As they await the potential impacts of a new presidential administration and the GOP-controlled Congress, access to justice leaders across the country say they're headed into 2025 with an eye on issues like use of nonattorney professionals and AI technology to help address the ever-increasing need for free or affordable legal services.

Despite uncertainty in Washington, D.C., around issues like immigration enforcement, public benefits and legal aid funding, advocates told Law360 they're looking to build on innovations that took hold in 2024, like pushing to expand use of nonattorney community service workers to address some basic but essential legal needs for the most vulnerable, or exploring how to bring artificial intelligence to bear on their work.

The underlying issue, advocates say, continues to be the country's justice gap. A 2022 Legal Services Corp. study found that only 8% of the civil needs of low-income Americans are being met.

"It's not a gap, it's a chasm," Texas Access to Justice Foundation Executive Director Betty Balli Torres told Law360.

Law360 caught up with legal service leaders to find out how they're looking to address this chasm in the new year.

Nonattorney Legal Assistants

The introduction of "justice workers," or nonattorney community service workers who can provide certain basic legal services, continued to be a major priority for many access to justice leaders in 2024. Despite lingering concerns over rules forbidding the unlicensed practice of law, many states have moved forward with programs to license these paraprofessionals.

The idea, according to Frontline Justice CEO Nikole Nelson, is to allow nonattorneys such as faith leaders, social workers and others to address basic legal needs of populations they're already serving, whether it's filling out power of attorney forms or appealing public benefit denials.

"I think it's important, particularly in this day and age, that people seek help from sources that they trust to give them accurate information," Nelson said. "And I think that's a benefit of the community justice worker model."

After the movement gained ground last year in places like Texas, Arizona and Washington state, it will be important to establish a more cohesive set of national guidelines for justice workers in 2025, said David Udell, executive director of the National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham University School of Law.

"The justice worker movement is the wave of the present, and efforts in many states are starting to bear fruit in terms of the numbers of people helped, in terms of demonstrating that the provision of service is safe, and in terms of winning hearts and minds," Udell told Law360. "But substantial work still needs to be done to consider the place of attorney supervision and to better understand when matters should be referred to a lawyer."

Frontline Justice, an initiative aimed at increasing the capabilities of justice workers across the country, is working to help create this framework. Nelson said the organization will launch a national task force in January that includes stakeholders from across the country to develop training models and guidelines for justice worker programs that can be replicated across states.

This year "is really going to be focused on how will we train justice workers and how will we support them to make sure that we're ensuring competency," Nelson told Law360. "Hopefully we'll come up with a national framework so that jurisdictions, as they pick this up, don't have to start from scratch over and over again."

By the end of 2024, several justice worker programs began to take hold across the country. In December, the Washington State Supreme Court adopted a new regulatory framework permitting companies and nonprofits to offer legal services by applying for temporary exemptions from the rules governing the legal profession. And Arizona's Supreme Court that month announced the creation of a Legal Services Authorized Community Justice Worker program aimed at recruiting nonlawyers to provide limited legal support to primarily rural communities with training and supervision from existing legal organizations.

Last summer, the Texas Supreme Court also agreed to implement ethics rules allowing nonattorney paraprofessionals and court-access assistants to perform some services in the areas of family law, consumer debt law, and estate planning and probate law. But in November, a month before the rules were set to take effect, the court put a pause on the rollout following input from the Texas State Bar suggesting amendments like increasing the education requirements for court-access assistants from a high school diploma to an associate's degree, and requiring they abide by many of the same professional conduct rules that govern Texas lawyers.

Nelson said the adoption of justice workers in places like Texas will be "huge moving forward," but she cautioned that the more restrictions and requirements that bar associations put on nonattorney justice workers, the more they delay addressing the nation's massive dearth of legal services.

"The size and scope of the problem is so enormous, it's so underserved, so we need to make sure that we're reducing as many barriers as possible, while still ensuring that people are getting quality and competent help," she said. "Every single requirement that we put on a justice worker that is not related to ensuring their ability to do their job well is going to create an impediment to scale."

Artificial Intelligence

In the new year, Balli Torres said the Texas Access to Justice Foundation will be investing in programs to explore how artificial intelligence can help lighten the load for legal aid providers who frequently can't keep up with demand for services.

For instance, she said algorithmic AI models could be useful in filtering through criminal records to identify clients that are eligible to have convictions expunged.

"So instead of having someone sit down and go through a thousand records, those people are able to develop programs that will do that for you," she said. "And then you have saved so much time and maybe you find out 500 are eligible. Then we're investing our time and actually helping those 500."

But Udell said there are still major concerns with the technology. In addition to the possibility of hallucinations and other errors in material generated by AI programs, he also warned that the technology could also be wielded by "police, landlords, creditors, and others whose interests often align against the vulnerable."

In this vein, Udell said widespread use of AI has the potential to increase the demand for legal services even further, particularly in healthcare coverage disputes. An investigation by health publication STAT last year found that providers of Medicare Advantage plans, the taxpayer-funded alternative to traditional Medicare that covers more than 31 million people, frequently use predictive AI algorithms to pinpoint when they can cut off payment to a patient's treatment, resulting in a flood of appeals claiming care was denied prematurely.

Still, many are optimistic about how AI could be used for good. In August, e-discovery and legal software provider Relativity announced it would be giving free access to its generative artificial intelligence product aiR to organizations involved in litigation and policy research related to racial and social justice.

And Nelson said that Frontline Justice is exploring ways to use the technology to support justice workers.

"We think that there's always going to need to be that human pairing with AI to make sure that it avoids all of the pitfalls we worry about, getting inaccurate information and hallucinations and whatnot," she said. "But we do think that there's a good opportunity in terms of training and also helping us be more efficient and effective in serving lots of people."

Uncertainty of a New Administration

The backdrop of a new presidential administration and a GOP-controlled Congress means a lot of uncertainty, justice leaders told Law360. But Balli Torres said that Republican leadership in Washington doesn't necessarily mean that legal service providers need to be concerned about their budgets getting slashed.

"One of the things we've been fortunate with is that we've had bipartisan support, in Texas and nationally," she said. "During the last [Trump] administration, Legal Service Corp. funds increased during that four-year period, which I think is a surprise to many."

Although if there are budget cuts, Balli Torres said it would be a massive problem, as a real investment is required to close the justice gap. And many are concerned that certain issues where legal service is already in high demand are going to be exacerbated in a new administration.

Deborah Lee, the attorney-in-charge of the Immigration Law Unit at The Legal Aid Society, said she knows that things are about to get very scary for her clients following Trump's campaign vows to enact even more aggressive immigration restrictions than in his first term, including mass detention and deportation programs.

"There's been a lot of statements that have been made during the campaign and after the election, but it is still unclear how certain things might be, what I call, operationalized," Lee said. "What we're hearing from clients is just this tremendous fear and anxiety about what is going to happen to me, what is going to happen to my family, what is going to happen to my community."

One anxiety for criminal defense lawyers in particular is the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in local courtrooms, said Amanda Jack, a Legal Aid Society policy director in New York. While New York state passed a statute in 2020 blocking ICE from making arrests in courtrooms without a judicial warrant or court order, Mayor Eric Adams has hinted at attempting to bring the agency back into the local courts.

"I think taking seriously the threat of ICE sitting outside ready to nab people from public spaces is something that we really have to work our way through and find real solutions so that we're not enabling mass deportations," Jack said.

To combat the fear and uncertainty, Lee said the Legal Aid Society's immigration unit is working on developing tool kits with basic legal information to share with legal service providers and community-based organizations if restrictions on asylum-seekers tighten or detentions increase.

"There are lots of people, even within New York City, who don't have a lot of familiarity with what happens when you're detained," Lee said. "Where do you go? What happens if you have an immigration court hearing already going on in New York, but then you get detained in Western Pennsylvania? What is the legal services landscape in these other areas?"

Lee said Legal Aid Society is also working on community education and training around more complex immigration representation work like habeas petitions.

"I also try to think about ways in which we can help people even if we're not providing individual representation to them," she said. "Are there resources that we can provide? And that could be community education, but it could also be maybe more impact litigation, or other ways that we can advocate."

"Justice-Driven" Pro Bono

Statistically, pro bono work has been on the rise after dipping in 2020. According to the most recent report from the Pro Bono Institute, 120 firms reported performing more than 5 million hours of pro bono work in 2023, representing 3.76% of total client billable hours, a more than 8% increase from the previous year.

But Brenna DeVaney, the director of pro bono at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP, said it isn't just about how many hours a firm puts into its pro bono projects that measures the private bar's impact on the nation's justice gap. Rather the pro bono community needs to develop a more consistent philosophical approach to the work — what she calls "justice-driven pro bono."

Firms should be centering their pro bono efforts on "issues that address essentials of life, like keeping people in their homes, making sure public benefits are accessible, and securing things like access to education and orders of protection for domestic violence survivors," she said.

At the same time, pro bono leaders are also pledging to stand up to potential abuses of the justice system in light of President-elect Donald Trump's calls for legal action against political foes and other perceived enemies. The New York Lawyers for the Public Interest and its Pro Bono Clearinghouse, which works to connect nonprofits with lawyers from some of New York's top firms, released an alert in December encouraging legal service providers to begin to prepare for new federal government policies and enforcement priorities.

"The incoming administration has discussed plans for intensive oversight and investigation of organizations perceived as opposing its policies or supporting certain communities," the alert said.

And NBC News reported in December that a nationwide network of lawyers and pro-democracy advocates was being formed with the goal of providing free legal services to defend and protect people who may be unjustly targeted once Trump takes office.

"The pro bono bar and nonprofit legal organizations need to be ready to provide strong support to those who are targeted unfairly," said Norm Eisen, a co-founder of the State Democracy Defenders Fund who was interviewed by NBC about his role in the effort.

E. Danya Perry, the founder of New York litigation boutique Perry Law, said much of her firm's pro bono workload has been focused around a "pro-democracy" agenda, something she sees continuing into 2025.

"I think we're going to be working with some attorneys general offices in the coming months and years to continue the pro-democracy fight, doing things that really are critical," she said.

Ultimately, DeVaney said firms should be guided by experts in the legal services and civil rights community about where their efforts will be more effective and needed.

"When [the] need for lawyers increases, we uniformly see them step up — that holds true across the collaborative law firm pro bono community," she said. "There are countless examples of lawyers organizing and showing up when disaster or crisis strikes. I expect that will hold true in the future."

--Editing by Orlando Lorenzo.

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