Rasa Legal's AI cuts expungement work to five hours a case

The interesting number in NPR's report on AI and criminal records is not the model, it is the wage bump. NPR cites research that within a year of expungement, people's wages rise by an average of 22%. The point of the technology is to make that outcome cheap and fast enough to actually reach the people entitled to it.

Noella Sudbury, a former public defender in Utah, founded Rasa Legal, whose name nods to the Latin tabula rasa, to attack a gap between the law on paper and what happens in practice. More than 70 million U.S. adults have some form of criminal record, and at least 20 million could partially or fully clear theirs under existing law but have not. Sudbury led the campaign that got Utah's Clean Slate law passed in 2019, and now runs a service that turns those eligibility rules into software.

The mechanics are the part worth reading closely. Rasa's app determines eligibility in about three minutes. According to NPR, AI has taken the manual work of preparing a petition down from the 10 to 12 hours it used to take to about five. Since 2022 Rasa has helped clear records for around 34,000 people across Utah, Arizona and Pennsylvania, with more than 90% of the petitions it files getting approved. The pricing is aggressive by legal-services standards: free to check eligibility, $25 for an attorney consultation, and a $500 flat fee if the case moves forward.

The honest caveat is that this is a state-by-state game. Each jurisdiction has its own laws and its own courts, which is why three states since 2022 is the actual pace, not a national rollout. The reporting does not break the 34,000 cleared records down by state, and it does not say much about the cases that fall outside the 90% approval band, which is where the more interesting failure modes probably live.

The forward-looking piece for operators is what happens when a $500 flat-fee product handles work an individual would otherwise pay a private attorney to do. Employers running background checks in tight labor markets get a larger, cleaner candidate pool as more people qualify to have records sealed, and the same compression pattern of eligibility screen, drafting and human lawyer review is portable to plenty of other legal-aid categories where the cost of the lawyer, not the law itself, is what keeps people out.