The Court Innovation fund
A thriving justice system requires responsive, modern, and fair courts. As the nexus of the criminal and civil justice systems, state and local courts are how Americans experience the law and too often those Americans are met with impossible hurdles: Byzantine systems, impenetrable language, and confounding forms compound people’s problems, rather than solving them.
Taking on 99% of all American legal disputes, these institutions are critical levers for systemic change, shaping long-term solutions for not only criminal justice, but economic mobility, housing stability, and family well-being. This makes courts a high leverage point for society-wide reform. And because they’ve been long overlooked by legislators and philanthropists, there is tremendous potential for high impact investment.
This is why we are building the Court Innovation Fund at Renaissance Philanthropy, a new 4-year, $25 million philanthropic effort. This catalytic fund will build a field of practitioners that will innovate courts and transform the institution’s role in delivering justice by investing in new technology, sector-wide talent, and institutional capacity. This fund will drive system improvements that benefit at least 10 million Americans. It will also expand the pipeline of funders supporting court innovation, enhance court capabilities to meet public needs, build a robust community of practice, and set a strategic direction for the future of justice reform.
Our Fund identifies bottlenecks that constrict justice and support public goods that overcome these challenges. Two examples illustrate of our theory of change:
Courts are limited by their case management systems (CMS). Whether it’s being able to share data or build functionality on top of a CMS, vendors often determine a court’s technical functionality. We are focused on breaking that control through technology (scaling agnostic data exchange software, allowing courts to build beyond their vendors), training staff (increasing court buying sophistication), and litigation.
The number of state and local courts using generative AI is expected to double in the next year. However, no one is building benchmarks to validate GenAI being used by courts. Without standardization, evaluation, and training around GenAI, these tools can unaccountably take away people’s freedom and demolish their economic well-being. We are going to bring accountability to court AI by supporting the development of novel benchmark datasets that ensure that AI deployed in courts is accurate, unbiased, and aiding access to justice–not eroding it.
Now is the time to make court innovation a national priority. As criminal justice reform and federal justice efforts falter and economic precarity lead to exploding dockets, modernizing state and local courts offers a pragmatic and impactful path to strengthening our communities and democratic systems by delivering equal justice for all.
If you are interested in learning more, please email me at jason.tashea@renphil.org.