Five acts stay with the lawyer. A machine may help with the rest.
For 92% of their civil legal problems, low-income Americans get no real help. A lawyer may supervise a machine in most of the work. The parts you can read stay with a licensed human.
Read the reserved acts The Minnesota case
Sources: Legal Services Corporation (2022), O*NET 29.0. Not legal advice.
Interpret laws, rulings and regulations for individuals and businesses. Analyze the probable outcomes of cases, using knowledge of legal precedents. Gather evidence to formulate defense or to initiate legal actions by such means as interviewing clients and witnesses to ascertain the facts of a case. Represent clients in court or before government agencies. Evaluate findings and develop strategies and arguments in preparation for presentation of cases. Advise clients concerning business transactions, claim liability, advisability of prosecuting or defending lawsuits, or legal rights and obligations. Examine legal data to determine advisability of defending or prosecuting lawsuit. Prepare, draft, and review legal documents, such as wills, deeds, patent applications, mortgages, leases, and contracts. Study Constitution, statutes, decisions, regulations, and ordinances of quasi-judicial bodies to determine ramifications for cases. Negotiate settlements of civil disputes. Supervise legal assistants. Negotiate contractual agreements. Confer with colleagues with specialties in appropriate areas of legal issue to establish and verify bases for legal proceedings. Search for and examine public and other legal records to write opinions or establish ownership. Perform administrative and management functions related to the practice of law. Present and summarize cases to judges and juries. Select jurors, argue motions, meet with judges, and question witnesses during the course of a trial. Present evidence to defend clients or prosecute defendants in criminal or civil litigation. Probate wills and represent and advise executors and administrators of estates. Prepare legal briefs and opinions, and file appeals in state and federal courts of appeal. Act as agent, trustee, guardian, or executor for businesses or individuals. Help develop federal and state programs, draft and interpret laws and legislation, and establish enforcement procedures.
The gap
If you have ever decided you could not afford to know your rights, this page is about you.
A renter gets a nonpayment notice with fourteen days on it.
The landlord has a lawyer. She has a search box. In 2022 the Legal Services Corporation measured what happens next: for 92% of substantial civil legal problems like hers, low-income Americans get no legal help, or not enough. Not because the law is unknowable; because an hour of a person licensed to say what it means costs more than her margin for error. The eviction goes on her record either way. The record follows her for years.
A machine can already draft most of what she needs. The question this program exists to answer is how she gets that help without anyone breaking the rules that exist to protect her.
Reserved acts
Some acts belong to licensed humans, and should. We are writing down which ones, so machines can do everything else.
Five things stay with the lawyer, in every design we will ever propose.
Appearing before a court. Giving final legal advice. Signing pleadings. Setting and taking legal fees. Agreeing to settle. That is the reserved list, and it is short on purpose: everything outside it (research, drafting, forms, timelines, translating legalese into plain English) is preparatory work a licensed lawyer may supervise a machine in doing, the way lawyers have always supervised the people and tools that help them.
This is not our invention. Utah's own reform committee, redesigning what comes after its sandbox, is studying the same shape: the UK's “reserved activities” model, which (in the committee's words) flips the unauthorized-practice question on its head by defining which activities are reserved for fully licensed lawyers.
The catalog is published and versioned: law.org.ai/reserved-acts, v0.1.0, with a machine face at /reserved-acts.json. A regulator can diff it. When it changes, the change has a date and a reason.
- 1Appearing before a tribunal
- 2Giving final legal advice
- 3Signing and filing pleadings and court documents
- 4Setting and taking legal fees
- 5Binding the client on consequential decisions
- Everything not on this list is preparatory work a licensed lawyer may supervise a machine in doing.
Privilege
A conversation with your lawyer is protected. Add a third party, and it can stop being protected. Is a lawyer's AI a third party?
Courts have answered this question before, for people.
In 1961 a federal appeals court held that an accountant working at a lawyer's direction does not break the privilege, because he is the lawyer's agent, not a stranger in the room (United States v. Kovel). Minnesota's privilege statute already covers the lawyer's employees and interpreters. In 2013 the Minnesota Supreme Court placed supervised law students inside the privilege by rule, and in 2020 it did the same for legal paraprofessionals.
In February 2026 the first federal court to face the AI version left the door open in exact words: had counsel directed the defendant's use of the AI, it “might arguably be said to have functioned … as a lawyer's agent within the protection of the attorney-client privilege.” The defendant had directed it himself, with no lawyer anywhere, so he lost. The condition that failed is the condition our whole design begins with.
No state has answered yet for AI. We think the answer runs through supervision, not around it, and the first ask is Minnesota.
The lawyer stays
The order of events is the whole design: a licensed lawyer first, then the machine. Never the reverse.
The machine is the lawyer's instrument, and the record proves it.
Before any machine writes a word that is about your situation, a licensed lawyer is engaged: yours, named, responsible. The AI then works the way the bar's own guidance says a lawyer's tools must work: under supervision, with the lawyer reviewing and adopting what it produces before you rely on it. Every direction is logged (which lawyer, which task, which matter, when) because that log is what a court would read. The words themselves are not in the log; they stay in the lawyer's file, where client words belong.
And the system does not learn from your matter. Not as a promise in a policy; as an architecture: nothing identifiable leaves the matter, nothing enters the model. A promise can be broken quietly. An architecture can be inspected.
Supervision is also what makes oversight cheap. A regulator who can read the log does not need to interview anyone to know what the machine did.
Minnesota
Every state's supreme court regulates its own practice of law. So a precedent has to start in one state, and we have picked ours.
Minnesota has twice let a certified non-lawyer inside the attorney-client privilege.
Law students in 2013. Legal paraprofessionals in 2020, as a pilot that measured itself and then became permanent. Both times the conditions were the same: certified by the Board of Law Examiners, supervised by a named lawyer who carries personal professional responsibility, identified to the client and accepted by them, bound to confidentiality. Both times the sky stayed up. And Minnesota's bar association has already recommended that its supreme court consider a sandbox for access-to-justice AI.
The Minnesota page carries the precedent, the ask, and the pilot: law.org.ai/mn.
Where it comes from
Every claim on this page names a primary source we actually fetched. Where we could not fetch one, we say so instead of citing it.
- revisor.mn.gov
- mncourts.gov
- justicegap.lsc.gov
- americanbar.org
- mnbars.org
- utcourts.gov
The list, in one paragraph.
The 25 Minnesota Rules of Professional Conduct and 4 statutes we read, from revisor.mn.gov. The Minnesota Supreme Court's orders: the student-observation amendment (file ADM09-8002, order of August 6, 2013, retrieved from the State Law Library's archive) and the paraprofessional pilot (ADM19-8002). The bar's national guidance on lawyers using generative AI (ABA Formal Opinion 512, 2024). The measurement of the gap (LSC, The Justice Gap, 2022). Utah's published sandbox data (roughly one complaint per 5,869 services through April 2025) from its Office of Legal Services Innovation. One order in the 2013 file, from March, we have not yet retrieved; until we have read it, nothing on this site cites it.
Nothing that merely felt like evidence is in the room.
What this is
law.org.ai is a program of the Org.AI Foundation. It writes down which acts of legal help are reserved to licensed humans, which acts a lawyer may supervise a machine in doing, and what a court would need to see before extending the privilege to cover the lawyer's supervised agent.
We publish the working, not just the answer. Every claim names its source. Nothing here is a legal service, and no petition has been filed anywhere.
We are building it for the person who could not afford to ask. Not for law firms.
Nothing on this site is legal advice.
Read on
The reserved-acts catalog, the supervision design, and the privilege question, then one state, asked properly.
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