This panel serves as a follow-up to Mountainqueer: Name Changes and More in Appalachia presented at EJC in 2024. Participants will learn how Legal Aid of the Bluegrass, University of Kentucky College of Law, and Legal Aid of West Virginia continue to collaborate and operate name change clinics in Appalachia.

• Participants will learn how to improve cultural competency within their legal aid organization.
• Participants will create a plan to facilitate a name change clinic.
• Participants will develop solutions to overcome barriers present for planning, implementing, and conducting name change clinics.

Biases are internal processes everyone relies on to readily process information we have been taught, or experienced. This training will provide the tools needed for you to take the first step in being a better advocate for yourself, your team, and most importantly, for the clients we serve.

• Upon completion, participants will be able to define institutional bias and describe and identify its effects in the workplace.
• Upon completion, participants will be able to define individual bias and explain the difference between bias, prejudice, and stereotypes.
• Upon completion, participants will be able to demonstrate situations in which bias occurs within the individual advocate context and conduct similar awareness training with themselves and employees/supervisees/students/colleagues.

As legal self-help websites grow, generative AI chatbots offer efficiency and accessibility but raise ethical, practical, and technical concerns. This interactive session explores deploying AI in sensitive areas like family court, focusing on ethical issues, policy implications, and decision-making frameworks to ensure fairness, equity, and effectiveness.

• Explain how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances the accuracy and relevance of responses in generative AI chatbots.
• Recognize major ethical and policy considerations when adopting generative AI chatbots, especially in family court and other sensitive legal contexts.
• Utilize a decision matrix to guide decision-makers and funding authorities through the process of selecting and adopting generative AI tools for legal self-help applications.

Back by popular demand, the Ethics Quiz show will allow attendees to show off their knowledge about legal ethics issues facing legal aid and pro bono lawyers. Using reality-based scenarios and the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, quiz show emcees experienced in the field will challenge attendees with practice-based scenarios on subjects including ethical use of artificial intelligence tools, working with allied legal professionals and pro-bono lawyers, confidentiality concerns, immigration issues, working with allied legal professionals, and disability and language access issues.

• Understand current ethical issues impacting legal aid and pro bono lawyers
• Undersand ethical considerations relating to the development and use of artificial intelligence tools to help legal aid offices increase the provision of legal services to those in need.
• Identify new ethical challenges and address them consistent with rules of professional conduct

• Participants will be able to describe the benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary legal services
• Participants will be able to understand and analyze conflicting ethical duties of social workers and attorneys when incorporating social workers in a legal aid setting.
• Participants will be able to apply strategies to optimize benefits of interdisciplinary legal services