Opening Doors with AI: How Free Law Project and the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse Are Reimagining Legal Research
At Free Law Project, we believe the law belongs to everyone. But for too long, the information needed to understand and use the law—especially in civil rights litigation—has been locked behind paywalls, scattered across jurisdictions, or buried in technical complexity.
That’s why we teamed up with the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse on an exploratory grant from Arnold Ventures: to see how artificial intelligence could help unlock these barriers, making court documents more accessible and legal research more open and accurate.
What We Learned
This six-month project gave us the opportunity to experiment boldly. Together, we researched and tested AI based approaches and tools to:
- Classify legal documents into categories like motions, orders, or opinions.
- Summarize filings and entire cases, turning dense legal text into plain-English explanations.
- Generate structured metadata to make cases easier to track and analyze.
- Trace the path of a legal case as it moves through the court system
- Enable semantic search, allowing users to type questions in everyday language and find relevant cases.
- Build the foundation of an open-source citator, so researchers and advocates can see when cases are overturned, affirmed, or otherwise impacted by later decisions.
These prototypes showed us not only what’s possible, but what’s practical. By testing real AI models on real data, we proved that tools like these can responsibly scale to improve the infrastructure of justice.
What’s Next
The best part? This wasn’t the end—it was the beginning. FLP and the Clearinghouse are continuing to work side by side to finalize these tools and bring them into everyday use. This work is already fueling progress on our open-source citator, powering development of semantic search on CourtListener, and sparking the creation of new features on the horizon.
Why It Matters
Every advance we make opens doors. For civil rights advocates, it means easier access to models and precedents and better tools to fight for change. For journalists, it means uncovering patterns and holding institutions accountable. For researchers, it means richer, more timely data. And for the public, it means a legal system that is less intimidating, more transparent, and more accessible.
The law is a public resource—and thanks to this collaboration, we are one step closer to making sure it’s available to all. And thank you to Arnold Ventures for your support of this exploratory project.
