“A better bill would target deception specifically: chatbots that claim to be licensed professionals, that create attorney-client relationships without disclosure, that fail to identify themselves as AI.”
Every year, more than 2 million New Yorkers walk into civil courtrooms without a lawyer. They face evictions, custody disputes, benefit terminations, and immigration proceedings—adversarial processes with life-altering stakes—alone. The other side almost always has counsel. The result is not justice. It is a rout.
I spent 20 years in New York City Housing Court as an advocate. I watched tenants lose their homes not because the law was against them, but because they could not understand the law well enough to use it. The justice gap in this country is not, at its core, a funding problem. It is a knowledge problem. Legal knowledge is rationed by a licensing system that has, for generations, ensured that access to it tracks wealth.
That is why I was hopeful when artificial intelligence began to offer a different possibility. I have spent the past several years working at the intersection of AI and access to justice, and I recently helped build Roxanne AI, a chatbot designed specifically to give tenants plain-language legal guidance. Not a lawyer. Not a replacement for a lawyer. A knowledgeable friend—the kind that people with money have always had, and that everyone else has always lacked…