Biography
David Freeman Engstrom is the LSVF Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Co-Director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, the premier academic center shaping the future of legal services and access to the legal system. An expert in civil procedure, administrative law, constitutional law, and law and technology, Engstrom focuses much of his current work on the future of courts and legal services in the age of AI. His award-winning scholarship spans court use of technology in multidistrict litigations, lawyer use of “legal tech” tools to serve their clients, and use of technologies to assist individuals without lawyers. Engstrom has published numerous articles on these topics, and he is also the editor of Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice and, with Nora Freeman Engstrom, Rethinking the Lawyer’s Monopoly: Access to Justice and the Future of Legal Services, both with Cambridge University Press. He also co-founded the Filing Fairness Project, an ambitious collaboration with seven states to modernize court technologies. In its latest venture, the Project is partnering with the Los Angeles Superior Court, the nation’s largest trial court, to design new digital systems, including AI, that better serve court users. Finally, much of Engstrom’s work, both tech and non-tech, focuses on access to justice in the millions of low-dollar but highly consequential cases, including debt collection, eviction, foreclosure, and child support actions, that shape the lives of Americans each year. He is leading the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law, High-Volume Civil Adjudication project, which will offer courts guidance on the urgent challenges these cases raise.
Engstrom is an elected member of the American Law Institute, an appointed member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, and a faculty affiliate at the Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab (RegLab), CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. A longtime litigator, Engstrom has represented a range of clients before the U.S. Supreme Court and many other courts and agencies. He has a B.A. from Dartmouth, a J.D. from Stanford Law School, an M.Sc. from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. from Yale University.
