When it comes to unmet need, pro bono work doesn’t even come close to replacing a generation of legal aid cuts. But technology, including AI, is helping to magnify its impact, reports Catherine Baksi
The low down
The removal of most civil legal aid in 2013 put legal advice beyond the reach of vulnerable clients. No one insists that pro bono can come close to filling the void. But its significance is growing. More lawyers than ever before are giving more of their time for free. Now technology can amplify their efforts, with AI completing tasks at a speed and cost that makes it viable to take on more cases. Yet, as in other areas of life, tech is also creating more tasks for people, which in the pro bono world includes clients arriving with a wrongheaded assessment of their cases.
Financial pressures arising from the cost-of-living crisis and growing levels of debt have been mirrored by a surge in the need for legal advice. That applies particularly to issues concerning housing, welfare benefits, employment, immigration and family matters.
At the same time, as a consequence of cuts to civil legal aid, access to publicly funded legal advice continues to fall.
Recent analysis by the Law Society found that 85% of people lack a local welfare benefits legal aid provider, 63% lack an immigration and asylum provider, and 44% lack a housing legal aid provider within their local authority area.
Stepping up
As the demand for free advice increases, so does the number of lawyers offering their services for free and the number of hours of pro bono work that they provide.
The Thomson Reuters Foundation TrustLaw Index of Pro Bono, which maps the scale and trends of pro bono work around the world, collected data from over 209 firms representing lawyers in 123 jurisdictions. It shows that in 2024 lawyers globally donated 3.5 millions hours of their time assisting charities, non-profits, social enterprises and individuals free of charge.
The firms that reported in England and Wales recorded a total of 505,925 hours of pro bono work, with lawyers completing an average of 23.6 hours – up by just over 10% in the 10 years since the index launched in 2014.
This year’s third annual Pro Bono Recognition List, meanwhile, included a record 5,500 lawyers across England and Wales – up from 4,780 last year and a rise of nearly 50% since its launch in 2024.
Supported by lady chief justice Baroness Carr, the List recognises lawyers who have given 25 hours or more pro bono legal assistance over the last year. This year’s features 4,630 solicitors and 700 barristers, together with 136 legal executives and 47 registered foreign/European lawyers.
Acknowledging the work, Carr said: ‘The judiciary sees first-hand how pro bono advice and representation helps those who might not otherwise receive legal assistance.’
As demand grows, pro bono legal advice clinics run by LawWorks, the solicitors’ pro bono charity, continue to play a vital role in helping the public understand their rights and access early legal support. Last year, the number of clinics around the country rose from 313 to 317.
The latest report from the LawWorks Clinics Network highlights growing need identified by 283 clinics who contributed, representing 89% of the total.
In 2025, with the aid of 15,674 volunteers, the clinics responded to 106,391 enquiries – up from just over 90,000 the previous year. Despite the growing pressure, they supported 81,743 people through legal advice, information and referrals, an increase of almost 20,000 compared with 2024.
Lifting the limit
However, there are only so many hours work that they can do, which limits the number of people who can be helped, especially as cases become increasingly complex or more document- or data-heavy.
Just as artificial intelligence (AI) is already transforming the way that paid legal work is done, it is also playing a role in helping lawyers doing unpaid cases.
Margarita-Nikki Michael, a solicitor-advocate and consultant at Linklaters, says: ‘AI has the potential to make pro bono work far more scalable, particularly by reducing the amount of lawyer time absorbed by the first stages of a matter.’
It can help with early case analysis, organising large volumes of documents, producing chronologies, identifying the relevant legal issues and preparing first drafts of correspondence or pleadings.
These are the tasks which often make a relatively modest pro bono matter disproportionately expensive for a firm or chambers to take on, she notes: ‘A solicitor who might previously have had capacity to take on one pro bono case could potentially supervise several matters where AI has done much of the initial information gathering, document review and drafting.’
There is also considerable scope, Michael argues, for AI-assisted tools to help litigants understand what information they need to provide and to present it coherently before a lawyer becomes involved.
‘Used responsibly, AI has the potential to transform the reach and impact of pro bono work,’ suggests Robert Allen, a partner at Simmons & Simmons. AI, he adds, has already changed the way pro bono is coordinated within his firm, allowing more opportunities for lawyers to get involved.
‘The exciting part,’ Allen says, ‘is not simply doing the same work faster. It’s the possibility of providing meaningful legal assistance to far more people and pro bono clients than we can today.’
'AI has the potential to make pro bono work far more scalable'
Margarita-Nikki Michael, Linklaters
The Access to Justice Foundation has compiled a list of 50 justice-tech tools that have been developed to help reduce legal need, resolve issues and drive efficiencies in frontline free legal advice organisations. The foundation’s website notes: ‘One tool developer estimated that by rolling out their solution across frontline organisations the free legal advice sector could help 100,000 extra people a year… At a time when demand for free legal advice services continues to outstrip the resources available to help, these solutions are not something we can afford to ignore if we’re serious about ensuring more people get access to justice.’
Harvey is a platform founded in 2022 by former O’Melveny & Myers associate Winston Weinberg and Gabriel Pereyra, a former AI research scientist at Google DeepMind and machine learning engineer at Meta. Named after the character Harvey Specter from the legal drama Suits, the business announced this month that it is launching a dedicated pro bono programme in the UK, Australia and the US.
Christopher Hook, global head of responsible business at Harvey, tells the Gazette: ‘If AI is going to make a meaningful difference to improving access to justice, it has to work for the lawyers and organisations dealing with these cases every day.’
'Used responsibly, AI has the potential to transform the reach and impact of pro bono work'
Robert Allen, Simmons & Simmons
Used well, he insists, AI ‘can help them take on a higher volume of cases, ultimately supporting more people with complex needs, with the same level of accuracy and output’.
That is what the company is aiming to do. Working with a group of law firm customers, it is exploring how responsibly deployed AI can expand the capacity of pro bono teams and improve access to justice.
Initial work, Hook explains, will focus on three areas ‘building custom AI agents for high-volume pro bono work such as housing support, veterans’ services and social welfare claims; developing templates and knowledge resources that can be used across the legal sector; and creating repeatable workflows for common tasks’.
Hook adds: ‘Together, these tools can reduce the time lawyers spend on routine and repetitive tasks, enabling them instead to focus on providing their expertise on supporting those who need it most.’
'If AI is going to make a meaningful difference to improving access to justice, it has to work for the lawyers and organisations dealing with these cases every day'
Christopher Hook, Harvey
As part of the pilot, the company will ‘measure where those tools have the greatest impact on capacity and outcomes, use those learnings to improve the programme and, ultimately, scale what works to support more pro bono teams and frontline legal organisations’.
In addition, a targeted cohort of frontline legal organisations will receive free access to Harvey through an in-depth pilot later this year.
Fairy land
LawFairy is another potential game-changer. In February, the law firm and technology company was authorised by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. ‘We are the only tech-only law firm in the world that is regulated,’ says its founder, former City solicitor Raj Panasar.
Unlike AI, which produces ‘probabilistic’ outputs, Panasar explains that LawFairy is built around a ‘fully deterministic legal model’ that uses ‘encoded rules’ to reach structured decisions.
‘If you put the same input in, you get the same output as a result,’ says the former Cleary Gottlieb and Hogan Lovells Cadwalader partner. That means ‘unlike other models, ours does not need a human to review the output’.
The firm is currently geared to deal with immigration law issues and, says its founder: ‘I learned immigration law so that I could code the rules myself.’ He adds that the firm has also worked with top lawyers to improve the platform.
It was, Panasar says, born out of an idea of Yasmin Waljee, international pro bono partner at Hogan Lovells Cadwalader, who was looking for ways to help a charity supporting the roughly 215,000 undocumented children in the UK who are potentially eligible for British nationality.
'We are seeing the exponential rise of use of legal technology in commercial environments, but many of these developments are not available for the marginalised communities'
Yasmin Waljee, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader
Working with LawFairy and the Central England Law Centre’s Kids in Need of Defence initiative, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader this year launched the legal intelligence system for undocumented children.
The technology facilitates pro bono legal advisers to evaluate a child’s pathways for nationality and, as a result, says Waljee, ‘the time taken to evaluate options for nationality has been reduced by 50%’.
She notes: ‘We are seeing the exponential rise of use of legal technology in commercial environments, but many of these developments are not available for marginalised communities.’
More widely, LawFairy makes its platform and technology available to a range of other legal clinics and law centres. It also offers lawyers free access to its legal technology platform for the duration of individual-referred pro bono cases: helping them assess clients’ eligibility across 70 UK visa, settlement and nationality routes; identify available pathways and next steps; and reduce the time spent on initial assessments so they can focus on advising and supporting clients.
Working alongside in-house pro bono lawyers from Bank of America and a network of African law firms, Hogan Lovells Cadwalader has a three-year partnership with the Centre for Digital Language Inclusion – an initiative of the firm’s social enterprise clients.
Waljee explains that the centre collects datasets of non-standard speech to build automatic speech recognition models, enabling disabled people with communication barriers and speech impediments to take advantage of automatic speech recognition software, such as voice-enabled systems like Alexa or Siri.
‘The centre collects non-standard speech for native African languages for the first time, enabling access for those most needing inclusive communication technology,’ she says.
Beware: risks extend to pro bono work
The legal risks associated with using artificial intelligence (AI) are well known and this summer prompted the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to publish a warning notice reminding law firms of their professional obligations.
The notice deals with key concerns regarding AI-generated inaccuracies, or ‘hallucinations’, in legal research, advice, analysis and submissions to courts; instances of confidential client information being entered into AI tools that lack appropriate safeguards, risking potential breaches of confidentiality; and wider data protection requirements.
The guidance reminds solicitors: ‘The use of AI does not diminish or transfer your professional responsibilities. You remain accountable for all work and advice delivered to clients, whether or not AI has been used in its preparation. Appropriate human oversight, informed professional judgement and a proportionate, risk-based approach are essential to ensure compliance with your regulatory and legal obligations.’
The regulator received 42 reports of potential AI misuse in the year to July 2026. Investigations are under way into inaccurate legal citations, failures of supervision and breaches of confidentiality.
The risks are no less apparent when working pro bono for vulnerable clients. Margarita-Nikki Michael, a solicitor-advocate and consultant at Linklaters, stresses that ‘questions of confidentiality, privilege, accuracy and data protection cannot be treated as an afterthought’.
Tamara Krupski-David, a former head of enforcement at the SRA, who now works with Regulation Resolution Solicitors, stresses: ‘The SRA’s warning notice in August was blunt: AI changes how the work is done, not who answers for it.’
She adds: ‘Pro bono is where that risk is sharpest. When nobody is paying for the hours, the temptation is to lean on the tool and check less.’
Krupski-David adds: ‘A client who pays nothing is owed the same competence, the same confidentiality and the same candour to the tribunal as one who pays in full.’ Safeguards, she says, are not complicated: ‘Keep client data in a closed system. Verify every authority against the source. Make sure a named solicitor stands behind the work. Done properly, AI widens access to representation. Done carelessly, it puts a vulnerable client, and the solicitor’s practising certificate, at risk.’
Family and discovery
Charles Russell Speechlys is using AI to develop the Pro Bono Family Justice Hub. Funded through the Charles Russell Speechlys Foundation and developed in collaboration with RCJ Advice, this is intended to become a national gateway to free specialist family law advice.
Speechlys partner Kerry Stares explains that the first phase, launching this year, focuses on the development of an automated digital platform that combines accessible information and intelligent triage while enabling family lawyers at small and medium-sized firms to deliver high-quality pro bono advice.
‘The next phase of the build will explore how AI functionality can be layered onto that automated foundation, with the potential to help individuals engage more easily with the service while supporting advisers through more efficient information gathering, case management and administration,’ she says. ‘[By] reducing friction on both sides, the platform aims to expand access to justice while ensuring that legal advice and professional judgement remain firmly in the hands of qualified lawyers.’
The use of eDiscovery tools is also helping to bridge the gap in access for casework via charities where there is a lot of evidence management, says Emily Sherratt, project director at the National Pro Bono Centre (NPBC).
The Pro Bono Expert Support scheme, delivered in partnership by the NPBC and Pro Bono Connect (a scheme connecting solicitors and barristers to work together on civil pro bono case), links pro bono lawyers with providers who can offer specialist services often needed in complex litigation.
As well as forensic accountants, strategic communications specialists, and interpreters, this includes eDiscovery providers like Relativity and Everlaw.
Underlying crisis
In summary then, AI is bringing many positives. A spokeswoman for Advocate, the Bar’s pro bono charity, insists: ‘AI is not a solution to the underlying access to justice crisis.’
She stresses: ‘Technology can help increase capacity, but it cannot replace professional judgement, advocacy, ethical obligations or the relationship between lawyer and client. Access to justice ultimately depends on people, not platforms.’
AI also poses problems for the free legal advice sector. LawWorks Clinics Network Report 2025 identifies ‘the growing impact of AI and online information on client expectations and understanding of legal issues’ as an ‘emerging challenge’.
While digital tools and AI have the potential to improve access to legal information, the report notes that managing client expectations and correcting misinformation is becoming a resource-intensive aspect of clinic work.
It adds: ‘Several clinics noted that clients are increasingly conducting their own research online, in advance of their appointments, often forming fixed views about their case before they speak to an adviser or lawyer. This can make it more difficult for advisers to manage expectations and provide clear, practical guidance’.
The LawWorks report suggests that the rise of AI-generated information appears to be exacerbating this problem.
Technology, then, emerges as a double- edged sword for the pro bono movement – creating as well as assisting on tasks. But whereas the prospect of machines helping to bridge the justice gap was for a long time just a theory, imagination and practicality are now being applied to its use to help clients in need.
Catherine Baksi is a freelance journalist
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