Let’s Stop Calling It “Legal Tech” for Access to Justice — It’s About Life Solutions

The very words—“legal” and “tech”—can alienate the people we most want to help.

I’m watching a panel discussion on “legal tech” at a conference on the future of law, and something hits me. There’s something off about the phrase legal tech. Not in the way it’s often used—generally to describe digital tools that help people navigate laws, courts, or contracts—but in the way it frames the problem. Legal tech is too small a container for what we’re actually trying to do. Worse, the very words—“legal” and “tech”—can alienate the people we most want to help.

Let me explain.

Start with the word legal. For most people, especially those who are poor, working-class, or marginalized, the word legal doesn’t suggest help—it suggests fear. Legal means eviction, deportation, arrest, fines, court dates, missed work, and unfamiliar systems. It conjures bureaucracies, not solutions. It reminds people of what they don’t have: status, representation, protection.

Now consider the word tech. For a small, well-funded circle, tech signals innovation, power, and progress. But for everyone else, it suggests opacity, disconnection, and complexity. It evokes glitchy portals, unanswered help tickets, and AI systems they don’t trust and don’t understand.

Put together, legal tech sounds like a product made for courts or lawyers—not for people navigating broken systems. It centers the system and its lawyers, not the individual. It tells us what the tool is, not what it does.

But the work so many of us are doing in this space—at Just-Tech, at Upsolve, at Suffolk Law School, at Stanford-  community-based labs around the world—isn’t about legal tech for its own sake. It’s about helping people avoid homelessness, stabilize their families, stay in school, get out of jail, keep their kids, and live with dignity. It’s about life solutions.

“life solutions.”

Because that’s the real goal. We are not solving “legal problems.” We are solving human problems that happen to intersect with the legal system. When a tenant faces eviction, it’s not a “housing law issue.” It’s a crisis of shelter, stability, and survival. When an immigrant faces deportation, it’s not an “immigration law challenge.” It’s a crisis of safety, family separation, and identity.

The law is not the point. It’s the obstacle.

And so, the tools we build should not be marketed or measured by how well they integrate with the courts or mimic legal processes. They should not center lawyers and their workflows. 

They should be judged by how effectively they change lives. Did the user avoid eviction? Did they get benefits? Did they find safety? Did they experience justice?

We don’t need more “legal tech” products. We need more tools that talk like people, adapt like humans, and deliver like normal services. We need design that starts with the crisis, not the code.

Reframing this work as life solutions does more than change language—it changes our priorities. It forces us to ask: Who is this for? What do they need? What does success actually look like? And it centers us, rightly, on outcomes rather than outputs.

Calling this work “life solutions” also makes space for interdisciplinary collaboration. Social workers, educators, community organizers, and behavioral scientists have long approached problems from a human-first perspective. When we move away from “legal tech” and toward “life solutions,” we invite those disciplines in—and we build better tools because of it.

This isn’t just about branding. It’s about justice. Because the people who need these tools most aren’t browsing app stores for “legal tech” platforms. They’re dealing with missed paychecks, abusive landlords, and school expulsion notices. If we want to meet them where they are, we have to speak their language—and design from their lives, not our labs.

So yes, let’s keep building. Let’s keep iterating. Let’s keep pushing technology to meet the moment. But let’s stop calling it “legal tech,” as if that’s all it is. Let’s start calling it what it really is:

Life solutions.

Because law is just the means. People are the end.