Evening the Odds
How Technology Helps This Nonprofit Seek Accountability for Human Rights Crimes
In honor of the annual National Celebration of Pro Bono approaching next week, we’re proud to highlight the impactful work of Everlaw for Good partners the Center for Justice and Accountability and the pro bono practice at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. The Center for Justice and Accountability is a finalist for this year’s Everlaw for Good Award (nominated by their partners at Wilson Sonsini), which will be presented at the Everlaw Summit next week in San Francisco.
The Center for Justice and Accountability (CJA) is a human rights nonprofit that works on behalf of victims of atrocity crimes, including torture, genocide, and war crimes. While CJA is based in the United States, they use a unique combination of tools including litigation, transitional justice, and policy to bring some of the worst alleged perpetrators of human rights abuses to justice around the world.
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati is an AmLaw 50 (and AmLaw Pro Bono 50) law firm with a rich history of supporting pro bono work. They’ve been partnering with CJA for more than 20 years, and have deep expertise across a variety of access to justice issue areas.
An Uneven Playing Field
Historically, nonprofits do not have the same resources and backing as law firms, corporations, or government agencies as they take on complex cases. For Claret Vargas and Daniel McLaughlin, two senior attorneys at CJA, bringing litigation in this space means organizing thousands of documents, from many different sources and often years or decades old. For a team of only five staff attorneys, the ability to organize documents and sift through discovery quickly can be the difference between pursuing a case and dropping it.
“I can reach back to the time where we just had a local server where we stored all of our documents on. We didn't even have a shared cloud platform or anything like that [...] we had very limited tools to review documentation.”
- Daniel McLaughlin, Senior Staff Attorney, CJA
Technologies to support discovery in cases like these have become widely available over the years, but they are often cost-prohibitive for nonprofit organizations like CJA. As Luke Liss, Pro Bono Partner at Wilson Sonsini, says, it’s unusual for legal tech companies to invest in offering their services for access to justice.
“When you can leverage technology for access to justice, it’s an opportunity to make an impact on so many levels. [...] It’s unprecedented for a vendor to actually be willing to get involved in large-scale impact litigation on a pro bono basis. It just hasn’t happened until, essentially, Everlaw for Good.”
- Luke Liss, Pro Bono Partner, Wilson Sonsini
The Impact of Technology
CJA happened upon Everlaw through a law firm partner back in 2019 while describing their discovery workflows and needs. They saw the opportunity for efficiency gains right away, and the product was available free of charge through the Everlaw for Good program.
In one case, CJA had started the investigation before getting access to Everlaw and was trying to process and review thousands of pages of documents manually. Once they had those documents in Everlaw, they were able to speed up the process dramatically — a transition that Vargas called “transformative.” She remembers the first week that CJA started using Everlaw: “It was almost like a party, we could not believe how fast we could do these things.”
CJA found specific value in many Everlaw features. Automatic OCR helped them scoop up all the information available and make it instantly readable and searchable. Foreign language detection and built-in translation tooling helped attorneys perform review regardless of their language skills. Expedited review and search helped them ensure they had reviewed the entire database, and enabled them to identify patterns much more quickly — for example, reviewing past interviews from other proceedings or finding every document that referred to a particular witness. Everlaw’s collaboration features enabled them to share, comment, and tag documents directly in the platform, so they could stay in sync with partners throughout the case. The security capabilities of a cloud-native, privacy-first platform gave them confidence in uploading sensitive data about clients and witnesses at risk of retaliation in their home countries.
For Wilson Sonsini’s part, they have seen a lot of value from CJA being able to own and control the databases in the cases they partner on. Liss noted that this takes the administrative burden off of the law firm, and enables the subject matter expert — the nonprofit — to be in the driver’s seat controlling and organizing the data.
Outcomes Enabled
Vargas says Everlaw has enabled CJA to “punch above our weight,” enabling them to review mountains of documents and sometimes identify perpetrators who were not previously on their radar screen. She estimates that Everlaw has saved the organization “hours of time in our preparation” just in the small interactions between team members in a case - emails, text messages, phone calls. Liss agrees, sharing that Everlaw enables his pro bono teams to get to the heart of the matter much more quickly and calling it a “force multiplier” for their work.
More broadly, McLaughlin emphasizes how the platform helps clients to finally have their day in court. “For a U.S. judge to say, ‘Yes, that man who's over there in the defendant's dock, he did those things to you or to your family. He is responsible. He is legally accountable’ — to be able to play some role in that journey is quite humbling, but it's also quite uplifting.”
Part of CJA’s theory of change is that rulings in the U.S. will have knock-on effects in the countries where the atrocities were committed, so that future actors will think twice. Vargas and McLaughlin noted that it is hard to quantify that impact, but their hope is that this work ensures accountability and creates a safer and more just world.
Looking to the Future
CJA is also excited about how emerging technological innovations can help them pursue even more justice going forward.
“I am very excited, and I'm starting to learn more about the use of AI. Being able to process information of the volume that is required to talk about widespread or systematic violations, I think, is going to impact the ability of our partners to identify perpetrators and prove patterns of behavior. I'm excited to find out what else it will enable us to do.”
- Claret Vargas, Senior Staff Attorney, CJA
Everlaw is proud and honored to be able to support CJA and Wilson Sonsini in their pursuit of global justice, through today’s technology and tomorrow’s. Other nonprofit organizations and pro bono practices are encouraged to check out Everlaw for Good and to get in touch at everlawforgood@everlaw.com if interested.
