Legal Aid of North Carolina launches Justice Hub to speed intake, cut staff review time
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Summary
Legal Aid of North Carolina says its new Justice Hub portal, launched statewide in January 2026, has cut average human-review time to about four minutes and increased daily intake processing capacity by several-fold, while preserving multiple access pathways and integrating with Legal Server.
Legal Aid of North Carolina launched Justice Hub statewide in early January 2026, an online, mobile-friendly intake portal designed to route people seeking legal assistance into the organization's case-management system and provide immediate self-help resources. Megan Hennings, program manager and staff attorney with the Innovation Lab, described Justice Hub as "an online portal available 24 7" that combines a prescreen, profile creation and a full application to reduce unnecessary phone traffic.
The portal was developed after stakeholder research and a TIG grant funded development and pilot work. Jacob Whisner, data and business application manager, said baseline call-center issues drove the effort: their systems received "upwards of 300,000 calls a year," many of which abandoned before reaching staff. Since launch, the team reported more than 5,000 logins and about 3,500 prescreens; a slide listed 1,200 full applications and a vendor representative, Mauricio, told the panel the number had risen to about 2,000 since that slide was created. "Without an efficient intake system, people will not get served," Reza Islam, deputy executive director at Legal Services of Long Island, said in opening remarks.
Justice Hub integrates with Legal Server for case transfer, conflict checks and messaging. Staff said the portal shortened the average human-review processing time to about four minutes and that an intake specialist can now fully process 75–100 online intakes per day, compared with 25–35 before the portal and 15–20 per day on the phone. Staff still perform conflict checks manually; speakers cautioned that existing Legal Server records and 30 years of legacy data complicate reliable automated conflict screening.
The portal also embeds an AI chatbot mascot called Leah and ports self-help content from LawHelp-style resources; panelists described using AI-generated legal-issue summaries to speed staff review and trialing targeted AI-driven follow-up questions tied to case-acceptance guidelines. North Carolina's team emphasized that Justice Hub is one of several intake pathways—phone, SMS, walk-in clinics and community access points remain available—to avoid excluding people without mobile or internet access.
Panelists said they are tracking staff and client surveys, intake throughput and conversion-to-case metrics as part of continuous monitoring. Next steps include iterative user-testing updates, a Spanish-language version in a planned v2 release, additional document- and appointment-upload features and careful, staff-centered use of AI on the backend. The team plans ongoing evaluation to ensure the portal improves access without simply shifting bottlenecks to downstream attorneys.
