Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic At the height of witness examinations for the UK government’s Covid-19 inquiry in 2023, Norton Rose Fulbright was receiving thousands of documents a week, which it was handling as part of its pro bono work for charity Save the Children.The inquiry, launched in 2022, was examining decision-making in government during the pandemic, and the charity had wanted to look at how children’s rights had been considered in policy decisions.“Even with a fairly substantially staffed review team — which comprised paralegals, Norton Rose Fulbright lawyers and barristers — [there was] absolutely no way we could get through that amount of material and find the stuff that was actually relevant,” explains David Wilkins, e-disclosure technical lead at the firm.So the legal team used artificial intelligence to find and prioritise the most relevant documents from the inquiry for review, in just one example of how law firms are applying technology to increase the impact of their pro bono work and allow them to take on much larger projects.With permission from the inquiry, Norton Rose put the disclosed documents through its AI-assisted e-discovery platform, which analysed and sorted them according to recurring text patterns to first find where children were mentioned. For example, it grouped together documents that included words or phrases such as “playgrounds” or “school closures”.The platform then prioritised documents by analysing the team’s previous review efforts and working out which were likely to be more relevant for the paralegals to review, before passing them on to barristers. This meant the team “had the best chance of getting the most important evidence as quickly as possible”, Wilkins recalls.Andrew Barton, pro bono counsel for Europe, the Middle East and Asia at Norton Rose, says that, if Save the Children had tried to undertake this task itself, it “just wouldn’t have been feasible”, and the charity would need to have taken a different approach.At the inquiry, the recommendations made by children’s rights organisations were for all decision-making, not just for pandemic scenarios, notes Barton. As a result, the work done could affect children in Britain for generations to come.“The way we’re thinking about pro bono work is changing,” observes Elsha Butler, head of pro bono practice at law firm Linklaters in London. “Whether we can use legal tech or generative AI on a project is becoming one of our first reflexes . . . there are so many great projects that don’t get done because the scale is too big, and they involve a lot of manual summarisation.”A recent pro bono project at Linklaters is also using AI to support its aims. The government of Tanzania is working with non-profit organisation Lawyers Without Borders to address human trafficking. “A key part of the project is supporting the judiciary in deciding cases with appropriate sentences,” explains Butler.While there are legal precedents in Tanzania, says Lizzie Harker-Noor, a pro bono associate at the firm, there was scope to supplement these with insights from cases in other countries.The way we’re thinking about pro bono work is changing. Whether we can use . . . AI on a project is becoming one of our first reflexesLinklaters therefore turned to Laila, an in-house generative AI chatbot, to produce first drafts of case summaries. Lawyers reviewed the drafts and added specialist legal analysis. Through this, they built a library of case summaries.Using the technology accelerated the drafting process, which freed up time for lawyers to discuss feedback with Lawyers Without Borders — including its team on the ground in Tanzania, which could also suggest additional changes.This made the lawyers’ work more “dynamic”, notes Harker-Noor. “It really was a game-changer for how useful we [could ensure that] this final compendium was.”Some law firms are even developing new technology on a pro bono basis to improve access to justice.Hogan Lovells is working with legal tech company LawFairy to build a tool to help immigration caseworkers from voluntary and charitable organisations. Working alongside a parent or carer, the caseworkers determine whether a child is eligible for UK nationality.The criteria for eligibility are very complex. The platform helps applicants to navigate this by using AI to break down all the information required into simple questions.The tool, which is not yet publicly available, will tell the user whether the child is eligible, and why. It is designed to be “digestible for the person reading it”, explains Raj Panasar, chief executive and founder of LawFairy — although legal support is still needed.“It is important that you have a caseworker to work alongside an individual,” says Yasmin Waljee, international pro bono partner at Hogan Lovells. But the caseworker does not need to be a fully qualified immigration solicitor, she adds.Junior lawyers could potentially take on pro bono work, notes Waljee, as they can use the tool themselves and a lawyer with more expertise in the firm could check their work.This is one area in which technology could further develop pro bono work in future.The back end technology that underpins the Hogan Lovells/LawFairy platform is complex to create and Hannes Westermann, an assistant professor specialising in law and AI at Maastricht University, is looking at using generative AI to help build it.Westermann is also working on a system in which generative AI could help users to fill in text, argue a point, or describe a situation.But humans are still required. “I think it would be very powerful for helping people to fill out forms that could then be given to a pro bono lawyer to verify,” he says.Video: AI: a blessing or curse for humanity? | FT Tech
