Legal Help Commons

What the Commons provides

Build safe, quality legal help AI together

A Shared Agenda of What to Build

The wishlist

Legal aid and court teams are identifying the technical solutions they most need to increase their impact. The Commons is developing these as functional agendas: clear, specific descriptions of what a system should do, what tasks it should handle, and what outcomes it should produce for organizations and the people they serve. This is the kind of clear wishlist that can motivate great, aligned technical development.

See the functional agendas →

Testable Standards for Quality and Safety

The goalposts

For each workflow, the Commons is developing conformance standards that define what a technical solution should be able to do in order to meet quality, safety, and sustainability requirements. These standards set the goalposts so builders are aiming at the right targets, public money is being spent wisely, and legal aid teams and their evaluators can tell whether a technology is actually living up to the hype.

See the conformance standards →

Blueprints, Guides, Classes, and Case Studies

The how-to

For each workflow, the Commons is developing reference architectures, implementation playbooks, interactive courses, and case studies drawn from real implementations. These are hands-on resources that an internal team or a vendor can follow to borrow from what other teams have already figured out about building effective, safe, and sustainable AI-powered legal help solutions.

Browse the workflows →

What the Commons Provides

What You'll Find in the Commons

Each workflow in the Commons produces a package of shared assets. Here is what goes into each package, organized by the three things the field needs.

What to build The wishlist

Functional Agendas

A checklist of every capability a system should have, organized by what happens during the workflow. Use it to scope a build, write an RFP, or evaluate a proposal.

Browse agendas →

Shared Tools Agenda

The reusable components every workflow needs: issue classifiers, document readers, PII maskers, jurisdiction matchers. An open agenda of what to build once and share.

View the tools →

Knowledge Base Preparation

Standards and guides for structuring your legal help content (articles, FAQs, service directories, forms) so AI tools can use it reliably across jurisdictions.

Read the standard →

How good it needs to be The goalposts

Conformance Standards

The quality bar a system must clear: performance, usability, safety, onboarding, and sustainability. Each gate has specific pass/fail criteria for each workflow.

Browse standards →

Test Suites

Banks of realistic scenarios you run through a system to see how it performs. Each scenario includes the situation, the correct answer, and what good and bad look like.

Evaluation Protocols

Methods for measuring whether an AI tool is accurate, safe, jurisdiction-correct, and useful. Designed so an independent evaluator can run them without the builder present.

How to build it The how-to

Reference Architectures

Technical blueprints showing how a system's components fit together: data flows, integration points, model selection, and the design decisions that matter most.

Implementation Playbooks

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

Courses and Masterclasses

Interactive classes built around the the practical ways the new systems work, and how to manage them. Good for strategic leaders who are already familiar with the basics of AI, and now thinking through how to deploy AI-powered solutions in specific areas.

Browse courses →

Case Studies

What teams chose, why they chose it, what surprised them, and what they would do differently. Designed so the next team does not start from scratch.

Why together

Why We Should Build Legal Help Tech Together

When the field builds together, effort compounds instead of scattering, and good work travels from one team to the next.

Build it once

Build a tool once and the whole field can use it, instead of every organization solving the same OCR, classification, and accuracy problems alone.

A shared bar for quality

Shared benchmarks let any team check whether a legal AI tool gives accurate, safe, jurisdiction-correct answers, so the field builds with instruments instead of in the dark.

Lessons that travel

When a team in Illinois learns that a prompt strategy fails for debt collection intake, that lesson reaches the team in Texas facing the same thing.

A level playing field

Shared infrastructure lets a small or rural office stand up capable tools, not only the well-resourced states and organizations.

How the Commons works

From agenda to impact and back again

The Commons runs a continuous cycle. Practitioners and community members set the agenda of what tech solutions are needed. The Commons packages the specs -- issuing a call with the specific functions and standards to meet. Builders and organizations build from them. Teams share what they learn, including their results, decisions, setups, and innovations. The whole field gets stronger.