Fireside Chat with Ron Flagg

In this episode from the LawDroid AI Conference 2026 is Ron Flagg's keynote and fireside chat where he discusses the challenges and opportunities that lay ahead for access to justice. Enjoy. I want to introduce Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation, who's going to say a few words and then I'm going to ask Ron some questions uh that are extremely relevant in light of our recent report from LSC. Ron, welcome. Thank you, Satish, and hello everyone. It's a pleasure to be with you. I'm grateful to Tom and Satish for inviting me to join this conversation. I must say uh trying to follow Sherri and Zach and Lisa and Ange must let much less Shakespeare and Elton John is a tall order, uh but I'll I'll do my best. The >> [clears throat] >> The theme for today, a year to build, I must say feels exactly right to me. The moment we're in right now isn't theoretical anymore. The question is no longer whether AI will shape the future of legal services. It already is. It already is at LSC. It already is at our grantees. The real question then is how are we going to build that future? And I'm going to use the same word that Sherri just used intentionally, together, in in a way that actually expands access to justice. At LSC, we often say something that can sound a little counterintuitive for the nation's largest civil legal assistance funder, and that is we cannot close the justice gap with money alone. Now, don't get me wrong, funding matters. It matters a great deal. But even at our highest funding levels, funding has never been enough to meet the legal need for civil legal help in our country. You're all familiar or I believe with the data, 92% of uh legal needs being met inadequately or not at all among those living or experiencing poverty, and roughly half of the eligible applicants being turned away for lack of resources. So, that's why innovation matters and matters so much. But just as funding can't be the silver bullet, neither can one technological solution. And again, I heard the tail end of the panel discussion and this point was made as well. The truth is there is no single solution. Unfortunately, no silver bullet. In the grant-making world, we sometimes talk about scalable approaches as if we can just copy and paste one tool or one model across the country and call it a day, unfurl our mission accomplished sign. But legal [clears throat] help doesn't work that way. It's deeply local, shaped by local laws, a multitude of court systems, and the needs of the community that is being served. And yet, if the answer isn't a single innovation, the question is what is the answer? Let me posit that it's the innovators, rather than the innovation itself, that hold the key. It's a community that builds, tests, refines, and shares for the benefit of all. And that's where legal services have something truly unique to offer in this broader AI conversation. Because this is a community that already knows how to collaborate. LSC's grantee network has a deep culture of sharing, of learning from one another, improving together, and adapting quickly. It's one of the strongest collaborative ecosystems I've seen anywhere. It's also a community of creative problem-solvers. If you want to call it this, if there's a silver lining to operating for decades with far fewer resources than you need, it's that you learn to be creative. Long before AI, LSC grantees were innovating new ways to extend their arms just a bit longer to reach as many people as possible. And that culture is now shaping how legal services, as a national network, is approaching AI. What we're seeing around across the country is not hesitation, but hunger. The legal aid programs we work with experience every day that 50% turn away rate. And therefore, programs are experiment. They're asking hard questions about responsible use. They're trying to figure out not just what these tools can do, but what they should do in service of their clients. And increasingly, the most promising opportunities are not just on the public-facing side. Many of them are internal. Questions like, "How do we reduce the administrative burden on legal aid staff through reporting, compliance, and data requirements that are necessary, but take time away from clients?" Or, "How do we streamline intake and triage so the highest priority cases get through the door more quickly?" "How do we use AI to increase capacity at every level of the organization?" Now, if we can make meaningful progress in these areas, even in just a few use cases, the impact would be enormous. Not abstract or theoretical, but very real. More time for clients, better allocation of scarce resources, more fulfilled staff who are able to focus on clients and not administrative details, and ultimately more people getting the help they need. And here's the opportunity I'd lift up to this audience, especially those building these tools. Legal aid is not just a user of technology. It's a proven ground. There's so much to learn from how this community is applying AI in constrained, high-stakes environments, where accuracy, trust, and ethics are not optional. Where the goal is not efficiency for efficiency's sake, but for the sake of someone's home, someone's livelihood, someone's child. Imagine together bringing more of these tools, these fancy AI tools as we lay people in the legal profession sometimes call them, into the hands of legal services advocates, and pair those tools with this community's ingenuity and mission-driven focus. The question isn't whether that combination will make a difference. It's how much. So, Satish, as we think about this year of building, my hope is that we build together developers being willing to make their tools available to those in our community won't just help test them and refine them, but will use them to make a difference in real people's lives. Innovation doesn't happen in isolation. It sparks more innovation. It grows through shared learning, through communities of practice, through peer networks, through spaces where people can test, fail, and improve together. That's how real progress happens in life and in legal services. And if we get this right, we won't just be building better tools. We'll be building a stronger, more capable system of justice. One that meets people where they are and delivers on the promise that justice should be accessible to all. Again, thanks for inviting me, and I look forward to uh the rest of our conversation. Thank you so much, Ron. That was so inspiring, and we are so honored to have you here with us today. We have time for for a little bit of a fireside chat, if you will. And [clears throat] so I wanted to ask you first, how does this moment compare to other moments that we've faced as a legal community, as a legal services community? For example, the rise of personal computers, the advent of the internet. Is this the same as those things? Is it bigger? Is it different? Yes. >> [laughter] >> It's different and in some ways it's similar. I actually was thinking about this the other day as I thought about 30 or 40 years ago uh uh seeing my younger colleagues compose documents on computers by themselves. I I was writing out my my documents in longhand and handing them to an assistant to type up. And I was convinced that I it was impossible for me to compose at a keyboard. So there's for those of for those of us who are concerned or nervous about AI, I've been there. But uh address your question and it's a good one. Um if we look at the the types of things you mentioned, computers, the internet, uh things like remote outreach and intake and e-filings, which are more recent in vintage, you know, we we from those innovations we saw real gains in efficiency, access to information and communication. And those shifts took time to filter through the system. Um I think perhaps with AI things may be a bit different. I think we all get the feeling of speed and immediacy. Uh for For of us who have opened up an AI application, the tools are available. They're usable almost instantly, even for those of us who are technologically challenged. They're much lower barriers to entry. But that said, some things haven't changed as our panel just touched on before me. Uh like with previous innovations, there's a need for human judgment. Uh there's critical importance of trust and accuracy. Uh the local nature of legal services hasn't changed. Uh again, the diversity of jurisdictions, the diversity of legal standards, and uh rules and regulations still persist. Uh hopefully, things like AI will help us get our arms around them more quickly, but those differences still persist. So, in many ways, this is an evolution, not a replacement. It's uh building on past innovation. It's but it's accelerating it, to be sure. And like those earlier moments, uh I think the impact will depend on how intentionally we adopt it. There's that word again. Yeah, I really I really like that. Let me follow up on the uh the point that you've made a few times, which is that many of these problems are local, the solutions are local, the context, the jurisdiction, is local, and sometimes each problem comes down to the individual's perception of it, where they stand and their situation. >> [snorts] >> So, is there an opportunity to scale? And I know you sit in a very unique place because you can see the whole country uh at once. Can we really scale solutions? Is there an opportunity there? Or should we remain looking at this locally? Well, I think we need to do both. But uh no, the scalability is critical. Again, when we're looking at a justice gap, depending on how you define it, where 92% of people experiencing poverty uh find that uh over 90% of their issues are not addressed at all or adequately, or that our grantees are turning away half of uh the eligible applicants who come to their door. It's clear that we need to do something that's going to make a material difference. It's got to be scalable. Uh that said, the most useful tools solve specific everyday challenges. As I've said, others have said, you just uh said, "Legal services is deeply local and context-specific." You know, the laws, courts, workflows vary widely. Uh but that doesn't mean that we can't build scalable solutions. We can. But we need our developers to build with legal aid, not not just for it. Engage practitioners early and often. Collaborative design leads to better outcomes. And you know, it's critical for those working with legal aid to understand the constraints under which we're working. Limited resources, high case loads, compliance requirements. All of those things prioritize usability and trust. Tools need to be intuitive and reliable. Stakes are high. As I said before, people's home, safety, and families are at stake. So, while ultimately we're looking for tools that in the aggregate will create a disruption in how services ultimately delivered. In the immediate moment, we need to think about integration, not disruption. How does a tool fit into existing workflows? How does it reduce the burden of those workflows rather than adding to it? Uh I think we all as collaborators need to be open to iteration and feedback. >> [laughter] >> One thing I know from personal experience in legal services is uh our field will tell you what works and what doesn't. I certainly hear in those uh realms every day. So, anybody that works with us needs to be ready to listen. But all that said, there's an enormous opportunity here. Legal services is a proving ground for building better and more responsible tools. The last thing I'll add is the advice I've just given we give to ourselves. When we talk about serving clients we underscore the critical the criticality of looking at that service through the eyes of our clients, working with them to identify [snorts] what works, what is helpful, and what's not. So, there's sort of an analogy here between the guidance we give ourselves as legal aid lawyers in terms of uh collaborating with our clients to achieve outcomes that are meaningful to those clients. And here uh technologists, researchers working with legal aid, again listening uh to the challenges Legal Aid faces and coming up with um, solutions that will uh, you know, help address those needs. We appreciate in this community all you've done and the team has done to maintain our funding in this space. Uh, can you give us an update? Where does Where do things stand right now with LSC funding? Well, uh, that's a a question I think about and talk about every day and I'm happy to share with you. You know, not a, uh, surprise. It's certainly been a challenging 18 months, uh, since, uh, you know, roughly, uh, January of 2025. That said, I'm happy to report we're in a much more stable place than a year ago. Congress appropriated $540 million for fiscal year 2026, which runs through September 30th, 2026, which is a modest cut, about 3 and 1/2%. Now, generally, I'm not in the, uh, position of celebrating funding reductions, but considering what many other federally funded organizations received, you know, far greater cuts or even, uh, uh, you know, ceasing to exist completely, uh, we're thrilled with how things shook out for fiscal year 2026. And I want to underscore that that's only possible because of LSC's strong bipartisan support in Congress. Uh, the uh, Trump administration proposed to eliminate us, proposed to eliminate us going forward in 2027. I would point out that that was the case in 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020, and in each of those years we uh either had flat funding or small increases. Uh the House of Representatives uh uh Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Subcommittee will con- consider the bill, the CGS bill uh for the first time this week. We're following that closely. Frankly, uh we expect the House to propose a significant cut again for LSC as the uh House Appropriations Committee did last year. Um the Senate last year, just to um go over the history, proposed a funding increase and ultimately where they came out was much closer to where the Senate was than to where the House was. And I expect a similar uh outcome this year. I in the short run, at the end of the fiscal year, September 30th, um you'll be shocked to hear that I expect there will be gridlock and that >> [clears throat] >> pending the midterm elections, we and everybody else in the government will get flat funding at the same level as we're currently getting until the midterms shake out and uh Congress comes back and uh takes another look at all of the budgets including ours. But the message from Congress 2017, '18, '19, '20, 2025 and '26 has been loud, clear, and consistent. Civil legal services matter. Legal aid provides services in critical areas of constituents' lives. These are constituent services covering things like shelter, security, and sustenance. When members of Congress get calls from their constituents asking where they can get help uh with their housing or their family issues or their veterans benefits or their disability benefits or responding to natural disasters for which there's federal relief the answer is often civil legal aid. So this work has broad support in Congress and continues to and what that means is uh our funding will be stable. Uh now we stability is is good. It's not good enough given the justice gap, but that's where we are right now. Well, I think it's a tremendous achievement and I applaud you and your team despite everything else that's happening in Washington, across the world, this is something that we have been able to hold steady relatively speaking. So I applaud you and I'm sure everyone [clears throat] on this call here feels the same way. Let's turn to something that personally kind of motivated about the eviction report that LSC just released. Can you share some takeaways from that? I thought it was really groundbreaking and identified some issues that I've never seen before in a report like this. Well, thank you. Yeah, evictions um really forever and certainly underscored by the immediate aftermath of the pandemic where so many people lost their jobs and you know, thereby their ability to pay their rent. Um and our eviction report really focuses in part on the myriad of of of different laws eviction laws throughout the country and those laws whether they differ in terms of you know, the amount of notice you get which can vary from a a few days in some jurisdictions to a month in other places, how much it costs to file an eviction, it can be very in so landlords can with impunity in some places file lots of eviction matters and in other cases it's much more expensive and they have to be more thoughtful. Not surprisingly, those differences in local laws produce a wide variety of outcomes in terms of uh, you know, eviction rates as you would expect. I mean, if you were building a a new highway and we're trying to decide you know, what should the speed limit be, you'd look at at data on you know, what is 55 miles an hour uh, mean in terms of uh, accident and mortality rates and or you know, what is 65 or 75. We've really never done that with uh, eviction law. So, that's one thing we've done in this report is to start that conversation and hopefully arm jurisdictions with some information. Writ large, uh, the report also confirms what you know, many people in this room and certainly those of us in legal aid already know. The demand for affordable housing remains extremely high and the supply is very limited. And because of that dynamic, eviction remains one of the most common and urgent legal needs. It represents about 35% of the cases closed by LSC grantees, so it's the largest category of any case category that our grantees handle. And I think it's important to realize one reason that our grantees prioritize uh, evictions and housing uh, so highly is not only because demand for those services is very high, but evictions have immediate consequences that really are there's a ripple effect without legal help. Uh you lose your home, it has effect not only on your housing, but on your employment opportunities, your educational opportunities, your access to health care, a whole raft of other issues. And uh so I think what the report does is reinforce that the justice gap is very real and ongoing and uh really connects directly to the conversation we're having today. Both with respect to housing as well as every other area in which legal aid focuses, whether it's families, veterans, response to uh domestic violence threats, uh natural disasters, demand exceeds capacity. And that in turn means funding and innovation are both needed to meet that demand. And we need to expand our reach in multiple ways. There's as I said before, no silver bullet. That's great to hear. Um one of the things that really struck me in the report was a section called landlords as essential partners in housing stability. Can you speak a little bit about that and are there any opportunities using technology to bridge that gap between landlords and tenants outside of eviction courts? Uh I think the answer to both those questions is yes and it it may be counterintuitive that, you know, at first blush that landlords might be you know, interested in avoiding evictions. But think about this. What other economic endeavor in America has as a uh a model throwing out your customers? I mean >> [laughter] >> Yeah. No restaurant does well by uh throwing out you know, they don't want people who don't pay their bills, but uh that's not a a great economic model where you're constantly churning and throwing out some significant percentage of of of your your customers, if you will. And so, what we've seen across the country is particularly well, both [clears throat] large and small landlords recognize that uh if they can work with tenants, if they can work with legal aid or with the representative of tenants to find a way to avoid eviction, that can often be a much better economic solution than throwing somebody out going through the process of finding somebody else with no guarantee that, you know, they'll necessarily be able to pay their rent in a current economic environment in which we operate any better than the people they've just evicted. It's really a not a very good business model. And so, I you know, I think that one thing we need to do better, and we actually we did it during the pandemic, when we had more resources, when we had emergency rental assistance, we saw now there was an a moratorium on evictions, but beyond the moratoria uh when there were additional resources, we saw landlords far more willing to negotiate and work out payment plans, and there were resources to fund those payment plans. Um so, I think whether it's additional financial resources or additional information that AI can help, you know, facilitate the acquisition of alternatives um you know, I think again, I I I I don't think the evict and and re uh relist the the uh uh the listing is a very good business model and I think uh many far-sighted uh landlords are interested in partnering with their tenants, with their customers. >> Well, thank you. It's really interesting to hear. Um I don't want to take up too much of your time. We really appreciate you being with us today. Are there any takeaways that you want us to leave here with um from you? First, this is a shared effort. No single person or group solves this alone. Uh again, as I said before, if you're a developer, uh stay grounded in the real world needs and build with users, not in isolation. Same advice we're constantly hearing from our colleagues in legal aid about listening to and partnering with uh their clients. If you're a legal services advocate, uh again, the status quo is uh turning away half your your uh eligible applicants. Uh we need to lean into experimentation and share what's working and what's not. If you're a researcher or partner, help us understand and measure the impact. We have a long way to go in legal aid in terms of outcome analysis and you know, I'm hopeful that AI can help us with that as well. The bottom line is collaboration is a multiplier. Our field already does it well. Build on that collaboration, that collaborative nature. Stay focused on purpose. This is not innovation for its own sake. It's about making our justice system more accessible and more fair. But uh the opportunity here is huge. It's not just better tools. It's a stronger, more capable, more trustworthy system of justice. So, again, Satish and Tom, thank you so much for inviting LSC and inviting me. And thank you so much for this conference. It really has the potential to make a difference uh in a critical aspect of American life. Thank you so much, Ron. We're really honored to have you here today. And to everyone else in the audience, we have a short break. We will resume at 3:30. See you then.