Kara Peterson

Pioneers and Pathfinders

In this week’s episode, we're speaking with a legal tech entrepreneur who operates at the intersection of generative AI and access to justice. Today's guest, Kara Peterson, is co-founder of descrybe.ai, a free legal research tool leveraging AI to make complex legal information more accessible to professionals and laypeople alike. For several years, Kara worked in marketing and communications at various organizations, including Suffolk University Law School. She continued this work in the public health space for a decade, serving as Executive Director of Communications at Boston University School of Public Health and Chief Communications Officer at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In these roles, she became further interested in access to justice. She would go on to create descrybe.ai with tech software engineer Richard DiBona, as a way to help people overcome the cost barriers to legal information they may need. This year, descrybe.ai is a finalist at the American Legal Tech Awards for both the AI category and the Startup category. In our conversation, Kara talks about what makes descrybe.ai unique and the problems it aims to address, how her hometown influenced her access to justice work, and her advice for legal professionals considering using generative AI.