During the spring semester, students and faculty in the Law School’s Tenants Advocacy Practicum investigated how new advances in technology can help more people access resources to solve their housing legal issues.
The practicum’s main client source is the Tenants Legal Hotline, a pro bono project where students, supervised by lawyers, help tenants with issues like security deposits and eviction defense. A key feature of the hotline is Teny, a chatbot created in 2022, which covers tenants’ rights. This spring, Information Science students worked to improve Teny by interviewing users and addressing common issues.
Simultaneously, a group of practicum students led by Eliza Hong ’24 created a generative AI program for internal use by students who are researching cases. This was done in collaboration with the legal technology company Josef, using its generative AI program called JosefQ.
Teny began as Hong’s idea in the Social Entrepreneurship class at the Law School. Since then, the chatbot was featured in the New York Statewide Civil Legal Aid Technology Conference and the AI was presented at the JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, along with a working paper.
