Tech Plays An Indispensable Role In Addressing Legal Deserts

Buck Lewis

The problem of legal deserts — defined by the American Bar Association as regions with fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 people — is too big to solve through traditional methods alone. Programs that encourage lawyers to live and work in underserved areas can help, but technology can do something those approaches cannot: overcome barriers of time and space and make it easier for lawyers to help.

I've seen how tech can help us tackle these important issues firsthand.

Back in 2008, former Tennessee Chief Justice Janice Holder and I were returning from an Equal Access to Justice public hearing in a rural area. The hearing was in a rural area because one of our court's concerns was how the court and the state bar could help in legal deserts. At the time, I noticed that most attendees were on these new devices called BlackBerries.

I told Justice Holder I was going to talk to our firm's tech staff to find out if that nascent technology could help the cause. That was the seed of the idea for Free Legal Answers.

During the 2009-10 period, the Tennessee Alliance for Legal Services and Baker Donelson worked on a web-based platform that would handle eligibility and registration, qualify volunteer attorneys, and allow questions and answers to be posted in a confidential web environment. Basically, we wanted an online legal clinic. We launched just after the serious floods in Nashville in 2010.[1]

What Providing Virtual Advice Has Taught Us

Free Legal Answers is now active in 42 states and territories, with 17,956 volunteers registered since its launch.[2]

In its 15 years of operation, we have learned that a lawyer in Texas could be very helpful to a client in Hawaii in a time of disaster, and vice versa, with the right court orders in place.[3]

We learned not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

We learned that what we might think of as a basic small piece of legal information — like the notice requirement for an eviction — can often be all the client needs to make it through a difficult time.

We learned that low-income clients have as much or more stress and demands on their time as lawyers.

We learned that there were lots of lawyers who would help if we just made it easier for them to do it via an online portal, and we learned that law students make great collaborators if engaged correctly.

We are still learning.[4]

Continually Improving the Tech

We formed a strategic partnership with Stanford University, which examined the data for us and gave us insight into what types of questions are posted at certain times and days and certain seasons of the year.[5]

This not only helps with fundraising, but it can also help bar leaders and access to justice organizations to train volunteers and launch initiatives at the right times in the right places.

If the issue is unusual, it can be presented efficiently to many volunteers online. It allows us to prioritize the situations that are more time sensitive.

For example, a client in a desert will not typically know if there is a nearby Legal Services Corp. office, or a clinic on the town square, or a nearby modest means program through a local bar. So if a court date is set, for example, in a custody matter or an eviction, the Free Legal Answers volunteer can help the client find a traditional pro bono lawyer.

And, our terrific code writer, Patrick Zanone, just rewrote the entire code to add some important features like artificial intelligence compatibility, to try to keep us on the cutting edge in the next decade.

For example, I have been studying and pondering on the use of AI to provide quick help to clients, but only in the form of legal information, not legal advice. If it can get better and better, while proactively addressing crucial safety concerns,[6] providing legal information could be a game changer in the future. But our judicial leadership must get comfortable with it.

Collaboration with state partners proves key to programs like this. The ABA/state bar collaborative structure behind Free Legal Answers is designed to get the best of both worlds. Having the same website, code and curators is clearly preferable to trying to launch a site in every state.

On the other hand, state and local bars are generally better at recruiting volunteers and understanding where awareness efforts should be directed. There is a network of state administrators, and they can and do share opportunities and issues with each other all the time.

Often, of course, Free Legal Answers is the only resource available to the client. They are the legal first responders in a disaster response situation or an evictions crisis, for example.

Current Limits of Tech

Technology does have its limits. Some situations simply call for a human being to meet with the client and to accompany the client to court.[7]

I would like to see many more courts allow much more to be done by videoconference — most of the things that don't involve evaluating witnesses or jurors.[8]

Since many court appearances now required are not adversarial, and since the vast majority of court arguments do not involve the credibility of witnesses, this would save huge amounts of time and money, just as it does now in many matters in our federal courts.

All our courts need to be quicker to accept and utilize new technology. When our court systems wrestled with COVID-19, they learned what was possible just overcoming the barrier of space, if not time. We have to see legal deserts with the same urgency and use every tech tool at our disposal.

Using Tech to Drive Change in Legal Deserts

This brings me to the issue of scope and limited resources. These resources are limited despite many, many favorable rule changes. These changes include Arizona's elimination of key restrictions on the law firm ownership sandbox, and Utah's new service models, both in 2020.[9] They come despite 500,000 families getting help on Free Legal Answers, and despite work done by Legal Services Corp., bars, firms, law schools and legal departments.

We shouldn't only be taking small, safe steps like in-person clinics and initiatives that try to place lawyers in deserts. They help people, so that is terrific. Some of them, as discussed, work pretty well. But the numbers look prohibitively large to solve the problem with the traditional methods.

The situation calls for big, bold measures. Arguably, it calls for us to help, in accordance with existing rules, many clients at a time. And, as we have learned over and over again, assistance more than a few days later may be of lesser value. It's a tough hill to climb, but my work in this cause has been the most fulfilling of my life.

The traditional tools for addressing legal deserts are certainly better than letting them go untended, but if we don't have the money, political capital, focus or staff to do both cutting-edge technology and traditional programs, then we have some difficult decisions to make about how to allocate resources.[10]

Equal access to justice issues often present the productivity paradox, or what some trial lawyers call the small-case syndrome. Our brains are programmed to prefer the smaller, more easily completed tasks. We like to save the big, complicated problem-solving for later.

Imagine a world in which we could deliver useful legal information within seconds to any client in a legal desert.[11] Imagine a world in which pro bono lawyers could handle matters in their offices instead of driving half an hour each way for matters that could easily be handled remotely. Imagine a world in which we have human-free mediations that resolve disputes.

When I look into the future, the justice gap numbers are so compelling that we must use new technologies or the justice gap will likely grow and grow. I wish I could, but I cannot persuade myself that we can recruit ourselves out of these challenges.

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George T. "Buck" Lewis is a shareholder and the chair of the appellate group at Baker Donelson Bearman Caldwell & Berkowitz PC. He is also the founder of ABA Free Legal Answers.

The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer, its clients, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

[1] https://justicegap.lsc.gov/.

[2] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/probono_public_service/abafree/rpts/2026/august-2026.pdf.

[3] https://lsc-live.app.box.com/s/mv52lja5n42j9auu0pywl07ozkzgvm6d.

[4] Syracuse University, School of Information Studies, "What Is the Digital Divide? Meaning, Causes, & Impact", January 29, 2026.

[5] https://law.stanford.edu/publications/legal-innovation-after-reform-five-years-of-data-on-regulatory-change-3.

[6] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgwy1k42w4o.

[7] https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/news/2020/07/potlp2020.pdf.

[8] https://alabamareflector.com/2026/08/17/rural-impoverished-areas-of-alabama-lack-access-to-attorneys/.

[9] See, ABA Profile of the Legal Profession: Legal Deserts and Law School Debt (2020).

[10] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7VUygKfhQw.

[11] Mapping Legal Deserts, Harvard Law School, Center on the Legal Profession, August 2025.

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