At the peak of the witness hearings for the UK government's Covid-19 inquiry in 2023, Norton Rose Fulbright was receiving 1000’s of documents per week, which it processed as a part of its pro bono work for the charity Save the Children.
Launched in 2022, the inquiry checked out government decision-making through the pandemic and the charity wanted to seek out out to what extent children's rights were taken under consideration in policy decisions.
“Even with a reasonably strong review team — including paralegals, Norton Rose Fulbright attorneys and lawyers — there was absolutely no way for us to undergo this amount of fabric and pick what was really relevant,” explains David Wilkins, the firm's technical director for e-disclosure.
So the legal team used artificial intelligence to seek out probably the most relevant documents from the investigation and prioritize them for review. This is only one example of how law firms are using technology to extend the impact of their pro bono work and enable them to tackle significantly larger projects.
With the permission of the commission, Norton Rose ran the disclosed documents through its AI-powered e-discovery platform, which analyzed and sorted them for recurring text patterns to first discover where children were mentioned. For example, it grouped documents that contained words or phrases reminiscent of “playgrounds” or “school closings.”
The platform then prioritized the documents by analyzing the team's previous review efforts and identifying which documents were prone to be more relevant for paralegals to review before passing them on to attorneys. This meant the team had “the most effective likelihood of getting an important evidence as quickly as possible,” Wilkins recalls.
Andrew Barton, pro bono legal adviser for Europe, the Middle East and Asia at Norton Rose, says if Save the Children had tried to tackle the duty itself, it might have been “simply not feasible” and the charity would have needed to take a distinct approach.
The children's rights organisations' recommendations from the inquiry affected all decision-making processes, not only pandemic scenarios, notes Barton. As a result, the work done could have an effect on children within the UK for generations to come back.
“The way we take into consideration pro bono work is changing,” notes Elsha Butler, head of the professional bono practice on the London-based law firm Linklaters. “Whether we are able to use legal tech or generative AI on a project is becoming one in all our first reflexes… there are such a lot of great projects that don't get done since the scope is simply too big and so they require plenty of manual summarization.”
A current pro bono project at Linklaters can be using AI to realize its goals. The government of Tanzania is working with the non-profit organization Lawyers Without Borders to combat human trafficking. “An essential a part of the project is to support the judiciary in deciding cases with appropriate penalties,” explains Butler.
While there are legal precedents in Tanzania, says Lizzie Harker-Noor, a professional bono lawyer on the firm, there’s a possibility to complement these with lessons learned from cases in other countries.
Linklaters subsequently turned to Laila, an in-house generative AI chatbot, to create initial drafts of case summaries. Lawyers reviewed the drafts and added subject-specific legal evaluation, making a library of case summaries.
The use of technology sped up the drafting process and gave lawyers time to debate feedback with Lawyers Without Borders – including the team on the bottom in Tanzania, who could also suggest further changes.
This has made the lawyers' work “more dynamic,” notes Harker-Noor. “It was really a turning point within the usefulness of this final compendium.”
Some law firms even develop recent technologies freed from charge to enhance access to justice.
Hogan Lovells is working with legal tech company LawFairy on a tool to assist immigration officers at voluntary and charitable organisations. The officers will work with a parent or carer to find out whether a toddler is eligible for British citizenship.
The admission criteria are very complex. The platform helps applicants navigate them through the use of artificial intelligence to interrupt down all of the required information into easy questions.
The tool, which just isn’t yet publicly available, will tell the user whether the kid is entitled to compensation and why. It is designed to be “easily understood by the reader,” explains Raj Panasar, managing director and founding father of LawFairy – although legal assistance remains to be required.
“It's essential that you’ve gotten a caseworker who works with a person,” says Yasmin Waljee, international pro bono partner at Hogan Lovells. But the caseworker doesn’t should be a completely qualified immigration lawyer, she adds.
Junior lawyers could potentially tackle pro bono work, Waljee notes, since they’ll use the tool themselves and a more experienced lawyer on the firm could review their work.
This is one area where technology could advance pro bono work in the longer term.
Developing the back-end technology underlying Hogan Lovells/LawFairy's platform is complex. Hannes Westermann, assistant professor specializing in law and AI at Maastricht University, is considering using generative AI in constructing this technology.
Westermann can be working on a system where generative AI could help users insert text, express a viewpoint or describe a situation.
But individuals are still needed. “I feel it might be very helpful to assist people fill out forms that would then be submitted to a professional bono lawyer for review,” he says.
