Since 2022, the Tenants Advocacy Program’s Technology Team has advanced TAP’s mission by building tools that expand access to justice. The team began with the creation of Teny, a tenants’ rights chatbot developed by Practicum students and later featured at the New York Statewide Legal Aid Tech Conference. In 2023, faced with rising hotline demand, the team adopted workflow automation, first through Google Apps Script and then through Make, to streamline case intake and administration. In 2024, TAP partnered with legal tech startup Josef to pilot Teny 2.0, an AI-powered Q&A tool using retrieval-augmented generation. Having launched publicly in 2025, you can now open Teny by clicking “Ask Teny” under the hula-hooping house in the bottom-right corner. The Tech Team’s innovations have since been recognized nationally, including at the American Bar Association’s Equal Justice Conference and in a forthcoming ABA book on legal AI.
To increase access to justice in housing law, our goal is for technology to help tenants access relevant legal information, rights guides, resources, self-help tools, and connect them to our hotline and/or intake form in order to consult further with our legal team.
The Tech Team is TAP’s backbone for digital tools and systems. Working alongside law students and staff, volunteers help manage the platforms that keep hotline and casework running, from intake forms to internal databases.
Tech Volunteers support TAP by:
