These discussions come as the broader legal industry has embraced the promise of AI to make billable work more efficient. Similarly, AI has the potential to help reshape pro bono work, particularly for legal aid organizations that lack the resources to serve more clients.
Angela Tripp, a program director for technology at the civil legal aid nonprofit Legal Services Corporation, tells Law360 Pulse that the most common way legal nonprofits use AI today is to create better internal efficiencies, such as using AI to summarize meetings or help with grant writing.
Instead of pricey off-the-shelf AI tools, many legal aid programs are building platforms with low-cost tools such as the enterprise version of ChatGPT. Legal aid organizations implementing AI are measuring success by using the technology to spend more quality time with clients.
Tripp said AI can handle time-consuming administrative tasks. For example, a common bottleneck in legal aid is intake. Tripp said that some nonprofits are experimenting with voice-based AI to gather information more efficiently.
"If that can be automated, then they get to spend more time doing what they went to law school for," Tripp said.
Legal Orgs Increase Access to Justice With AI
Nearly 90% of legal aid professionals see AI as a key for advancing justice, according to a 2025 survey from the e-discovery software company Everlaw.
Across the country, legal aid organizations are taking an innovative approach to using AI to help people in need. In March, Maryland Legal Aid launched MLAGPT, a generative AI platform that supports civil legal services such as drafting client letters and brainstorming legal arguments.
"As Maryland Legal Aid expands the impact of its Pro Bono Unit statewide, MLAGPT will assist with identification of regional pro bono needs to allow for more meaningful outreach to both volunteer attorneys and our clients," said Kimberly Neal, director of the pro bono program at Maryland Legal Aid. "MLAGPT can quickly review data to help us recruit attorneys for needed practice areas, allowing MLA to better meet critical needs in all areas of Maryland."
Last year, two New York public interest groups, New York Legal Assistance Group and Justicia Lab, launched Reclamo AI, a tool that helps low-wage and immigrant workers document workplace violations.
"Unlike tools developed by outsider companies, community- and advocate-developed tools like Reclamo AI respond directly to the needs of workers while supporting, rather than displacing or ignoring, existing legal and community advocacy efforts," said Mel González, director of the New York Legal Assistance Group's Employment Law Project. "Reclamo AI has helped democratize the fight for workplace justice by empowering everyday workers and nonlawyer advocates to better understand their rights, research current or potential employers, and more easily take action through a streamlined process for filing wage theft claims."
In 2024, the Legal Aid Society of Middle Tennessee and the Cumberlands launched ExpungeMate, an AI-powered tool that handles expungement petitions. The organization did not respond to a request for comment.
Kristen Sonday, co-founder and CEO of the legal industry pro bono software company Paladin, said that there seems to be a growing emphasis among legal aid organizations on human-in-the-loop processes to improve accuracy and maintain appropriate oversight.
"Legal aid organizations tend to begin with a very specific client or operational problem rather than with the technology itself," Sonday said. "They are exploring AI to streamline intake, organize information, support staff and make reliable legal guidance easier to access."
How Law Firms Use AI in Pro Bono Work
Law firms are also reshaping pro bono projects with AI tools.
Denver-based Wheeler Trigg O'Donnell LLP, a litigation firm with about 120 lawyers, rolled out the legal AI tool Harvey across the firm, giving its attorneys access to it for both billable and pro bono matters.
While the firm uses AI for pro bono matters of all sizes, it's most useful for larger litigation cases where attorneys often need help to search through more documents and facts, according to Miles D. Orton, of counsel at Wheeler Trigg and member of the firm's pro bono committee.
Kevin D. Homiak, a partner at Wheeler Trigg and its pro bono chair, said the firm's approach to pro bono work is to take on litigation that affects many people who need help, such as people in prison. Given the complexity of those cases and the high volume of information, Wheeler Trigg has used AI to make sense of case data.
For example, the firm used AI to synthesize information quickly in a pending case pushing for safe temperatures in Texas prisons. AI can quickly comb through documents to spot evidence or facts.
"It's really helpful as a gut check to make sure that we're not missing anything," Homiak said.
Eighty percent of law firms in 2026 are using AI in pro bono cases, up from 67% the prior year, according to the Pro Bono Institute's June report. The most common uses at firms include legal research, case analysis, pro bono program communications, and document drafting and reviewing. These uses mirror the common tasks that law firms use AI for in billable work.
When attorneys working pro bono cases can complete work more efficiently with AI, they can be freed up to help new clients.
"AI doesn't just make the same work faster," said Gina M. DelChiaro, a partner and director of pro bono initiatives at Akerman LLP. "It lets us do work we previously lacked capacity to do."
Akerman is in the process of expanding its internally built intelligence platform to include a series of workflow agents, a type of software that acts autonomously, designed specifically for pro bono work. For example, Akerman wants one agent to prepare briefings for attorneys when a legal services organization refers matters to the firm.
Experts say that law firms should use AI to redesign and improve pro bono programs.
DelChiaro said firms should develop a governance framework that protects pro bono client data, use technology to communicate to attorneys about new pro bono opportunities and to reward attorneys who develop new skills for using AI in pro bono work.
Sonday said firms should use AI to improve intake, match lawyers with the right matters and work with legal aid partners to find unmet legal needs.
"AI should reduce the administrative friction that discourages participation and help firms direct their resources where they can have the greatest impact," Sonday said.
Homiak said that growing a firm's pro bono program with AI boils down to overcommunication with attorneys.
"Create opportunities for people to share ideas and show what they're doing and what uses they've unlocked on a periodic basis," Orton said. "You need repeated instances of being able to share ideas and pick ideas that might work for your particular cases."
Since law firms usually have more advanced AI systems than nonprofits, partnering with legal service organizations on pro bono projects is common. Tripp suggests that law firms go further by trying to convince AI vendors to make their tools more available to legal aid organizations.
DelChiaro said that law firms should co-develop AI pro bono tools with legal service organizations to see how those platforms can be most useful for them. For example, Akerman is working on a model that it hopes legal service organizations can use, too.
"You don't build AI tools for legal services organizations," DelChiaro said. "You build it with them."
Is AI Actually Making A Difference?
There's some debate about whether the influx of new AI tools used by law firms and nonprofits is actually improving access to justice.
Orton said that AI is empowering the firm's associates to do certain pro bono work independently without support from supervising attorneys, but it hasn't grown the firm's volume of pro bono cases yet. While AI might save some time on certain tasks, Orton said that AI's recommendations could hypothetically increase the time it takes for work to get done.
Other lawyers, like DelChiaro, said that AI can produce efficiency gains in tasks involving drafting and document review, which ultimately benefits pro bono clients.
"For clients who could never afford that technology on their own, much less attorneys' fees, the efficiency gains go directly to them," DelChiaro said.
For legal service organizations, it's too early to tell if AI is helping them serve more clients because there are many factors affecting access, including legal aid programs losing funding and staff, according to Tripp.
"Even if you save some time with AI, if you lose a bunch of staff, you're not going to serve more people," Tripp said.
Sonday said the benefit of AI in pro bono work isn't necessarily helping lawyers work faster but rather helping more people reach the right support in the first place.
"I love the idea of AI as legal navigators, helping people identify their options, find the right resources and connect with the appropriate organization or advocate when human assistance is needed," Sonday said.
Tripp said there's a real desire for legal nonprofits to build AI tools for self-represented litigants. In particular, Homiak said that incarcerated people who traditionally had to research the law through prison libraries could potentially turn to AI in to quickly find applicable civil rights laws.
"In theory, it should lead to less frivolous cases being filed, and when meritorious cases are filed [they should] be better developed and more thoroughly developed," Homiak said.
However advanced AI might be, it still comes up short. Homiak said that pro se litigants should take AI with a grain of salt, viewing it as a starting point for legal research instead of an end product. That's because AI can occasionally produce false information, a phenomenon referred to as a hallucination, which has occurred in several pro se filings.
Another glaring issue: AI tools currently can't negotiate with opposing counsel.
"High-quality [legal-based] AI assistance is certainly better than nothing," Tripp said.
–Additional Reporting by Kevin Penton and Cara Bayles. Edited by Daniela Porat and Orlando Lorenzo.
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