"Kara is not a lawyer. Her background is in public health and communications. Yet she now leads a company that has used AI to summarize more than 3.3 million judicial opinions and made them free and publicly available. In our conversation on "Notes to My (Legal) Self," she explained how justice, like health, is a public good. And access to law is one of its critical delivery systems."
"Legal Transparency Is A Health Equity Issue Kara grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, in a culture steeped in social justice. Her early experiences shaped a worldview that makes her uniquely suited to build bridges between legal complexity and everyday reality. As she puts it, "Access to the law is so deeply connected to other systemic problems. This is a way to attack something that's been broken for generations.""
"From a public health lens, the connection is obvious. People struggle to find housing, defend themselves at work, or navigate family law - not because they lack intelligence but because they lack access. And when legal literacy is only triggered by trauma, as when someone is fired, evicted, or sued, we are setting up millions of people to fail. Legal information, when made legible before the crisis hits, becomes preventive infrastructure. It is no different than distributing hand-washing guides or vaccination instructions."
Kara Peterson applied public-health logic to the legal system by treating legal information as preventive infrastructure that must be accessible, understandable, and widely distributed. Her public-health and communications background informed the creation of descrybe.ai, which used AI to summarize more than 3.3 million judicial opinions and made them freely available. Legal transparency intersects with health equity because lack of legal literacy contributes to housing loss, workplace injustice, and family law crises, often triggered by trauma. Making legal information legible before crises reduces systemic harm. AI can expose and amplify risks, but many such biases already exist within human legal systems.
Read at Above the Law
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