In November 2025, justice leaders, technologists, and policymakers from around the world gathered in Madrid for the OECD Global Roundtable on Equal Access to Justice. The theme, Shaping the Future of Justice: Building a System that Earns Trust and Delivers Shared Prosperity, captured the urgency and ambition of the moment. This work is especially urgent now, as justice systems around the world face rising demand, shrinking resources, and rapidly evolving technology. The decisions we make now will determine whether innovation strengthens or undermines public trust.

AI and Justice Sector Transformation Panel moderated by Javier Hernández Díez (Spain), featuring Jennifer N. Sellitti (U.S.), Margit Lauri (Estonia), Hilla Staib (European Commission), and Karim Benyekhlef (Canada).

Across two days of high-level discussions, one message rang clear: justice systems must evolve not only to keep pace with rapidly advancing technologies like AI, but also to ensure that human judgment, empathy, and dignity remain central to the way people experience justice.

As the Public Defender for New Jersey, I was honored to contribute to this conversation, particularly on issues at the intersection of technology, fairness, and access to justice. What I witnessed in Madrid was global recognition that the future of justice is data-informed and AI-enabled, but always centered on the people we serve.

A Global Commitment to Justice as a Public Service

The OECD has more than 60 years of experience shaping evidence-based international standards. It convened this event to explore how justice systems can deliver both legal outcomes and socio-economic well-being. Justice, as several speakers emphasized, is not a luxury. It is a strategic public service essential to democratic resilience, public trust, and economic competitiveness. When systems are transparent, predictable, and responsive, they enable everything from business innovation to community stability. When they fail, vulnerabilities deepen, inequalities widen, and trust erodes.

Technology, AI, and the Future of Fairness

The New Jersey Office of the Public Defender (NJOPD) is made up of more than 1,300 dedicated employees across 66 offices in 21 counties. Together, our lawyers, investigators, and support staff provide essential representation to people who cannot afford an attorney. We handle a wide range of matters: felony-level criminal defense, youth defense, parental and child representation in abuse and neglect cases, and the defense of individuals facing civil commitment due to mental illness. 

The OECD session I participated in, AI and Justice Sector Transformation, focused on how artificial intelligence can help justice systems manage rising demand, limited resources, and increasingly complex legal environments. As a statewide system, NJOPD is uniquely positioned to leverage state resources and infrastructure to adopt technology that meaningfully improves our workflows and the services we provide to the people of New Jersey.

I opened my remarks with three questions that guide my work as the leader of New Jersey’s statewide public defender system:

1. What if technology could help us be more human?
2. What if it could give us the time, focus, and flexibility to return to the essence of our work?
3. What if it could free lawyers from the routine and the mundane, allowing them to think more deeply and serve more effectively?

These questions are not abstract for public defenders. The truth is that the most significant challenge in public defense is not case complexity. It is time. When caseloads rise, time shrinks. And when time shrinks, so does the space for listening, thinking, and building trust with the people we serve – the very things that distinguish ordinary representation from the extraordinary service public defenders provide every day.

One of my top priorities when I assumed my position in February 2024 was reducing caseload burdens on public defender staff, not by hiring more lawyers, but by finding smarter ways to streamline workflows.

AI has become a critical part of our agency’s transformation.

How New Jersey Is Using AI to Strengthen Access to Justice

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has provided state agencies with powerful support and tools. At the OECD panel, I shared New Jersey’s three-part strategy for integrating AI responsibly and effectively at the Office of the Public Defender (NJOPD):

1. Leveraging Secure, State-Built Tools

New Jersey’s AI Assistant is a secure, state-hosted generative AI platform that enables our lawyers to draft motions, summarize transcripts, and conduct research without compromising confidentiality. Unlike public AI systems, this tool runs entirely on government infrastructure, ensuring privacy for the sensitive cases we manage. This alone has transformed workflows, turning hours into minutes and freeing time for client meetings, evidence review, and courtroom preparation.

2. Building Our Own Tools for Legal Practice

The New Jersey State Office of Innovation was created by Governor Murphy in 2018, with the appointment of Dr. Beth Simone Noveck as the State’s first Chief Innovation Officer. The Office partners with state agencies to solve public problems through innovative policy and technology. We turned to the Office with a challenge we call “Frankenbriefing,” public defender jargon for the practice of cutting and pasting from old briefs to create new ones. Frankenbriefing creates two significant issues: it is time-consuming, and it offers no assurance that lawyers are relying on accurate or up-to-date caselaw.

Working with the Office of Innovation and Princeton University, we developed a secure AI brief bank. Public defenders can now enter a legal question and receive content vetted by NJOPD experts. Our lawyers still exercise full professional judgment and verify all results, but the tool eliminates the most tedious part of brief writing. What once took hours – gathering the core legal arguments – now takes seconds. Those hours can now be spent on the more creative parts of brief writing, such as developing compelling fact sections, advancing novel arguments, and formatting.

3. Shaping Statewide AI Standards

We insisted that conversations about legal technology not ignore the communities public defenders serve. Our office played a key role in the judiciary and state bar working groups, pushing for guidance that protects defendants, promotes transparency, and acknowledges how AI can disproportionately harm vulnerable populations.

Public defenders have always occupied a dual role in the justice system: we are both sword and shield. We speak truth to power in the courtroom, and we are responsible for keeping out evidence that is irrelevant, unreliable, or scientifically unsound.

AI raises profound concerns on both fronts. These systems can reproduce and amplify racial bias embedded in historical data and flawed algorithms. Predictive policing is one example, where AI tools can concentrate enforcement in minority neighborhoods, leading to over-policing and inflated crime statistics that entrench existing inequities.

AI in forensic science presents similar dangers. “Black box” software used to analyze DNA, fingerprints, or other evidence blurs the line between human and machine judgment, making it difficult for the defense to understand or challenge the basis of its conclusions. Public defenders are uniquely positioned to confront these risks by scrutinizing AI tools and filing evidentiary motions. But to do so, we must stay on the cutting edge, not only in using AI as a tool, but in educating courts and policymakers about its inherent dangers.

We must ensure that technological advances do not reinforce inequality, but instead strengthen the fairness, equity, and justice on which our legal system depends. Across New Jersey, and now the world, we have helped shape recommendations on:

• Oversight of forensic algorithms

• The dangers of predictive policing

• Transparency in automated evidence analysis

• Bias mitigation in predictive tools; and

• Reliability standards for the admissibility of AI-augmented or AI-generated evidence.

Being Human Matters Most

Despite the impressive innovations on display at the OECD Conference, leaders from around the world agreed that using technology to reach people matters most. NJOPD’s message was consistent: technology will not define the future of public defense. Our lawyers will.

In her closing remarks on November 13, OECD Deputy Secretary-General Mary Beth Goodman spotlighted NJOPD’s innovative work.

Technology may make us faster, but only public defenders can make us fairer.

Technology may help us process information, but only public defenders can provide empathy and compassion to the people we serve. Technology may draft, summarize, and organize, but it cannot understand a person’s fear, stand next to them in their darkest hour, or fight for their dignity. Only public defenders can do that.

Looking Ahead: A Global Movement for a Fairer System

The OECD Roundtable signaled the emergence of a global movement, one in which countries recognize that justice systems must be proactive, rooted in community, and designed around the lived experiences of the people who benefit from them.

For New Jersey, participating in this global dialogue reaffirmed that we are on the right path, but also that we have more to learn and more to share. As justice systems evolve, the measure of success will not be how quickly we adopt new technologies, but how effectively we use them to enhance fairness, reduce inequality, and strengthen trust. 

Moving forward, our challenges will be building our IT infrastructure to support AI scaling, developing a holistic model in which technology teams are embedded within attorney offices, and transitioning from internal to customer-facing AI systems. Our call to action is to commit to deliberate, responsible innovation using technology not as an end in itself, but as a tool to build trust. 

What I brought home from Madrid reinforced what I already knew: our greatest innovations will always be the ones that make us better at seeing, hearing, and standing with the people we serve.