The Digital Divide Is a Justice Crisis

Technology is Both the Problem and the Solution. 

I’ve spent years watching the legal technology industry celebrate innovation – new platforms, smarter AI, faster document automation – while an often quiet crisis compounds in the background. Millions of people around the world never make it to court at all, and those who do are increasingly confronted by digital systems built without them in mind.

That gap between the promise of legal technology and the reality of who it actually reaches is what drove us at the Justice Technology Association to publish our newest research report: The Digital Divide in Justice: Consistent Progress and Persistent Challenges. This report arrives at a moment when the legal technology industry is moving fast, attracting capital, and generating real excitement. That momentum is warranted. But it also creates a particular kind of risk: that speed outruns intention, and we leave behind the very people we set out to serve.

Just here for the report? [Download The Digital Divide in Justice]

The Access to Justice Crisis Isn’t Slowing Down

5.1 billion people worldwide lack meaningful access to justice. 4.5 billion are excluded from the social, economic, and political opportunities that the law is supposed to guarantee.¹ These aren’t abstractions — they’re the conditions under which most of humanity navigates legal systems every day.

The digital divide compounds this at every level. It’s no longer simply about whether someone has a broadband connection, though that remains a serious and persistent barrier. It’s about whether someone has the device capable of running the tools that exist, the digital literacy to navigate them, the language support to understand them, and the confidence to trust them. Remove any one of those conditions and the promise of legal technology evaporates entirely for that person.

A smartphone is not a laptop. Individuals without reliable internet access are 35% less likely to successfully navigate online court systems and 47% less likely to access virtual legal aid services.² These aren’t edge cases — they are the majority of people who need legal help, in the United States, in Brazil, in the Netherlands, in Australia, and everywhere in between.

And for many, the barriers don’t stop at connectivity. In child welfare proceedings involving Latino immigrant families in the US, 90% of parents do not speak English, yet only half receive assistance from caseworkers who speak their language.³ Language access is one of the most persistent dimensions of the digital divide in justice, and it’s one the report examines in depth.

An Honest Account of Progress and Challenges

People worldwide are increasingly turning to generative AI tools as their first – and sometimes only – source of legal guidance. These tools can lower the barrier to understanding legal language, drafting documents, and preparing for court, and that access is real and meaningful. But these platforms are designed to be persuasive, not legally accurate. A user without legal training – which is most users – has no way to distinguish a confident, fluent AI response from a fabricated one. The consequences of acting on a hallucinated filing deadline or an invented legal precedent can be catastrophic, and they fall hardest on those who can least afford an attorney to catch the error.

Platform fragmentation compounds the problem. A parent simultaneously managing a custody modification, a child support enforcement action, and a domestic violence protection order may be navigating three completely disconnected digital portals – separate logins, separate interfaces, no continuity. The cognitive load alone can undermine someone’s ability to focus on the actual merits of their case. This is a global pattern: federal, state, and municipal systems operating in silos, developed without interoperability in mind, creating a maze that punishes the people with the least capacity to navigate it.⁴

“Closing the digital divide in justice requires design that centers the communities being served, policy that removes structural barriers, funding that reaches founders closest to the problem, and collaboration across sectors that rarely talk to each other.”

But the report doesn’t stop at diagnosis. Some of the most compelling evidence of progress comes from outside the United States. Brazil’s government-endorsed Consumidor.gov platform processed nearly one million complaints in 2022 and resolved approximately 77% of them through online dispute resolution.⁵ Switzerland’s Justitia 4.0 project is digitizing the entire Swiss justice system to reduce backlogs and expand access.⁶ In the United States, Legal Aid of North Carolina’s AI-powered assistant “LIA” reached 95,000 users in just a few months,⁷ and the University of Michigan’s Matterhorn platform reduced average case resolution time by 74%.⁸

The progress is real. So are the challenges. That honest accounting is what makes this report worth reading.

Who Should Read This

Justice tech founders and startup teams. This report arms you with data to support what you likely already know from proximity to the problem. Most justice tech founders are building because of lived experience or deep community connection – you understand your users in ways that market research rarely captures. This report gives you the evidence to make that case to investors, partners, and your own team, and offers a framework for why user-centered, mobile-first, multilingual, accessible design isn’t a nice-to-have – it’s the mission.

Court administrators, judges, and policymakers. Remote proceedings where only 65% of participants feel they were treated fairly, compared to 84% of in-person litigants,⁹ aren’t delivering procedural justice. This report offers concrete, actor-specific recommendations: investment in vetted public-facing legal tools, AI disclosure requirements, and a shift toward digital infrastructure that is unified without being uniform – flexible enough for local needs, coherent enough to actually work.

Investors and funders. Whether you’re a VC evaluating impact investments, a philanthropic foundation, or a corporate social impact program, this report maps where capital is most needed and where it can generate measurable, scalable reach. The justice tech sector is a significantly underserved global market with mission-driven founders building real solutions to one of humanity’s most persistent equity challenges.

Law schools and law firms with pro bono practices. This report makes the case for technology integration with honesty about its limits – fragmented tools, clients with low digital literacy, chronic multilingual gaps – and offers a path forward through community partnerships, AI literacy programming, and shared infrastructure designed with end users at the center.

Anyone who believes the legal system should work for everyone. This report gives you data, language, and a framework for advocacy. Use it.

A Closing Thought

This report reinforces something the justice tech community has long understood: closing the digital divide in justice requires more than better technology. It requires design that centers the communities being served, policy that removes structural barriers, funding that reaches founders closest to the problem, and collaboration across sectors that rarely talk to each other.

The gap between promise and reality is still there. This report is a candid look at both.

Download the Report

The Digital Divide in Justice: Consistent Progress and Persistent Challenges was prepared by Md Abdul Malek with contributing editors Maya Markovich and Kalina Leopold Oak, and published by the Justice Technology Association in February 2026.

Footnotes