Stanford Legal Design Lab

Legal Help Commons

Shared infrastructure for the access to justice sector — so legal aid organizations, courts, and technology partners can build better AI together, instead of reinventing the wheel alone.

Three Pillars of Shared Infrastructure

The Legal Help Commons organizes shared resources around three complementary pillars — discovery, implementation, and community.

Pillar 1

JusticeBench

Understand the space

An R&D discovery platform cataloging AI projects, a formal task taxonomy, datasets, benchmarks, guides, and orientation resources for anyone entering the justice AI landscape.

Visit JusticeBench →
Pillar 2

Implementation Library

Build the thing

Reference architectures, implementation playbooks, proven code and classifiers, RFP templates, cost models, evaluation rubrics, API connections, and design pattern libraries.

See what's inside →
Pillar 3

Cohorts & Community

Build together

Working groups around specific workflows, public interest tech courses and groups, justice professional networks, and peer-learning programs connecting those building, stewarding, evaluating, and scaling new solutions.

Join a Working Group →

What You'll Find in the Commons

Resources to help your team go from "what should we build?" to a deployed, evaluated, and maintained AI tool — without starting from zero.

Reference Architectures

Technical blueprints for specific workflows — technology stacks, data flows, integration points, prompt strategies, and decision logic.

Implementation Playbooks

Step-by-step guides covering planning, staffing, procurement, data prep, testing, launch, and maintenance for specific AI workflows.

Evaluation Rubrics

Standardized protocols for measuring accuracy, jurisdiction sensitivity, equity, safety, and ongoing performance of justice AI tools.

Proven Tools & Code

Reusable classifiers, prompt libraries, data pipelines, and integration components that organizations can adopt or adapt.

RFP Templates & Cost Models

Procurement language, budget frameworks, and staffing models so organizations can plan and fund AI projects realistically.

Design Patterns

Tested UI/UX patterns for common justice AI interactions — intake flows, document explanation, multi-step navigation, and more.

Why Shared Infrastructure Matters

Without coordination, the justice sector's AI investments fragment rather than compound.

Duplicated Effort

Dozens of organizations are building overlapping AI tools in parallel — each solving the same OCR, classification, and accuracy problems from scratch.

No Shared Quality Standards

There are no widely adopted benchmarks for whether a legal AI tool gives accurate, safe, jurisdiction-correct answers. The field is flying without instruments.

Wasted Learning

When a team in Illinois discovers that a certain prompt strategy fails for debt collection intake, that lesson doesn't travel to the team in Texas facing the same problem.

Uneven Access

Well-resourced states and organizations build capable tools. Others can't keep up. Shared infrastructure levels the playing field.

Stay Connected

The Legal Help Commons is in active development. Be in touch to share your work with us or discuss new resources, working group opportunities, and platform launches.