarks, and publishes conformance test results.
The Legal Help Commons is built by working groups of practitioners, technologists, and researchers. Join a working group to help shape the agenda, or sign up to stay connected as new resources, standards, and courses are published.