“Too many people are falling through the cracks right now. With GenAI, we can help more people with less.”– Sateesh Nori, Adjunct Professor, New York University School of Law
Watch the full interview with NYU's Sateesh Nori.
Sateesh Nori is a lawyer, author and Adjunct Professor at NYU School of Law.
With over 20 years of experience in tenancy law, Sateesh has represented 1000s of low-income tenants, advocating for housing justice with organizations like The Legal Aid Society of NYC and Bedford Stuyvesant Community Legal Services.
Sateesh is a techno-optimist. While some remain apprehensive about the future post-GenAI, he’s all in, researching how we can use the technology to “boost the way we help people and do more with less.”
In this fireside chat, Josef Co-founder and COO Sam Flynn catches up with Sateesh to learn about his legal background and how he thinks GenAI will revolutionize the delivery of legal aid.
Watch the full video or read our quick recap below.
Demand for legal aid often exceeds the resources available, Sateesh says.
“One of the biggest challenges of working as a legal services lawyer or a nonprofit lawyer is that you don’t have enough time, or resources, to help everybody who seeks your help.”
“We might turn away more than half the people who seek our help, and that can be extremely frustrating and demoralizing.”
However, with GenAI, “I’ve realized that we can do 10x, 100x, 1000x the work that we’re doing right now. We can leapfrog generations of old technology that we maybe never had the money to adopt.”
Sateesh shares an example:
“We can create a tool that tells people where to go to assert their rights in court and have it work in English, Spanish, Bangla, and Chinese. We can have it work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s incredible. We could have never imagined such a powerful tool being available to us even five years ago.”
“Now, it’s just a question of convincing people and overcoming their hesitations,” he says.
“Too many people are falling through the cracks right now. With GenAI, we can help more people with less.”– Sateesh Nori, Adjunct Professor, New York University School of Law
In collaboration with Josef, Sateesh has spent the past 18 months+ researching how to create GenAI tools that are safe and reliable enough for high-risk, legal environments.
His work has seen him present at conferences like JURIX in the Netherlands in 2023 to Stanford’s AI + A2J Summit more recently in October 2024.
The key to creating safe GenAI tools lies in promoting transparency into how they work, he says.
“What’s great about Josef is that you’re building various safety features and controls that allow for transparency into how GenAI tools work. You can provide feedback and improve responses, so the tools get better and better over time. I think that’s a really noble undertaking, and I think it’s going to really impact the legal space.”
“People are resistant to change and lawyers are even more so,” Sateesh says.
“Our natural inclination is to say, no, that doesn’t work. There’s no way that’s possible. It’s too risky, but we just have to be patient.”
“We have to show people that human beings are still at the center of any project that we work on with GenAI. GenAI is just the technology that augments what’s possible for us.”
“You never know what’s coming and if you’re closed off to it, you’re going to miss out,” he says. “You’re not going to grow.”
“Keep learning and keep improving,” Sateesh adds.
“It’s not always easy to think that way and it can be exhausting at times, but we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.”
“What will GenAI free us up to do? How much more creative will we be? How many more people will be able to help? That’s what it comes down to for me. That’s really the goal.”
How can you properly test whether your GenAI tool is reliable enough for legal and compliance?
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