The Access to Justice Lab develops attorney-led AI systems that help people understand a legal problem, preserve evidence, find the right official forms, identify deadlines, and reach the right human help. A named California attorney is accountable for how every part of it works.
Free public clinics · official-source citations · transparent quality reporting.
Type your situation the way you would tell a friend. The attorney-supervised AI Legal Analyst meets you at your level: plain answers if you want plain answers, statutes and official citations if you ask for them. It will tell you honestly when a problem needs a real lawyer.
Two connected parts, one accountable attorney.
The institutional identity: a lawyer-led public-interest legal-technology program. It sets the methodology, curates official sources, tests quality, publishes aggregate results, and corrects errors in the open. This is the identity used for research, partnerships, law-school outreach, and public discussion of responsible legal AI.
The public-facing self-help tools people actually use: guided problem selectors, an attorney-supervised AI Legal Analyst, evidence checklists, deadline spotting, official forms and agency links, and printable action plans. Free, no signup required for general use.
The Lab is building focused clinics one at a time, each unusually complete and grounded in official sources, rather than fifty thin pages. California employment is the flagship. Everything inside a live clinic is free and self-serve.
Unpaid wages and overtime, misclassification, final-pay penalties, retaliation, discrimination and harassment, leave and accommodation, severance review, unemployment appeals. Employment deadlines are short and unforgiving; knowing them is half the battle.
Notices to pay or quit, response deadlines, habitability and repairs, security deposits, rent increases and rent-control routing, illegal lockouts. Renters win these with documents, not arguments.
Whether small claims fits, venue and defendant identification, demand letters, statute-of-limitations spotting, service, hearing prep, judgment collection, debt validation, credit-report disputes.
Deliberately narrow at launch: naturalization, green-card and work-authorization renewals, family-petition process explanations, official form navigation, records requests, and scam warnings. It routes straight to human help for anything high-consequence.
Later module: California unemployment appeals, Social Security disability process navigation, paid family leave and state disability insurance, and procedural information for other public benefits.
While the deep clinics roll out, the current AI Legal Clinic front door and the full free toolkit are already live.
The Lab keeps a strict wall between free public information and paid legal representation, so an anonymous question never quietly becomes a client file and I never imply I represent someone I have not agreed to represent.
Free · anonymous or minimally identified · no income screening
Separate intake · identified client · express engagement
The commitments this Lab holds itself to. These are standards I intend the program to be measured against.
As a law student at Boston University School of Law, I worked as a student-lawyer in an employment-rights clinic, representing people who could not otherwise afford counsel. What stuck with me was how often someone did not, at first, need a long legal memorandum. They needed someone to spot the issue, explain the deadline, help them find the right form, tell them what evidence to preserve, and point them to the next practical step.
I remember my clinic professor telling me I was one of the strongest students he had worked with in his years running the clinic. I share that as my own recollection, not as a formal endorsement, and I have not attached anyone's name to it. I mention it only because that experience is why this project exists: I want to scale that first-line, practical help while keeping an identifiable attorney responsible for the system's design and its guardrails.
One attorney could never answer thousands of questions a month. An attorney-curated AI can, against materials I write and guardrails I enforce. About 27,000 people use the free resources on this site every month, and the overwhelming majority never pay anything and are never asked to. The Lab is how I keep that useful and honest as it grows.
How the clinics decide what to say, and how they avoid saying what they cannot support.
The Lab intends to publish aggregate, anonymized results, defined openly, rather than vanity numbers. Measurement begins when the flagship clinic launches. No figures are invented in the meantime.
Status: data collection beginning. Full metric definitions and the measurement approach are on the impact & quality page.
The Lab is designed to be embeddable and shareable. I welcome conversations with public libraries, law-school clinics, community organizations, worker centers, legal-aid organizations, bar associations, and court self-help programs. No partnership is claimed that does not exist. See what an embedded clinic preserves →
If you run a program that serves people navigating legal problems without counsel and you want to explore an embedded, attribution-preserving version of a clinic, get in touch.
Some problems need attorney judgment, not another template. Every service is a published flat fee, so you know the total cost before you write to me, with a two business day turnaround on most documents. This is separate from the free clinic, with its own intake and conflict check.