Justice may promise equality, but in practice, it often hinges on whether someone can find the right legal representation — or any at all. I saw this firsthand during a volunteer shift at a local blood drive when a single mother asked if I knew where she could find legal help. I wasn’t a lawyer — just a volunteer — but her question unraveled into a maze of paywalls, confusing options and empty promises. What looked like a simple search revealed a deeper problem: a lack of transparency, consistency and trustworthiness in the legal search process itself. Her experience wasn’t an outlier — it was a window into a broader, broken system.
This story is part of a wider crisis, one playing out in cities across America, where the path to legal support is full of barriers, especially for people of color. In Georgia, racial disparities in arrests, probations, fines and incarcerations underscore systemic bias. In Metro Atlanta, where over half the population identify as people of color, access to quality legal help is often the difference between unjust imprisonment and a fair trial.
Yet finding legal help is harder than it should be. It’s not just the cost; it’s the inefficiency. Intake forms get repeated, and every missed call or unanswered inquiry isn’t just a delay, it’s a lost opportunity for both client and lawyer. In fact, the legal industry has one of the highest missed-call rates of any sector. Roughly 28% of client calls go unanswered, according Call Rail, a call tracking service. When callers are met with voicemail, most won’t even bother to leave a message; about 85% hang up without a word, and 20% immediately contact a different firm, according to TeleWizard AI. In an age of instant communication, people seeking legal help expect responsiveness. When they don’t get it, they move on—potentially leaving urgent legal needs unmet and leaving firms with business slipping through their fingers. People bounce between lawyers who are unavailable, unaffordable, or unfit for their case. The legal system overwhelms people at their most vulnerable.
But now, a new student-led project called Lawdie is aiding the process.
A team at Georgia Tech set out to reimagine how legal help is found — not by listing every firm, but by first fixing the bottlenecks that make legal access slow, confusing, and demoralizing. Lawdie tackles inefficiency at the source: the attorney level. It’s a top-down approach, starting with improving intake and lawyer workflows, with the end-goal of fixing legal search itself. Law firms partnering with Lawdie gain an “always-on” client intake assistant that effectively extends their office hours to 24/7. If a prospective client reaches out at 10 p.m. on a Friday, Lawdie’s AI-driven intake system is there to greet them—gathering the essential details about their case and assuring them that help is on the way. There’s no instruction to “leave a message and we’ll get back to you”; instead, the client gets immediate engagement. By the time an attorney checks in, there’s a well-documented inquiry waiting — no missed opportunity. Lawdie also offers attorney workflow tools powered by their advanced LLM, integrated with platforms like LexisNexis, revolutionizing legal research, document generation, and streamlining day-to-day firm operations.
In its earliest rollout, Lawdie has helped over 50 Atlantans navigate their legal search with less friction.
“I’d called five places before someone even picked up,” said one recent user. “With this, I didn’t have to jump through a bunch of hurdles and quickly found a lawyer who treated me like a person—not just a case number.”
Lawdie currently partners with about 30 law firms — a number reflecting its focused, quality-first stage. Rather than scaling prematurely, the team prioritizes meaningful partnerships and smarter, sustainable growth.
Historically, legal visibility has been pay-to-play — from billboards to online ads. Clients often end up with lawyers who can afford to advertise, not those who are the best fit. This drowns out solo practitioners and boutique firms, who are often more affordable and deeply rooted in their communities. Lawdie aims to flip this model by centering qualifications, not ad spend, and enhancing legal workflows so firms can better serve those who need help most.
And for the students building it, the vision is national. Georgia may have its flaws, but it’s also one of the few states where all licensed attorneys are required to join the State Bar — providing at least a centralized foundation. That’s not the case everywhere. Across the country, legal directories are wildly inconsistent: some are outdated, some unusable, and in some states, they barely exist. There’s no universal standard for how people are supposed to begin their search for legal help. Lawdie was built not just to work around these gaps—but to replace them entirely with something better, scalable, and finally user-first.
“The A shaped us,” said Sanay Shajith, who co-founded the platform alongside Meeth Naik. “It only makes sense we’d build something here first — something that doesn’t just work but works for people who’ve been overlooked for too long.”
The legal system doesn’t need more noise — it needs clarity. Lawdie shows what’s possible when technology is used not to gatekeep access, but to unlock it. If this early momentum is any indication, the blueprint for a fairer legal future might just be starting here. Because justice shouldn’t depend on who you know.
Credit: contributed
Credit: contributed
Sanjit Hajgude is a student leader at Emory University, majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. As President of Emory’s premier student programming organization, he drives initiatives to foster student creativity and engagement. Sanjit is passionate about writing on pressing community issues and conducts research at Emory’s School of Medicine.
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