In keeping with the organization's goal to use the tool to help fill a justice gap, it would be called Bailey B. and appear as a robot bee adorned with a mask and scales to mimic Lady Justice. The name is meant to flow with Bay Area Legal Services', and the B stands for bot, all the while embracing the essence of a hardworking insect.
"It is supposed to be fair. That's why she has the blindfold on because we're not supposed to see your demographic. We're supposed to see your facts. We're supposed to see the law and apply it fairly," said Hill, the organization's legal content manager.
Bay Area Legal Services recently launched Bailey B. as a free, AI legal assistant meant to help residents navigate landlord-tenant issues under Florida law. The firm provides free civil legal services to low-income residents in the Tampa Bay area.
At a time when demand for legal aid is outpacing the resources of Bay Area Legal Services and similar organizations, Bailey B. is meant to help bridge that justice gap when it comes to housing issues and assist more people than the firm is currently able to serve.
"When people are using Bailey B., they are probably in a sense of urgency. They're scared, they are concerned. These are serious issues. So I wanted the chatbot to be something that has longevity as far as what it represents," Hill said.
To use the bot, users can go to the organization's website and click on the Bailey B. logo. Users can ask it questions or use prompt questions it suggests. The bot then can ask any relevant follow-up questions that may be needed to form better answers.
Bailey B. is not an attorney, so it cannot provide legal advice, Hill said. Instead it's a "smart little assistant" that can give out resources and road maps in the blink of an eye, she said.
The majority of clients seeking help from Bay Area Legal Services are doing so for housing issues, Hill said. Many of those issues began after the COVID-19 pandemic and have continued on in the years since, she said.
The tool was launched in an effort to help those who can't afford attorneys with matters such as giving notice of intent to vacate, requesting repairs and recovering security deposits.
"I want to demystify the law when it comes to these practical issues and how people are able to just live and enjoy their everyday life. And saying that, I do want to also comment on the nuance between legal information and legal advice, because this is something that a lot of attorneys — and rightfully so — are concerned with," Hill said.
Bay Area Legal Services partnered with justice tech company LawDroid to develop the tool. David Gray, the company's director of business and strategy, joined recently after a tenure at Bay Area Legal Services.
"This goes above and beyond just providing text on a page of what to do. This gives them actionable solutions. And that's really what we're all about, filling that access to justice gap," he said.
Bailey B. was developed by first creating a knowledge base that it can pull from. It was written in plain language, mostly at a sixth-grade level, to ensure clients can understand the material, Gray said.
The developers even had experienced housing attorneys try to trick the bot to see how it answers questions, and even had Bay Area Legal Services clients test it out and give feedback, he said.
"This is a human taking their knowledge and experience of the law and rewriting in a way that can be easily communicated to others. So that's all done by human which is very important, probably one of the most important aspects," Gray said.
For Hill, she wanted to avoid the tool feeling like a library, where someone simply requests books on eviction and has to sort through them to find the information they need.
"I wanted it to be something that is extremely intuitive," he said. "So the back end of that requires an intense amount of research and writing. It's just like collecting as much data as possible. We hosted think tanks with the various teams. You have an entire team of attorneys that are all collaborating together to ensure that all the sub topics within a certain content area are covered, and that's based on the need that we see with our user data from people calling us or the people that have applied for our services."
The tool was built with a hierarchy of information, with any controlling law or statutes being considered first before it dives into explaining the law and procedure.
For example, Hill said Bailey B. counts days according to when a legal statute is in effect, which may be different from how non-attorneys count days in the real world.
"Bailey B. is also cognizant of those nuances in the law that can mean you losing your home or staying in it based on you being able to count three days correctly according to how the judicial system counts it. So those are just some small, really important things that are meaningful and provide real support to people," he said.
In the future, Gray said the bot hopefully will expand into other knowledge areas, cover more housing-related topics, perform more document automation assistance, and even operate in other languages, particularly Spanish.
"With the advancements that AI offers, this was a unique opportunity for us to pursue so that we can continue to help those people that we can't serve, whether it's [because of a] lack of resources, [or] sometimes ... they don't know they have a legal issue," Gray said.
--Editing by Adam LoBelia.
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