More than 70 million Americans have some form of a criminal record, which can entail an arrest, charge, or conviction. 

That record can go on to limit access to housing, employment, and education — even if an offense was dismissed in court.

While some states offer automatic record expungement for qualified individuals, others require a court petition — a process that can be both expensive and confusing.

But a new justice tech startup is looking to make the record expungement process less complicated in its pilot state of Mississippi. 

The goal? Leverage the power of artificial intelligence to assist people in the record-clearing process.

Click the audio player above to hear the full story or read an edited transcript of the segment below.

Roger Roman: My name is Roger Roman, and I am the co-founder of LegalEase.

So my co-founder, Lawrence Blackmon, he's a practicing attorney, you know, he would come with ideas about things that could be fixed, basically, in the legal system. And expungement was one that he kept coming back to - like a true attorney, he was very persistent and convincing, and I started to help him build an MVP, which was our first model, to help people basically go ahead and figure out if they were eligible, one for an expungement, and then help them in terms of processing it.

We built that MVP a couple of years ago, and we realized that there was something there, there was a huge gap in the market in this space.

Early on, you know, we thought our ideal customer profile was of a certain demographic. You know, we had our preconceived notions about who this could help. But over time, we found that this problem transcends all economic levels. It transcends race, it transcends everything.

We've had investors say, ‘Hey, you know, I needed an expungement.’ Similar to Lawrence, right, he's a state representative and attorney and he needed to get an expungement.

We started in Mississippi, one because Mississippi was perceived as a challenge to us early on in terms of their judicial system - there's still a lot of reliance on paper. In addition to that, my co-founder, Lawrence, is a practicing attorney there, he's barred. He's also a state representative, right, so we had a lot of insight into how things move with the courts.

The incarceration rate and the people with criminal records in Mississippi is one of the highest in the country. Unfortunately, it was fertile ground to test out our model and to build it. To be completely honest, we felt that if we could make this work in Mississippi, it would be a lot easier to make it work in other states that might have a little more advanced judicial system and might be a little more adept to using technology to solve these issues.

I might be a little biased, but, you know, I'm a big fan of AI. Maybe in 20 years when we were all slaves to, you know, some AI overlord, right, I might regret saying this, but today, it just feels like a superpower.

A lot of times I joke with my co founders about it being similar to a calculator, right? You know, in school, we were told not to use a calculator, because we had to learn how to do math ourselves. And, you know, we wouldn't always have access to a calculator, and here we are today with cell phones with calculators on them and we pretty much have access to a calculator and every predicament.

So I know there's a lot of fear around AI and the potential power it has, but I think used in the right space, and used, you know, responsibly, it can really help a lot of people and even the playing fields in a lot of spaces.