#access-to-justice

#access-to-justice

Matthew Diller, a renowned legal educator for more than three decades, will succeed Muhammad U. Faridi as head of the organization championing the legal profession in New York and promoting the rule of law. Faridi had been president of the bar since 2024. Diller was most recently the dean of Fordham Law School in the Bronx, a post he held between 2015 and 2024; prior to that, he served in the same post at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law.

Anthropic has launched Claude for Legal, dramatically expanding its generative AI offerings for lawyers and legal professionals. In a Tuesday press release, the company announced that Claude Cowork now connects to 20 widely used legal platforms and unveiled 12 practice-area specific plug-ins. The new features mark a significant upgrade for Claude's legal plug-in, which first launched in February.

More than $178 million of legal services were contributed by the law school class of 2025 via legal clinics, experiential courses, externships and other pro bono activities, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Association of American Law Schools. In December, the survey found that 22,336 law students in the class of 2025 worked more than 5.1 million hours in legal services-or about an average of 230 hours each-according to a Feb. 18 press release.

Leaders of the state court's system on Tuesday called for a nearly $200 million budget increase to boost their spending to $3.2 billion in the coming fiscal year. The Unified Court System unveiled the Fiscal Year 2027 budget proposal that included the 6.7% increase alongside Gov. Kathy Hochul's executive budget proposal. Nearly three-quarters of the court system's spending increase would go to existing operations and ongoing programs, including a 2% salary increase for all judges and justices.

"You might need to have 100 conversations to take on five or six cases," says AlphaLit founder and CEO Anand Upadhye.

We could be everybody's PAL, Pacheco told amNew York Law.

Ontario Superior Court Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz has been outspoken about the need to modernize the province's justice system and said the change is long overdue. What we're trying to achieve is a system that works for everybody on a far more equitable timeline so that you can deliver justice in a system that is really quite responsive to the public and the public's needs, he told CBC Radio's Metro Morning earlier this week.

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.

[Our] goal is to give [students] a sense of how important it is to use the power that they will wield as a lawyer to bring about good in the communities that they live in and work in, he said. And so we want to empower them and we want to make communities strong and do service. To this end, he's pursued mission-driven goals.

I know we can all agree that juries play a vital role in our justice system. And I, for one, am very grateful when ordinary citizens from all walks of life answer the call and participate in the judicial process,

In the New York state court system, the people translating for non-English speaking litigants are called interpreters for a reason. They are doing more than just repeating, said Ann Ryan, a career interpreter who now heads the court system's Office of Language Access as its statewide coordinator. They're taking those concepts and converting them into the same concept in another language. And that is a thoughtful but very rapid process.

In addition to the celebrity status that I've garnered since this column catapulted me to a guest appearance on the Daily Show, the legal profession itself has experienced its own glow-up. The pandemic made remote practice mainstream, artificial intelligence is reshaping everything from research to drafting, and younger lawyers are demanding more humane work environments. But one concept remains constant: starting a law firm is a radical act.

"If you’ve ever received a legal notice like a Cease and Desist, you know that the 'oh shit' moment doesn’t happen once you actually read the letter; it happens the second you open it and realize a lawyer is mad at you."

The Alameda County Law Library offers resources such as legal volumes, databases, computers, printers, and attorney referral services to help individuals navigate the legal system.