Want to make a dent in the access-to-justice problem? Stop preaching and wringing your hands over how bad it is and start looking for a solution, even if it’s just a start. Which is exactly what the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (NJOPD) recently did in creating an innovative AI platform for that state’s public defenders.
The Beleaguered PDs
Perhaps no place does the access-to-justice gap seem so stark as with the besieged public defenders. So many cases. So much time needed to talk to and hand hold clients who have too little means and too little sophistication to understand what’s happening. So much time needed to earn their trust. So much time evaluating cases and negotiating with prosecutors, prosecutors who have more resources and are often paid more.
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Even more than any other area of the law, public defenders are all about dealing with people: people with serious problems facing not just fines but often imprisonment, sometimes for a life. Yet public defenders are notoriously overworked, underfunded, and underpaid. It’s a recipe for burnout. I’ve heard it from PDs over and over. I’ve seen young lawyers full of passion and energy get beat down with the never-ending work and tedium. And I’ve watched prosecutors taking advantage.
Then there’s that pesky law thing. Public defenders have to do what all lawyers do. Research. Write briefs. Make arguments based on the law. And, of course, take care of administrative matters. Administrative matters like keeping the office going. Keeping people from flaming out or worse. Trying to keep them satisfied with their jobs when they face enormous and often high-pressure case loads.
And that AI revolution that could reduce some of the mundane and tedious work? So far, it’s more or less left public defenders behind. Programs that would be specifically tailored for legal in general and public defenders in particular cost too much money, money that PDs don’t have. It’s not that public defenders don’t need AI. They do, perhaps desperately. It’s just that they have limited financial resources and, what they do have, often needs to be used elsewhere to shore up more pressing challenges.
And as for the public AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude and the like, their use by PDs carries the same risks as they do for all lawyers: confidentiality, privacy, and security. And those risks are compounded when you are dealing with people’s lives and freedoms.
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The New Jersey Program
The NJOPD realized the practical problems public defenders have with being able to get and use AI and came up with an innovative yet practical tool. A tool that may not do everything, but it does some things to make the state’s PD jobs easier.
To understand how, you first need to know that, unlike many states, the NJOPD is a statewide office. It is responsible for and in charge of public defenders throughout the state. This is unique since in most states, public defenders’ offices are run county by county with more limited funding. Most are small offices that run autonomously and independently. The NJOPD, on the other hand, is comprised of 1,300 attorneys in some 66 offices. It was one of the first public defender offices formed in the United States, so it has some experience dealing with and understanding public defender issues.
And reportedly it typically handles over 100,000 cases per year, not just criminal cases but also juvenile, family, mental health, and appellate matters. As a result, it has a database of over 3,000 briefs, 200 internal documents, and a variety of other materials.
Looking at all this, the NJOPD saw opportunity. Opportunity for the use of artificial intelligence to enable access to all these briefs and other materials for all public defenders within the state. But the creation of this kind of tool didn’t just happen. It took some innovative thinking.
The Program Development
Certainly, coming up with this kind of AI tool was not something NJOPD was qualified to take on by itself. But instead of throwing up its hands, it looked for partners to help develop aprogram. It first went to something called the New Jersey Innovation Authority. This Authority is also somewhat unique in that it is one of the first truly state government funded innovation offices, and functions similar to a chief innovation officer in a firm, only on a much broader scale. It looks for ways to encourage, create, and implement innovation for entities and individuals within the state. And with a 2027 budget of over $23 million it’s got the financial wherewithal to do some things.
The Innovation Authority was excited about the idea of creating an AI platform for public defenders and it looped in Princeton University. A Princeton University professor and research fellow studied public defender workflows to see where AI could help. They also determined that a customized AI tool was needed to meet these workflow needs.
And they decided to start with a tool which would enable public defenders to search the existing briefs and other materials using natural language. This enables a public defender in any New Jersey office to have access to past efforts, experiences, and expertise of public defenders throughout the state. PDs who have been there and done that.
The tool is not necessarily a brief writing or pure legal research tool in and of itself. Instead, it is a mechanism to obtain access to materials developed by public defenders that are already in existence. Just like more expensive AI systems enable lawyers in a firm to quickly find and use previously prepared documents to help with their work.
The partnership is, however, continuing to work on other tools to do things like aid investigators and help support administrative personnel in the public defender offices. More to come.
Thinking Differently
What is so refreshing about what the NJOPD has done is how it maximized opportunities by working with other entities and starting with something that appeared to be easiest to tackle.
Granted, the NJOPD had some advantages that most states do not have. Having a statewide public defender system provides the organization and material to make something like this feasible. Individual public defender offices typically would not have the skill set or money to create an AI program similar to what New Jersey has done. And having the Innovation Authority and a world-renowned university willing to pitch in didn’t hurt.
But that doesn’t detract from the fact the NJOPD saw an opportunity to help its public defenders and make a dent in the A2J crisis. It is just these sorts of ideas along with those of other low-cost legal AI services like that provided by Descrybe that give some hope for helping to solve the A2J problem.
It’s a problem that won’t be solved by just throwing money at it. It won’t be solved by thinking we have to boil the ocean before we take any steps at all. It will only be solved by innovating, thinking, by partnering with other institutions like universities and think tanks, and starting small, just like the NJOPD has done. It is a roadmap for better serving the legal needs of those that do not have the resources to otherwise obtain them. More creative thinking. Less speech-making. Less hand-wringing. Taking on the A2J elephant one bite at a time.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.