For millions of rural Americans, justice is unaffordable, inaccessible, or both. That’s because for many folks living outside city limits, there’s a shortage of qualified attorneys to represent them. Rural Americans, like all Americans, deserve a fair shake whenever they’re trying to assert or defend their rights, and the legal profession needs to take seriously the problem of legal deserts. 

A legal desert is any area in which there are too few attorneys to meet the needs of the surrounding communities. These deserts exist across the United States. In about 1,300 counties, there’s fewer than one attorney for every 1,000 residents. In these communities, residents often opt to (or are forced to) represent themselves. 

Pro se litigants face an uphill battle in the courtroom. The win rate for pro se plaintiffs in federal district court is just three percent. When both parties are represented, however, plaintiffs win 42 percent of their cases. The barriers to success are even greater for rural pro se plaintiffs. They may experience long commutes to the courthouse, suffer from shaky internet access, and lack the support of legal aid offices, which tend to be concentrated in urban areas. 

Many commentators have recognized the potential for AI to address this problem. But as technology continues to develop toward realizing this potential, the legal profession must address three barriers: first, outdated professional norms; second, inadequate tools; and, third, an inadequate digital infrastructure. The first and second barriers are the focus of this essay. But the third barrier, the digital divide, prevents many Americans from making full use of the internet and new AI tools. Increasing the availability and affordability of  high-speed internet in rural communities is a crucial precondition of enabling all Americans to access justice using these new tools.

Professional norms have allowed disparities in access to justice to persist. The traditional response to legal deserts has been a combination of pushing and pulling. State bar associations, in conjunction with law schools, push attorneys to spend more time in rural areas. University of Idaho College of Law, for instance, runs the Idaho Heritage Project. This novel and praiseworthy effort provides law students with financial support to accept summer internships in rural communities. It’s a step in the right direction. A career pathway that may have previously been off a student’s radar may suddenly become their primary goal—and a worthy goal at that. More than half of Idaho’s counties have ten or fewer attorneys. The Project may help chip away at that shortage by exposing students to the important and fulfilling work of practicing in a small community. 

Other state bar associations attempt to pull lawyers into rural communities through financial incentives. The Ohio State Bar worked with the state legislature to create the Rural Practice Incentive Program. In some cases, the Program will repay up to $50,000 in loans—a big deal for a new lawyer fresh out of law school. Law school unfortunately comes with a high price tag, so this program could empower graduates with heavy debt loads to turn down high-paying law firm jobs and instead serve as prosecutors or public defenders in rural communities, or otherwise defend rural community members. Again, this is a positive step that deserves praise and propagation.

But however well-intentioned, these programs are barely a drop in the ocean of the access to justice problem. The legal profession has a responsibility to constantly evaluate new and novel means to lower barriers to the legal system. Any such evaluation since November 2022—when ChatGPT was released—should include the possible use of AI tools by pro se litigants to advance and defend their legal rights.

Specialized legal AI tools already exist that allow pro se litigants to more accurately and forcefully engage in the legal system. Thanks to research and experimentation by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the UC Berkeley School of Law, Vanderbilt AI Law Lab (VAILL), Stanford Legal Design Lab, and others, these tools will improve over time. With improvements in accuracy and increases in the scope of the tools, pro se litigants may become less reliant on expensive attorneys in distant locations to realize their legal rights. 

This positive outcome is contingent on the legal profession embracing its special responsibility. Historically, the profession has prioritized profit over people. Lawyers and their lobbyists have enacted “unauthorized practice of law” statutes that limit individuals and applications from stepping into the practice of the law. These statutes have hindered the spread of tools that ease creation of wills, empower tenants in landlord-tenant disputes, and ease divorces. In some cases, these laws have achieved their goal of preventing fraudsters from deceiving individuals desperate for cheaper means of legal relief. In many cases, however, these laws have quashed innovation that, if given more time and support, could meaningfully increase access to justice. 

Achieving such an outcome also turns on lawyers aiding the development of improved legal tools. Specialized AI legal tools continue to suffer from a number of setbacks. Deploying flawed tools to those most in need of accurate legal work would be akin to sending a middle school basketball team a bunch of flat balls—they’re bound to miss more shots than they should and, over time, they might just give up. That’s why lawyers should volunteer their time and expertise to help make AI legal tools more accurate and reliable.

The legal profession should embrace AI, even if it means setting aside self-interest. Individual lawyers can help push the profession in the right direction by, for example, urging state legislatures to study possible amendments to unauthorized practice of law statutes, encouraging state bars to explore ways to improve AI tools rather than undermine them, and informing state legal aid offices about the opportunity to partner with groups like VAILL to see how they can integrate existing AI tools into their outreach programs. 

There are, of course, limits to AI’s ability to take on key legal tasks. We should not slow walk our way into a world in which the wealthy receive in-person counsel and everyone else relies on the latest AI model—hoping that the latest updates from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other developers included some improvements in legal reasoning. In short, AI tools can help rural residents fill out forms, draft motions, and understand legal language, but complex cases will still require human expertise to ensure justice is fully served. Still, the status quo is unacceptable—too many Americans are left with little to no guidance in relatively routine legal disputes. AI tools can and should play a part in those cases and give people—especially those in rural communities—a better shot at a fair fight. 

Efforts to incorporate AI into larger access to justice initiatives should coincide with ongoing strategies to reduce the digital divide. There is little value in building new AI tools if the intended communities lack the internet connection required to make full use of those tools. One in three Americans lacks sufficient internet to reliably use Zoom. For AI to increase access to justice across the U.S. and, in particular, in legal deserts, there must be continued and increased investment in the infrastructure necessary for all Americans to frequently and fully use AI. The alternative—use of AI tools by those who already have reliable access to the internet—will likely entrench the disparities that lawyers should strive to eliminate. Infrastructure development is a bit outside the remit of lawyers, but the legal profession should not be neutral in this policy conversation. Lawyers can and should advocate for expansion and enhancement of high-speed internet in every corner of the country.

Access to justice is not only a core responsibility of the legal profession but also a fundamental value of our constitutional order. AI has the potential to secure the blessings of liberty for more Americans, which places a responsibility on the entire legal community to explore when, how, and by whom those AI tools can be employed to serve such ends. This will not be an easy undertaking. Decades of professional norms, local rules, and the like stand in the way of fully realizing AI’s potential. Lawyers should avoid the temptation of sticking with the status quo and instead look for opportunities to close the justice gap using AI.

Note from the Editor: The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public policy matters. Any expressions of opinion are those of the author. We welcome responses to the views presented here. To join the debate, please email us at [email protected].