At the turn of the millennium, during her teens and early twenties, Heather Chase was addicted to methamphetamine.
To fund her addiction, she broke into cars and homes and forged checks, leading to several arrests and a year in jail. But she got sober in 2004 after attending a court-ordered recovery program in Salt Lake City.
She moved on, ultimately graduating college in 2014 and earning a master’s degree in 2015. Today, she runs the same nonprofit recovery center she attended, called the Haven, where she has worked for 18 years and now serves as executive director.
“It’s like a CEO for a nonprofit, but not as cool sounding,” she says.
Staying ahead of the paper trail
Chase’s last criminal offense was in 2002, she says. But her record followed her for two decades, complicating every step of her life. Landlords repeatedly denied her housing applications, while she sank her money into fruitless $30 rental application fees.
“When you are falling below the poverty line making very little income because of your criminal record, that’s a lot of money,” she says. Even after she became executive director at the Haven in 2015, at one point Utah’s state government said she could not be alone with clients at the center because of her record.
So in 2023, Chase went through the legal process of clearing her record, known as expungement. Expungement is available to people who have committed certain types of crimes and have remained crime-free for some designated amount of time, among other requirements that vary by state.
To clear her record, Chase used an online tool made by Rasa Legal, a company operating in Utah and Arizona, that uses generative AI and other automation software to accelerate the expungement process.
“We’re trying to automate everything that doesn’t require creativity or judgment,” says Noella Sudbury, the founder and CEO of Rasa. “For expungement, that’s about 90% of the work.”
Prior to using Rasa’s tool, Chase had looked into clearing her record herself, but found the process too onerous to complete. It would require her to physically travel to every jurisdiction she’d ever been arrested to request her records.
A long, hard road
The American judicial system organizes documentation based on cases, rather than individuals, and “that makes it really difficult for a person to see where all their cases are across the state in one place,” says Sudbury.
If Chase had pulled those records, the state would then use them to determine her eligibility for expungement.
“I did not have it in me to spend a year of my time going around and pulling all these records, especially when some of the counties are over an hour away,” Chase says. That’s not to mention the emotional stress she felt revisiting that era of her life.
In contrast, Rasa’s tool automatically determines clients’ eligibility. The company has entered into agreements with state and local courts in Utah and Arizona that allows them to aggregate their criminal records into a centralized platform.
The client pays $15, or $5 if they’re willing to submit some demographic information, to learn what is on their record in under three minutes and whether those records are eligible for expungement. If they are, Rasa provides legal services for a flat fee of $250 to those individuals to help them get through the process.
It’s significantly cheaper than the conventional route, where the person seeking expungement hires a lawyer for several thousand dollars.
Using AI can save a lot of money for legal relief
Some of those savings come from using generative AI. Rasa uses generative AI to help clients write a document known as a petition for expungement, to be submitted to the court.
This document is a personal statement that explains the client’s motivation to clear their record and remain free of crimes, whether it is to get a job or to volunteer in their child’s school.
The client answers a questionnaire and Rasa’s generative AI model produces a first draft of this petition. A lawyer reviews and edits that draft before submitting it to the judicial system.
“We don’t just file it straight with the court, but it saves us a ton of time,” says Sudbury. Rasa’s team includes just three lawyers.
The results seem promising. Since September 2022, when Rasa launched, 22,000 people have used the company’s tools, with 5,000 people of them having successfully cleared their records.
By comparison, Sudbury used to run free legal clinics in the 2010’s, which could help about 400 people clear their records a year. Chase’s recovery center also offers Rasa’s expungement services to employees as a benefit.
The need for these tools have grown recently, as many states have expanded legal relief, which has increased the number of people eligible for expungement. In the last decade and a half, 30 states have passed laws to reclassify or downgrade charges associated with nonviolent property or drug crimes.
Passed in 2017, California’s Proposition 64, which legalized recreational use of marijuana, also provided a path for those convicted of marijuana-related crimes to downgrade or clear their convictions.
But the process is still too slow
A speedier expungement process could help more people clear their records.
A 2020 study found that less than 10% of people eligible for legal relief, such as expungement, actually go through with it. That leaves some 20 to 30 million American adults, or about a third of people with criminal records, living in this so-called “second chance” gap.
“I call it America’s paper prisons,” says Colleen Chien, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the study. “It’s the idea that red tape, not steel bars, are holding people back.”
Chien, too, thinks generative AI could help with expungement. In a similar effort to Rasa’s tool, Chien has tested a proof-of-concept chatbot based on ChatGPT to help people identify whether they are eligible for expungement in the state of Arizona. The LLMs are especially useful because they can respond to users in other languages, says Chien.
Recipients of expungement get a new lease on life.
“There’s just a freedom in having your record cleared and knowing that you have fulfilled your obligation to society many, many years ago,” says Chase. “You’ve done your time; you’ve paid your fines; you’ve completed your probation or parole and all the court recommendations and requirements. It’s finished.”
It also makes practical tasks like finding a job or renting an apartment easier. Under most state laws, after record sealing or expungement, a person is no longer legally bound to report their criminal record on job and housing applications.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act, passed in 1970, also requires background check companies to remove these records from their databases.
“Sealing and expungement are typically very effective at helping someone pass a background check,” says Sudbury.
Legal and AI fight to change stigma
Rasa also offers a model of how lawyers could responsibly integrate AI into their work. Ultimately, humans review whatever their technology generates.
“It’s really important that humans and technology work together to file things that are accurate,” says Sudbury. She calls generative AI “toddler software.” “Would I just allow AI to do this on its own? No way.”
Their practice contrasts with recent headlines where lawyers have been sanctioned for citing nonexistent ChatGPT-invented court cases. In addition, to protect clients’ privacy, Rasa uses an in-house AI model.
However, Chien cautions that technological-based solutions are not a silver bullet.
“AI removes friction, but it doesn’t change the fundamental dysfunctions that exist in the system,” says Chien.
AI helps, but it won’t solve the problem, which is the number of people who qualify for relief who can’t get it is simply too large.
“My fear is that in automation, we will become satisfied with the current systems, rather than really thinking about the root causes of the problems and trying to change the power dynamic,” she says.
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