We invited Rebecca Fordon to chat with us because she has a rare gift: she can explain frontier AI tools to a room full of Luddites and make it feel like the most natural thing in the world. Rebecca is the Assistant Director for Innovation, Research, and Instruction at the Moritz Law Library at The Ohio State University, where she teaches legal research, legal tech, and generative AI. She sits on the board of the Free Law Project, is a co-creator of AILawLibrarians.com, and serves as a chief mentor for Moritz’s Justice Tech. Her whole professional life is organized around one question: how do we get powerful legal information into the hands of people who cannot afford Westlaw or Lexis? For this episode, we asked her to answer that question specifically for mediators, especially community and volunteer mediators working with limited resources and self-represented parties. What follows is essentially Rebecca’s tour. Be sure to check out this video for a demonstration!
Free Law Project: Two Tools Worth Knowing
Rebecca introduced us to the Free Law Project, a nonprofit she serves on the board of, and its two flagship products. CourtListener pulls court opinions from across the web, backfilled by a massive Harvard scanning project, and now covers roughly 95 percent of published federal and state appellate opinions. It is free to search, and the underlying data is also open to developers.
RECAP (PACER spelled backwards) tackles the federal court system’s paywall. PACER charges by the page (a rate that just climbed from 10 to 13 cents), and RECAP’s browser extension captures every document a user pays for, adding it to a free, shared public database so the next person who needs it gets it for nothing. Combined with monitoring of the courts’ own filing feeds, RECAP has quietly built an enormous free archive of dockets, filings, and case information, including cases that never generated a published opinion because they settled first.
“It’s More Like a Plugin” — Rebecca Explains MCPs
The heart of the episode was Rebecca walking us through how she actually uses these tools day to day, through a Model Context Protocol, or MCP, that connects CourtListener and RECAP directly to Claude. You can access the Claude CourtListener MCP connector from a free Claude account and a free CourtListener account.
Asked for an analogy a novice could hold onto, Rebecca didn’t reach for jargon. “It’s more like a plugin,” she said, “or I think Claude calls them connectors — so you might have connected Claude to your Google Drive or your Gmail, and you can also connect it to CourtListener.” Once connected, Claude has access to real, current legal data rather than just what it happened to absorb in training or court decisions that make news headlines. “It gives the data tools to Claude, and says, hey, Claude, you’ve got this cool database available to you, and here’s how you use it, and then Claude can use it whenever it sees fit, or you can just direct it.”
Setting one up, she showed us, takes about thirty seconds: click the “+” button in Claude, browse or search connectors, and add CourtListener. (She also flagged Descrybe as another strong, low-cost legal connector, one we featured with Susan Guthrie in an earlier column.) And if you are not sure how to even get started, Rebecca’s advice was simple: just ask Claude. She typed a version of “I’m a mediator and want to use CourtListener with Claude — what are some things I can do?” directly into the chat, and Claude walked her through its own capabilities.
Watching Rebecca Work: A Live Demo
Rebecca then did something a research demo rarely does well on a podcast — she made it genuinely suspenseful. We gave her a scenario: a party in an automotive supply dispute weighing venue between the Eastern and Western Districts of Michigan. Rebecca typed the question in and then narrated what Claude was doing in real time, watching its reasoning unfold rather than just waiting for an answer.
“I like to look at what it’s thinking,” she said, as Claude decided on its own to query CourtListener for the Eastern District first, then the Western District. “It’s thinking through this process, and making some decisions along the way, and you can kind of see what’s happening — it knows the tool it has available to it, and it just makes a decision about whether and how it will search that.”
She was quick to note the limits of opinions-only research. “If you’re asking about something that’s not been written about a lot… probably not a lot has been written about this specific venue question.” So, she switched connectors, asking Claude to pull from RECAP instead — actual filings and dockets, not just published opinions. This mattered, she explained, because RECAP surfaces “nature of suit” codes and the underlying statutes cited in a filing, giving Claude a way to find comparable disputes even when a case settled quietly and never generated an opinion at all.
Rebecca has taken this even further on her own. “I just built a little skill in Claude,” she told us, a written plan Claude follows, that solves a real gap between the two databases: RECAP’s docket entries often describe what happened (say, a motion to dismiss granted, with a brief summary), but that description does not automatically link back to the actual opinion in CourtListener. Her custom skill searches docket descriptions for a topic, then retrieves the connected opinion, stitching together two datasets that Free Law Project itself hasn’t yet merged.
Throughout the demo, Claude was transparent about its own limits, noting when it was working from docket metadata rather than full complaints, and flagging where a human would need to dig further. Rebecca treated that transparency as a feature, not a caveat: a reminder that these tools are a starting point for testing assumptions, not a substitute for verified research.
A Portal for Self-Represented Litigants — and a Role for Mediation?
Rebecca also previewed a newer Free Law Project effort she is excited about: a “litigant portal,” built with court partners, aimed at self-represented parties who have never filed a case and don’t know what comes next. It combines document automation, walking someone through how to fill out a form, with AI-assisted navigation that lets litigants ask questions in plain language as they go. Free Law Project issued an RFP for the project within the last year and is now beginning to build it out with interested courts.
“I wonder if maybe there would be room or interest for mediation within that portal,” Rebecca mused, thinking aloud as she talked to us. Given how often small claims and housing cases often involve self-represented litigants and are often referred to mediation (sometimes by mandate and sometimes voluntarily), it’s an idea worth watching, and one we intend to raise.
Where Rebecca Tells Beginners to Start
Asked what the low-stakes “appetizer” is for a mediator who has never touched an AI connector, Rebecca didn’t hesitate: Claude, paired with the CourtListener connector. It costs nothing to try, and academics can get even more generous MCP access through a free Free Law Project membership; anyone can get a free CourtListener account as well. The embedded video crisply shows just how to do this on Claude.
On Whether AI Will Replace Mediators
We ended, as we often do, by asking Rebecca whether she thinks mediators will still be human beings in five or ten years. Her answer was unequivocal. “Having a human, to me, demonstrates someone cares about this process,” she said. “I’m not sure people will feel heard in that way by an AI… a computer can’t care about you.” She pointed to research showing people increasingly feel comfortable asking AI the questions they hesitate to ask a person — there’s data on this in medicine, she noted — and suggested that comfort may carry real value of its own. But resolving a dispute, in her view, remains fundamentally human work. “I just think there’s something human about resolving disputes that [will] be difficult to replace with AI.”
We could not agree more, and we’re grateful to Rebecca for showing us, screen-share and all, exactly how these free tools work. Links to CourtListener, RECAP, and the MCP setup instructions accompany this column so you can try it yourself.
N.B. Claude developed a draft of this column, which the authors heavily edited.
