Fortifying Families through Digital Access to Justice

The American civil justice system is in crisis. In 75% of the 20 million civil cases filed in state courts each year, at least one side lacks a lawyer. Many of these involve significant and even life-altering matters such as debt collection actions, evictions, and family law matters. Without a lawyer, many individuals and families cannot protect their rights, and millions of cases end in default judgment, an automatic loss when a party fails to take any action. 

The fundamental unfairness and social cost of this “justice gap” are acutely evident in eviction cases. Across the U.S., landlords file 3.5 million evictions each year.  In California, evictions displace 500,000 tenants annually, and in Los Angeles County alone, some 47,000 eviction cases were filed in 2023. In a large number of these cases, tenants fail to respond despite viable defenses that could delay or prevent displacement, with rippling consequences for housing and family stability, employment, and health that fall most heavily on vulnerable populations.   

Many factors contribute to the access-to-justice crisis, among them anemic legal aid funding, rising economic insecurity, and a frayed social safety net. But there is also mounting evidence that a core part of the problem is courts themselves. Court procedures were built by lawyers for lawyers, with inscrutable forms, byzantine filing systems, and needlessly complex procedures.

This project, a collaboration between Stanford Law School’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession and Legal Design Lab, and the Los Angeles Superior Court, the nation’s largest trial court, seeks to expand access to justice through evidence-based digital innovation and modernization designed to make court processes more fair and accessible for all court users. 

With Stage 1 funding, the research team developed a suite of informational and technological interventions designed to improve court systems and expand access to justice. Stage 2 funding will allow the team to rigorously evaluate those interventions in real-world court settings. An ongoing randomized controlled trial will assess the impact of a redesigned tenant-information system that combines paper notices, text-message reminders, free remote document access, and links to a free online answer-filing tool for tenants facing eviction lawsuits. 

The team is also piloting multiple AI tools, including a Default Assistant that augments—but does not replace—court staff attorneys by flagging legal errors before courts enter legally defective default judgments against overwhelmed defendants, and a Referral Routing Tool that gathers information from litigants and connects them to tailored sources of legal help, along with clear instructions for accessing them. In partnership with the American Arbitration Association, the team will design and evaluate a next-generation online dispute resolution platform tailored to the capacities of court users and fully integrated into court operations. Together, these project components will harness evidence-based digital innovation to make court processes fairer, more navigable, and more responsive to the people who use them.