Lemma Legal just wrapped up a 2 year HUD-funded project with Legal Services of Eastern Missouri to build Missouri Tenant Help. As part of the project, we built an experimental intake screening tool that combines simple rules with GPT-4 to help users find out if they qualify for help before they call the program staff. Maintaining intake rules for legal aid programs is challenging. As grants start and finish, the phone staff are regularly updated with new memos that outline the cases that are “in” for that week’s intakes. Potential clients can wait in the phone queue for hours to find out that the program isn’t accepting, for example, a security deposit claim unless the tenant paid a deposit of more than $300.
LSEM’s new AI-powered intake screener uses a traditional Docassemble interview for the portion of the questionnaire that asks about factors that change rarely or not at all, like income, location, and citizenship eligibility. When the intake rules of the week come into play, the text of the rules and the applicant’s problem description are sent together to OpenAI’s GPT-4. Applicants are warned to keep private information out of the prompt, but OpenAI’s terms of use make it clear that the data belongs to the applicant and is never used for OpenAI’s own training purposes.
If the applicant qualifies based on the most recent intake rules, the program gives them a phone number and the website for the legal aid program that serves their address. If the program needs more information, it creates a follow-up question on the fly.
The system saves legal aid intake staff time and money, and it’s handy for applicants, too. Instead of waiting on the phone to find out they can’t get help, they can get an answer right away. Program staff can update the program rules by uploading a new copy of the latest instructions as a simple text file, without the need for a computer programmer to update the interview.
The program costs a few cents each time it is used.
The program currently only covers tenants looking for housing help in Missouri’s 4 legal aid programs: Legal Services of Eastern Missouri, Legal Assistance of Western Missouri, Mid-Missouri Legal Services and Legal Services of Southern Missouri. Future expansions could cover all of the legal topics that Missouri’s legal aid programs serve, as well as a direct tie-in to the programs Legal Server case management system.