Helping Self-Represented Litigants Navigate AI for Legal Uses

By Alan Kilpatrick

Information literacy remains constant, even as technology changes. As more members of the public turn to GenAI tools for answers to legal questions, legal information professionals and law libraries have a critical role in helping people use these tools more safely by building GenAI information literacy among the public. This includes explaining how GenAI works, the markers of credible legal information regardless of source, tool, or technology, the risks of relying on GenAI outputs, effective prompting skills, where to find credible sources of legal information, and options for legal assistance.

On April 15, 2026, I spoke about this topic in Helping Self-Represented Litigants Navigate AI for Legal Uses, a webinar I presented with Jennifer Leitch and Annette Demers for the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD) Professional Development Committee:

Self-represented litigants (SRL) are increasingly relying on AI to aid them in preparation of court documents. Law librarians are well-positioned to advise SRL on appropriate and inappropriate uses of AI. In this session, you’ll hear more about how SRL are being warned by the courts for submitting hallucinated cases. Learn more about the vulnerabilities of SRL and sources for assistance for them. Learn about how law librarians are helping SRL navigate the pitfalls of AI, as well as practical tips and advice that law librarians can provide.

The recorded webinar is available for purchase and viewing from the CALL/ACBD website.

You can read my portion of the webinar, which highlighted a new resource from the Saskatchewan Access to Legal Information initiative called Using GenAI Tools to Obtain Legal Information, below:

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Public access to legal information is a critical need. What does the data tell us? In Saskatchewan, for example, 19% of people will experience at least one serious legal problem in a three-year period, with marginalized individuals reporting higher rates. Unresolved legal problems often multiply, leading to additional legal issues and negative health, economic, and social consequences.

Access to legal information is a consistently identified need, and 40% of individuals in Saskatchewan experiencing a legal problem search the internet for legal information. This data is from the 2021 Statistics Canada Saskatchewan Legal Problems Survey, and the 2023 CREATE Justice Legal Data Scan and Needs Assessment for Saskatchewan. People rely on access to legal information to access justice. Why? Legal information builds awareness of legal rights, responsibilities, and options, and may prompt an individual to resolve their legal issue or seek advice from a legal professional.

Yet, as technology evolves, the ways people seek legal information are changing, introducing new information literacy challenges in ensuring that the information they receive is accurate and applicable. Public use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools is now commonplace, and GenAI outputs are increasingly embedded in most digital technologies, including summaries that appear at the top of internet search results. Members of the public with questions about the law or legal issues they are experiencing are turning to GenAI tools for the answers.

As the availability of GenAI grows, it is becoming harder for the public to distinguish credible legal information from misinformation. The quality of legal information generated by GenAI tools can vary significantly and may be incorrect, inaccurate, out of date, or may be based on information from jurisdictions that do not apply. Ultimately, it is important for the public to understand how to safely and effectively use GenAI tools when searching for legal information, if they choose to do so.

How can legal information professionals help? Legal information professionals can help build information literacy among the public by explaining how GenAI works, the markers of credible legal information (regardless of the source, the tool, or even the technology that generated the information), the risks of relying on legal information produced by GenAI, effective prompting skills, directing the public to reliable external sources of legal information, and, when necessary, making effective referrals to legal assistance and advice options. My hope is that you will leave today’s webinar with greater confidence and knowledge to assist members of the public seeking legal information on using GenAI tools in a more informed and effective way.

Recognizing the reality that public use of GenAI is increasing, the Saskatchewan Access to Legal Information (SALI) initiative recently developed a practical guide to support informed use of GenAI tools called Using GenAI Tools to Obtain Legal Information, which I would like to share with you as an example of how legal information professionals can assist people with the use of GenAI tools. Please feel free to use the guide in your workplace to assist public patrons or to adapt and modify it for your jurisdiction and use. I have put the link in the chat.  

SALI is a collaborative initiative of legal information providers in Saskatchewan that I coordinate, dedicated to making it easier to connect with credible legal information. SALI does this by creating resources and publishing a newsletter to help Saskatchewan’s trusted intermediary community (community organizations, front-line service providers, and libraries) better connect their members of the public (their public patrons/clients) with information about the law, options for legal advice/assistance, and community support. You can see SALI’s other resources on the screen here. SALI’s aim is to enhance the capacity of trusted intermediaries so they can more quickly and confidently connect members of the public with reliable legal information and assistance.

SALI’s newest resource, the Using GenAI Tools to Obtain Legal Information guide, is rooted in strong information literacy practices and outlines the key ways trusted intermediaries can support the public in safely using GenAI tools to obtain legal information: by defining GenAI, highlighting what makes legal information credible, identifying the risks, suggesting effective prompting, and directing to reputable sources of legal information. It is primarily designed to help trusted intermediaries in any type of organization in Saskatchewan (community organizations, front-line service providers, and libraries) guide the public in using GenAI tools. However, it is also designed to be directly helpful to the public.

The original conception for the guide emerged in early 2024 from a seminar course on access to justice at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law. The students researched and created guides for public/lawyer use of GenAI and ultimately suggested that SALI create and maintain such a guide upon the course’s conclusion. Our initial draft of the guide was several pages long. However, we felt that potential GenAI users would not be likely to read a lengthy document. We designed the published version of the guide you see here very intentionally, with lots of white space, and to be readable and immediately accessible to any potential GenAI user. The first two pages of the guide (the Key Points) constitute the absolute least we would want someone to know before using GenAI tools to obtain legal information. The remaining four pages (the Learn More) constitute what we would like someone to know and hope they will take the time to read.

The guide starts by explaining why we created it in response to the growing public use of GenAI tools. Then, it defines GenAI, indicating it does not think independently, but generates outputs based on learned structures and predictions. We acknowledge that GenAI tools have the potential to increase access to legal information, but that several concerns remain about GenAI. This is followed by a hyperlinked table of contents for the guide: the key points and the learn more. The second page of the guide contains the key points, organized in a flowchart: before, during, and after using GenAI tools to obtain legal information. These key points include links to supplemental content in the Learn More section of the guide, where the reader can, of course, learn more about the concepts identified in the key points.    

Before even using GenAI to obtain legal information, the guide states that the user must understand what makes legal information credible, regardless of the format, source, tool, or technology used to create it, indicating that one must consider the source (author), currency (legal information must be up to date), and jurisdiction (the legal information must relate to the jurisdiction in question). When creating the guide, we felt it was important to start from an information literacy perspective and highlight what makes legal information credible. While GenAI may be a new technology, the markers of what makes information credible have not changed. I felt this perspective (the information professional librarian perspective) was missing from many other GenAI guides, which largely focused on the technological aspects of GenAI or presented the perspectives of lawyers. Our perspective on information literacy is a key way that we can assist GenAI users.

Next, the guide indicates that the user must understand the type of GenAI tool they intend to search for and determine whether it generates outputs from large, uncurated datasets or curated datasets. This distinction is not well understood by any user of GenAI (public or lawyers), and we focused on articulating this distinction in plain language. Of course, most GenAI tools are uncurated, general-purpose tools that have not been purpose-built for legal information and which carry higher risks (for example, ChatGPT, CoPilot, and Perplexity). Curated tools (for example, British Columbia’s Beagle+ and CanLII Search+), in contrast, are purpose-built for legal information, and they lessen, though not eliminate, the risks. The final step that the guide asks the user to consider and understand before using a GenAI tool is the risks. The primary theme across all the risks presented is that GenAI tools may produce legal information that is not credible (e.g., inaccurate, outdated, or irrelevant to the jurisdiction in question).

During the use of a GenAI tool, the guide instructs the user to consider and understand how to prompt the tool. The guide defines prompting simply as asking a question, stressing that how a question is phrased when entered can improve the accuracy and relevance of the tool’s output, though not eliminate the risk inherent in GenAI tools. Next, the guide explains that multiple prompts (rather than just one) may be required to generate the most relevant content and shows the user how to ask a GenAI tool a legal information question by breaking it down and suggesting its main elements. A GenAI tool should be prompted in a way that makes the area of law, jurisdiction, currency, type of content sought, and situational context clear to the tool. While a GenAI user could certainly enter a single long prompt, we intentionally break the prompting process down to teach the user how to ask a legal information question most effectively, since the guide’s user is envisioned as a trusted intermediary or a member of the public with little legal knowledge. This is another way that legal information professionals can help members of the public using GenAI: effective prompting.   

Finally, after using a GenAI tool to obtain legal information, the guide instructs the user to review the results, verify them by consulting credible, reputable external sources, and, if necessary, seek legal advice. This is where legal information professionals can really play a crucial role in assisting members of the public. We can assist GenAI users by directing them to review the GenAI outputs that have been produced, noting where credible external sources and references are indicated in the outputs, and encouraging these members of the public to move away from the GenAI tool and towards credible, reliable sources of legal information. Beyond simply helping members of the public use GenAI safely and connect them with credible legal information, legal information professionals can also encourage them to seek legal assistance. In most cases, legal information is only a helpful starting point, and members of the public will require more than what legal information professionals are qualified to provide. An effective referral made by a legal information professional, where a member of the public obtains the legal assistance they need, helps them move towards resolving their legal issues.  

GenAI is not going away. Our role is to help people use it safely. Information literacy is constant, even as technology changes.