Former LSC president Jim Sandman tells Everlaw Summit that chatbots give tenants plain-language steps while legal research tools begin with going to court.
Former Legal Services Corporation president Jim Sandman suggested at Everlaw Summit in San Francisco that the debate over whether AI helps or hinders access to justice may have the wrong framing, Above the Law reported. Instead of placing the bot as the alternative to legal help, he said, consider what it can provide that the legal system is historically bad at providing.
Sandman now teaches at the University of South Carolina's Joseph F. Rice School of Law. He challenges students to write the kind of prompt a normal person would type, as if they had never set foot in a law school, and run it through two frontier models and two legal industry research tools. One student typed: My apartment is freezing. What can I do?
ChatGPT and Gemini came back with plain-language numbered steps. The example involved Philadelphia, which requires landlords to provide heat from November through March; Above the Law notes that Sandman taught at Penn until this year and that the anecdote clearly dates from those days. The bot told the user to first tell the landlord, then send a demand letter with a draft citing the relevant regulations, then call the housing authority. Sandman said that way down the list is sue.
By contrast, the legal tools got the law right but were, in Sandman's words, terrible at communicating. They began from the premise that the tenant needs to go to court, and it was the first suggestion those tools offered.
Separately, Legal Futures reported on episode 28 of Osprey Approach's Empowering Law Firm Leaders podcast, in which Simon McCrum, author of The Perfect Partner, discusses what defines a successful law firm partner. The summary says trust is the foundation of leadership, and McCrum says the answer to what makes a good partner is a good human.
