CLEO releases progress report on GenAI and Guided Pathways

CLEO has released a new progress report on Generative AI: Opportunities to enhance CLEO’s Guided Pathways. This marks a major milestone in our 3-year research initiative exploring how Generative AI (GenAI) could safely and meaningfully improve access to justice for self represented people.

This report builds on the groundwork laid in our October 2024 discussion paper. The paper examined how GenAI might help Guided Pathways users craft clearer legal narratives, receive real-time support, and better understand next steps in their legal matters.

The new progress report outlines what we’ve learned to date, including:

• Promising early results from CLEO’s GenAI narrative prototype.
  The prototype shows potential to help users generate more coherent, compelling affidavits and other narratives using the structured information already collected through Guided Pathways. It was developed in partnership with researchers at McGill Law and the Montreal Cyberjustice Laboratory.
• A responsible AI approach under development.
  Our approach is grounded in CLEO’s longstanding design principles of ease of use, accessibility, privacy and security, and long-term sustainability. And it’s aligned with evolving best privacy practices.

The progress report shares CLEO’s early insights, ongoing testing, and next steps as this work continues. Our goal is to explore GenAI responsibly, transparently, and in collaboration with community and justice sector partners. We want to ensure our innovations truly support the people who rely on CLEO for accessible, high-quality public legal information.

Read the full progress report to learn more about what we’ve learned and where the research is headed next.