Seven Organizations Increase Access to Justice with Half-a-Million Automated Consultations

Every year, millions of people face legal problems without speaking to a lawyer, even for urgent matters involving housing, safety, child custody, income, debt, healthcare, employment, and civil rights. The justice system is under-resourced, and the cost of legal help is out of reach for many. This growing divide between legal need and available support is known as the justice gap.

The Justice gap is wide and growing

In the U.S., only 14% of people receive help for their legal issues. That leaves 86% navigating complex legal systems alone, often with tragic consequences. And at the same time, public funding for essential legal services is shrinking, which is creating an even greater need for legal assistance.

But there’s hope: Front-line lawyers are leveraging their skills with technology

Some nonprofit legal-service providers and government entities, which see the tragic consequences of the justice gap every day, are using no-code development tools to produce software applications that enable their organizations to provide more legal services to more people. 

Listed below are seven organizations that are providing automated legal solutions built on the Neota Logic® development platform, through Neota Law School education programs:

• Pro Bono Net (PBN) is a nonprofit that supports other nonprofits that help vulnerable people get legal assistance. With support from the US Department of Justice, PBN offers multiple versions of its Elder Law Risk Detector, which enables social workers to quickly detect financial, legal, and physical risks faced by home-bound elderly people. More than 151,000 sessions have been run with this tool, which has uncovered many heartbreaking cases of elder risk and abuse. 
  
  
• California Civil Rights Department (CRD) provides Californians with the CRD Interactive Guides with the motto “Through understanding, justice.” Each guide is an app that gives the user narrowly tailored guidance on the user’s particular housing or employment situation, which can involve many variables. Sessions completed with the guides total more than 142,000.

• Texas Legal Services Center (TLSC) is a nonprofit law firm that offers the Texas Fresh Start Advisor, which gives tailored guidance on the complex subject of criminal-record clearing and sealing. The tool gets heavy use 24/7 and has been run more than 138,000 times to date.
  
  
• Virginia Legal Aid Society (VLAS) offers its Eligibility Advisor & Intake Tool to help people quickly learn whether they are eligible for VLAS services and begin the intake process if eligible. The tool has conducted more than 54,000 personalized sessions and VLAS estimates that the tool has saved VLAS 18,000 hours of staff time, which has been redirected to help VLAS clients.
  
  
• Family Legal Care (FLC) is a nonprofit that supports people involved in New York family law cases. FLC has created the New York Family Law Navigator, which provides tailored answers on a wide variety of family law topics. The system is based on more than 600 rules defined by the FLC family law experts and has conducted more than 8,100 personalized consultations with New Yorkers and FLC helpline staff. 
  
  
• South Carolina Access to Justice Commission (SCATJ) offers the South Carolina Legal Resource Finder, which enables users to quickly learn which legal service providers and self-help materials are best for an individual. The tool is used by legal professionals and members of the public and has provided more than 6,500 automated consultations. 
  
  
• Atlanta Legal Aid Society (ALAS) has created its Estate Planning Document Drafting Tool, which enables ALAS staff and volunteers to quickly draft estate planning documents for low-income people. To date, the tool has been run more than 2,100 times and produced approximately 4,000 tailored estate-planning documents. 
  

Congratulations to our law school partners, whose student work serves people long after graduation

Neota is proud to have been part of the very first law school legal app development courses, which were created by the prescient New York Law School and Georgetown University Law Center long before the current legal tech revolution. Today, we’re honored to work with many forward-thinking law schools that integrate app development into their curriculum. 

The law schools that partnered with Neota to create the long-running applications described above are global leaders in legal tech education: Brooklyn Law School, Cornell Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, and UC Irvine School of Law. Students and faculty at these innovative schools worked passionately to leverage their skills and knowledge through the legal apps, and now, long after the students who worked on the apps have graduated, their work increases access to justice daily.

Just some of the many solutions by passionate, next-generation professionals

The justice solutions described above have conducted more than 502,000 personalized guidance sessions with individuals in need, and these solutions are just a few of the many legal apps that law students have built using the Neota platform. And what’s more, over the last few years, we’ve seen a rise in interest among law students for creating tech-based solutions like these. Today’s law students understand technology and are eager to leverage it to foster justice in a world that seems increasingly unjust to many.

An offer to law firms and legal departments that want to do pro bono work at Internet scale:

When leveraged by caring, knowledgeable legal experts, technology can clearly provide more legal support to a greater number of people, which is needed now more than ever. If your law firm or legal department is interested in undertaking pro bono work at scale, please contact us at Neota Logic to discuss “Neota Impact” and explore how we can partner with you to create legal applications that enhance access to justice.

Want to learn more? Access the full Neota Network 2025 live session on “Leveraging Technology for Social Justice.”