The Litigant Portal Is Looking for Its First Court Partners
Today, Free Law Project is opening applications for the founding court cohort of the Litigant Portal, a guided legal navigation platform built to help self-represented litigants navigate the civil legal system with greater confidence and accuracy. We are looking for courts ready to help shape what this platform becomes. Letters of interest are due May 1, 2026.
The access to justice gap is not new. The majority of civil court cases in the United States involve at least one party without a lawyer. People arrive at courthouses and court websites in crisis, encountering legal processes for the first time, without any guide to what the forms mean, what the deadlines are, or what happens if they get it wrong.
These are not failures of intelligence. They are failures of infrastructure.
Courts bear the downstream cost: longer dockets, deficient filings, continuances, and staff time spent answering questions that a well-designed system should have answered already. Legal aid organizations cannot absorb the volume. Hiring a lawyer is not a realistic option for most people facing a civil legal problem.
The Litigant Portal is our attempt to address that infrastructure gap directly.
What the Litigant Portal Does
The Litigant Portal is a guided, AI-assisted legal navigation platform that courts deploy for their self-represented litigants. It provides jurisdiction-specific legal information grounded in actual statutes and court rules, step-by-step workflows through specific legal situations, document preparation assistance, and deadline flagging so users understand what is at stake before they act — or fail to act.
It is mobile-first, written in plain language, and designed to meet WCAG AA accessibility standards. AI enhances the platform's responsiveness and context-awareness, but the core guided workflows function independently of AI. Access does not depend on a single technology layer.
The platform is white-labeled for court deployment. When a litigant uses the Litigant Portal through a court, it carries that court's institutional authority. That is by design.
What We Are Looking For
This is a founding cohort. Courts that join are not adopting a finished product. They are co-designers, with direct influence over features, workflows, and the long-term direction of the platform.
We are looking for courts that have a defined self-represented litigant population they want to serve better, a designated project lead with authority to act, and leadership buy-in sufficient to sustain the project through implementation.
We are not looking for courts with finished content libraries, large IT budgets, or prior legal technology experience. We will meet partners where they are. The founding cohort is no cost to partner courts, supported by an AWS Imagine Grant awarded to Free Law Project in December 2025.
The Timeline
Letters of interest are due May 1, 2026. We are asking for no more than two pages. Selected applicants will be invited to structured conversations with the Free Law Project team in May, and the cohort will be announced June 1. Pilot launches in September 2026.
The full RFP is available here. If you work with a court that should be part of this conversation, I would welcome an introduction.
Courts that are uncertain whether they are a good fit are encouraged to reach out before submitting. We would rather have that conversation early.
Questions may be directed to jessica@free.law.
