David Udell, founder and executive director of the National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham Law School, is quoted in this Law360 article that breaks down what legal aid and access to justice leaders will be focused on as they await the potential impacts of a new presidential administration and the GOP-controlled Congress.
Nonattorney Legal Assistants
The introduction of “justice workers,” or nonattorney community service workers who can provide certain basic legal services, continued to be a major priority for many access to justice leaders in 2024. Despite lingering concerns over rules forbidding the unlicensed practice of law, many states have moved forward with programs to license these paraprofessionals.
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After the movement gained ground last year in places like Texas, Arizona and Washington state, it will be important to establish a more cohesive set of national guidelines for justice workers in 2025, said David Udell, executive director of the National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham University School of Law.
“The justice worker movement is the wave of the present, and efforts in many states are starting to bear fruit in terms of the numbers of people helped, in terms of demonstrating that the provision of service is safe, and in terms of winning hearts and minds,” Udell told Law360. “But substantial work still needs to be done to consider the place of attorney supervision and to better understand when matters should be referred to a lawyer.”
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Artificial Intelligence
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But Udell said there are still major concerns with the technology. In addition to the possibility of hallucinations and other errors in material generated by AI programs, he also warned that the technology could also be wielded by “police, landlords, creditors, and others whose interests often align against the vulnerable.”
In this vein, Udell said widespread use of AI has the potential to increase the demand for legal services even further, particularly in healthcare coverage disputes. An investigation by health publication STAT last year found that providers of Medicare Advantage plans, the taxpayer-funded alternative to traditional Medicare that covers more than 31 million people, frequently use predictive AI algorithms to pinpoint when they can cut off payment to a patient’s treatment, resulting in a flood of appeals claiming care was denied prematurely.
Read “Where Access To Justice Leaders Will Be Focused In 2025” on Law360.