Legal Services Corporation

Um, and then we also had Angela Tripp from a national organization.

She was at, um, the Legal Services Corporation, but now she's at the National Center for State Courts, and they all kind-- Angela, in the beginning, provided sort of this baseline of information.

What is AI? What should you know about it? It's a prediction model, not, like, something that you can rely on.

It's not a search engine.

So we're part-- We went, for example, we went to a conference that Stanford University put on last year.

It was on AI and access to justice, but it was a national summit, and it brought together people from all the states.

And there is-- So it's like those kinds of national organizations, the Legal Services Corporation, and some national organizations who work in this space that are saying that they want to-- they are attempting to communicate with these larger sort of LLM organizations to say it shouldn't be-- One, it shouldn't be a state-by-state solution.

Like this, our issues are sort of nationwide.

And a great example of that, frankly, is our ABA Day, where we lobby in Washington for various issues with members of Congress.

One we always lobby in support of is Legal Services Corporation.

And there have been years when Congress was, there was a huge effort to zero out the dollars for legal services.

We literally, with 400 people who came from every state, would go to our various members of our congressional delegations with the same message and the same information.

So what came was the Criminal Justice Act of 1964, which created the federal system for appointing and compensating defense counsel for indigent defendants in federal court, the origin of today's federal public defender offices and CJA panel attorneys.

In 1974 came the Legal Services Corporation Act, which expanded funded legal aid more broadly, though its main focus was civil legal aid rather than criminal defense specifically.

States responded by building out public defender offices, county by county, a patchwork system that even today is chronically underfunded relative to prosecutors' offices.

attention that's part of ongoing debates about the right to counsel in practice versus on paper.

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