Everyone's Wrong About AI and Access to Justice | Natalie Knowlton

Natalie Knowlton has spent 20 years working on what everyone in legal calls "access to justice", a phrase she calls "the buzzword to end all buzzwords." Now as the Associate Director of Legal Innovation at the Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford, she's focused on civil justice reform, family court, and the middle-market clients most lawyers forget are locked out too. During this conversation, Mike and Natalie discuss what AI can and can't do for access, why self-help isn't the fix everyone wants it to be, why the adversarial system was already broken before ChatGPT showed up, and what practitioners themselves would have to change for anything to actually improve. 📌 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗱𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀𝗹𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿: Get the latest news, trends, and tactics in legal AI—straight to your inbox. ➞ join free: https://www.spellbook.legal/newsletter 💎 𝗦𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗯𝗼𝗼𝗸: Draft and review contracts 10x faster ➞ try it free: https://www.spellbook.legal 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆's 𝗴𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalieanneknowlton/ Bluesky/X: natalalleycat 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗠𝗶𝗸𝗲 𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗮𝗻: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikewhelanjr/ 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀: 0:00 - Introduction 0:37 - Meet Natalie Knowlton 1:07 - What "access to justice" actually means 6:07 - Self-help and its limits 7:23 - Why pro se filings are flooding the courts 9:37 - The three functions of lawyers and where AI fit 10:46 - AI in the adversarial system 13:13 - The emotional good of being seen and heard 14:16 - The Nippon Life / OpenAI case 15:37 - Law as a credence good problem 16:41 - Small legal AI vs. big general AI on accountability 18:30 - Regulation and the trust vs. capability question 20:03 - What practitioners need to do next 22:11 - Bottlenecks surfacing older problems 22:33 - Connect with Natalie