by Ty Tagami | Jul 7, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A committee created by the Georgia Supreme Court is recommending that the state try letting people with special legal training do limited kinds of attorney work that would give more people access to the justice system.
A three-year pilot program in three parts of the state — rural, urban, and a mid-sized community — would allow the legal community to experiment with expanding legal practice “into new areas with the urgent unmet legal needs of low-income and rural Georgians,” said the report, which was released Monday by the high court’s Study Committee on Legal Regulatory Reform.
In the program, Limited Licensed Legal Practitioners (LLLPs) would be authorized to give legal assistance to landlords and tenants and people with consumer-debt issues. The LLLPs’ would focus on general legal guidance and preparing and drafting forms and documents but would be prohibited from appearing in court or contacting other parties.
“This limited assistance has the potential to make a significant impact in specific classes of cases that are generally high volume, relatively less complex, and involve significant numbers of self-represented parties,” wrote the committee, which was established last year and led by state Supreme Court Justice Carla Wong McMillian.
The committee also recommended letting attorneys collect legal training credit hours for pro bono (free) work. The report noted that some states — including neighboring states Alabama, Florida and Tennessee — give continuing legal education credit for pro bono work. Such ongoing training is required to maintain a license to practice law.
As part of its work, the committee surveyed lawyers. Out of more than 2,200 who responded, more than half agreed that non-attorneys could help address “the civil justice gap,” the report said, although slightly fewer than half were “generally supportive” of the idea.
Even so, the committee pitched the idea to the high court, saying early access to legal services could lead to fewer legal disputes winding up in court.
LLLPs would get training in procedural and substantive law, with an emphasis on ethics and professionalism. There would be a written exam, written portfolio assessment, and observation and shadowing.
The committee noted that the Minnesota Supreme Court recently adopted recommendations from a similar three-year program there called the Legal Paraprofessionals Pilot Project.
The Minnesota pilot was limited to landlord-tenant and family cases, but the recommendation that followed the trial program was to let paraprofessionals provide legal assistance in more legal areas.
Georgia’s committee said these legal helpers could give more people access to the courts.
“The committee finds that the proposed pilot program would increase access to justice for low-income and rural Georgians while protecting the public,” the report said.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 3, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — It started harmlessly enough, with kids using artificial intelligence to cheat on their writing assignments, but the technology has become a palpable threat to society as lawyers and others in the justice system have conducted novel experiments with it and even clearly misused it.
In the five years since OpenAI unleashed Chat GPT-3 on the public, people have found creative and sometimes unwise uses for the technology, including attorneys who harnessed it to write briefs with fake citations.
Recognizing the risk, the Georgia Supreme Court undertook a 10-month review in August and released new recommendations on Thursday. The state’s high court proposes a three-year process to adapt to AI.
It will start with establishing leadership and governance and conclude with new policies and processes for all the courts in Georgia’s judicial system. There will be community engagement, process reviews, education and training, and the establishment of business and technology architectures along the way.
The committee behind the new report, “Artificial Intelligence and Georgia’s Courts,” was led by Justice Andrew A. Pinson. It incorporates observations by the State Bar of Georgia’s Board of Governors, who produced their own report on the risks of AI in early June.
The bar’s report said revisions to a rule of conduct for lawyers was “particularly critical” because it was about their competence and proficiency with technology.
“It is the committee’s assessment GenAI tools will in short order become ubiquitous,” the bar report’s authors wrote.
Pinson’s committee cited numerous examples of AI uses that occurred just during the 10 months of their review process, such as the Indiana Supreme Court’s introduction of AI for voice-to-text transcriptions, the Arizona Supreme Court’s use of AI avatars to deliver news about rulings by their justices, and a family’s use of AI to create a victim impact statement by their dead relative during the sentencing phase of the trial over his road rage death.
“A key challenge the committee faced during its work is the rapidly evolving nature of a technology new to courts and organizations across the country,” Pinson’s committee concluded.
The panel noted acceptable uses for AI such as for research and scheduling, unacceptable uses such as for jury selection and “black box” sentencing algorithms, and potential uses that need more study and testing such as language translation and sentencing and risk assessments.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 2, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Shriners Children’s will establish a new pediatric medical research facility near Georgia Tech, bringing jobs and significant investment, the health-care nonprofit announced Wednesday.
Gov. Brian Kemp touted the new development as “an incredible addition to Georgia’s growing nonprofit, R&D, and life sciences communities.”
Leslie D. Stewart, chairman of the Shriners Children’s board, said the opportunity to collaborate and partner with Georgia Tech made Atlanta the clear choice for locating the new Shriners Children’s Research Institute.
The organization said it would invest more than $153 million in the new location at Science Square, across from Georgia Tech’s North Avenue Research Area.
The new facility will create 470 jobs, according to Kemp’s office, recruiting experts in gene therapies, robotics, artificial intelligence and other areas.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said the Shriners’ decision to locate the new facility in Atlanta was “a powerful commitment to healthier futures for children.” Robb Pitts, the Fulton County Commission chairman, called it a hub for innovation that will bring high-paying jobs and economic growth.
Shriners Children’s is a pediatric health-care system founded by members of the Shriners International fraternity in 1922. It focuses on orthopedic and neuromuscular conditions, burn injuries, spinal cord rehabilitation and cleft lip and palate conditions.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 30, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A hand count of ballots in a primary election race for the Georgia Public Service Commission found a discrepancy, but Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger determined it was not a problem.
The audit of results in all 159 counties for the District 2 Republican contest found one batch of 328 audited ballots had a discrepancy, but it was within an expected margin of error for a hand count, Raffensperger said Monday.
There was no deviation from candidate vote totals, he said.
“County election offices are in great hands,” he said. “Georgia’s system works. This is exactly why I’m leading the push to see our reforms instituted on a national level. This audit shows that our Georgia leads the nation in free, fair, and fast election results.”
Incumbent Republican Commissioner Tim Echols won the June 17 primary with 75.76% of the vote, easily dispatching challenger Lee Muns of Columbia County. Echols, who lives near Hoschton in the Athens area, will take on Democrat Alicia Johnson of Savannah in November.
Raffensperger, who attributed the discrepancy to human error, said the audit was supported by Voting Works and their Arlo auditing software.
Confidence in election integrity continues to be an issue among Republicans. At the state GOP convention in early June, a faction expressed discontent with party leaders when they announced that voting for party positions would be conducted with electronic “clickers” rather than the paper ballots that some wanted.
Some of the nearly 1,700 assembled delegates booed and yelled from the floor that the clickers were not working during practice votes before the real internal elections. Norine Cantor, who lost her bid for a party position, alleged that the convention was “rigged.”
by Ty Tagami | Jun 30, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A program that was intended to improve Georgia’s ranking on indicators of child “well-being” has produced mixed results, according to a state audit.
Georgia lawmakers asked for an examination of the Georgia Family Connection Partnership, which received $30 million in funding in fiscal year 2024, more than a quarter of it from the state.
The special examination by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts found evidence of positive impact on the high school graduation and teen birth rate measures. But the agency found no evidence of a positive impact on three others: child abuse and neglect, low birthweight babies and children in poverty.
The partnership told auditors that the results should be characterized as “promising” instead of “mixed,” but the auditors disagreed, saying it would be “misleading” to do so.
“We also considered that there is limited support in the academic literature to demonstrate collaborative-type entities lead to improved outcomes,” the auditors wrote.
The review was requested by the Georgia House Appropriations Committee, which has a leading role in writing the annual state budget.
Georgia Family Connection (GFC) is a statewide initiative that was established in 1991 after Georgia ranked 48th out of 50 states on the child well-being indicators created by an organization called Kids Count.
The GFC grew as state lawmakers allocated funding. Then, in 2001, a new state-level organization called Georgia Family Connection Partnership was created. By the next year, all 159 Georgia counties had joined the partnership.
In addition to state funding — $8.3 million in fiscal 2024 — the program gets federal, local and private money.
“Although the Partnership and collaboratives receive a state appropriation, there is no statute outlining their responsibilities,” the auditors noted. They found that the partnership’s strength is also a weakness: it operates on a unique, decentralized model. This allows for local decision making but “creates challenges for ensuring impact,” the auditors wrote.
Their report makes no recommendations to state lawmakers. It notes that the program is unique in the United States, but three states have programs with similar elements: Alabama, Florida and Tennessee.
