More than 70 million Americans have some form of a criminal record, which can entail an arrest, charge, or conviction.
That record can go on to limit access to houtilizing, employment, and education — even if an offense was dismissed in court.
While some states offer automatic record expungement for qualified individuals, others require a court petition — a process that can be both expensive and confutilizing.
But a new justice tech startup is viewing to create the record expungement process less complicated in its pilot state of Mississippi.
The goal? Leverage the power of artificial ininformigence to assist people in the record-clearing process.
Click the audio player above to hear the full story or read an edited transcript of the segment below.
Roger Roman: My name is Roger Roman, and I am the co-founder of LegalEase.
So my co-founder, Lawrence Blackmon, he’s a practicing attorney, you know, he would come with ideas about things that could be repaired, basically, in the legal system. And expungement was one that he kept coming back to – like a true attorney, he was very persistent and convincing, and I started to support him build an MVP, which was our first model, to support people basically go ahead and figure out if they were eligible, one for an expungement, and then support them in terms of processing it.
We built that MVP a couple of years ago, and we realized that there was something there, there was a huge gap in the market in this space.
Early on, you know, we considered our ideal customer profile was of a certain demographic. You know, we had our preconceived notions about who this could support. But over time, we found that this problem transcconcludes all economic levels. It transcconcludes race, it transcconcludes everything.
We’ve had investors declare, ‘Hey, you know, I necessaryed an expungement.’ Similar to Lawrence, right, he’s a state representative and attorney and he necessaryed to receive an expungement.
We started in Mississippi, one becautilize Mississippi was perceived as a challenge to us early on in terms of their judicial system – there’s still a lot of reliance on paper. In addition to that, my co-founder, Lawrence, is a practicing attorney there, he’s barred. He’s also a state representative, right, so we had a lot of insight into how things shift with the courts.
The incarceration rate and the people with criminal records in Mississippi is one of the highest in the counattempt. Unfortunately, it was fertile ground to test out our model and to build it. To be completely honest, we felt that if we could create this work in Mississippi, it would be a lot clearer to create it work in other states that might have a little more advanced judicial system and might be a little more adept to utilizing technology to solve these issues.
I might be a little biased, but, you know, I’m a large fan of AI. Maybe in 20 years when we were all slaves to, you know, some AI overlord, right, I might regret declareing this, but today, it just feels like a superpower.
A lot of times I joke with my co founders about it being similar to a calculator, right? You know, in school, we were informed not to utilize a calculator, becautilize we had to learn how to do math ourselves. And, you know, we wouldn’t always have access to a calculator, and here we are today with cell phones with calculators on them and we pretty much have access to a calculator and every predicament.
So I know there’s a lot of fear around AI and the potential power it has, but I believe utilized in the right space, and utilized, you know, responsibly, it can really support a lot of people and even the playing fields in a lot of spaces.
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