Artificial Intelligence Policies for Volunteers Working with Free Law Project

Thank you for helping Free Law Project (“FLP”) carry out its mission of expanding access to justice through the development of legal technologies. Your assistance will help us develop systems that remove barriers for individuals seeking to understand and use the law. As a volunteer with FLP, you will be making vital contributions to our development of consequential legal technologies.

Because the use of AI systems involves certain risks and has real world consequences, it is important that we develop these systems responsibly. Following the practices below will help us identify, avoid, and mitigate risks while getting the most out of the AI-powered tools and services we make available.

Foundational Rule: A person must stand behind every work product. AI is a tool, not a contributor. If you cannot explain, defend, and take ownership of a work product, it is not ready to submit, commit, or publish.

Required practices to ensure responsible AI use. We ask our volunteers to follow four basic principles detailed below when using AI in their work: 1) human accountability for AI use; 2) log in, opt out; 3) responsible data handling, and 4) reporting incidents.

Human Accountability for AI Use

You should not contribute to any areas of the codebase that you do not understand, unless using AI to make simple, self-contained changes (such as fixing typos) that require no knowledge of the surrounding system to verify. If you are working on a specific project with FLP staff, please reach out to your contact at FLP for project-specific guidance. In all cases involving potential contributions to the codebase, we ask that you disclose the specific AI model used in that contribution and also certify that you have reviewed the output. This simple disclosure would look like this: “Co-authored by [Claude Opus 4.8].”

Log In, Opt Out

You are free to use any AI assistant in your work so long as you can opt out of training the third-party model on your inputs. FLP recognizes that individuals have access to different AI resources and often prefer using different models to complete different tasks. However, before using any third-party AI assistant, you must take the following steps:

1. Authenticate to your user account.
2. Opt-out of the AI assistant’s training and data collection (e.g., “Help Improve Claude”).

This policy addresses the fact that the AI systems you interact with may seek to use your interactions to train their models for other purposes, and that some of those interactions may involve sensitive information. For this reason, FLP prefers that data related to its work not be used to train third-party foundation models.

Responsible Data Handling

Below we list the most common types of information you may work with and the conditions under which it can or cannot be fed into an AI assistant. If you encounter a type of information not listed here, consult with a member of the internal AI team.

Reporting Incidents

Mistakes in the use of AI will happen. Incident reporting helps FLP to learn from these mistakes. If AI-assisted work introduces an error into published code, communications, or contractual commitments, immediately report the error to your contact at FLP or to report@free.law. Good faith error reporting is encouraged.

Include the following information:

• The AI tool used and the purpose it was used for
• The error identified
• The data or work product affected
• The steps already taken to correct or resolve the issue

FLP will maintain an anonymous internal record of all reported incidents and responses.

Version: August 10, 2026