Justice Innovation
Could we build a single portal to all kinds of legal support, help, counsel? If it’s a simple, memorable number that’s the same across the country — that would be terrific from a branding approach.
The LSC-TIG Summit last year listed centralized state-by-state legal portals as one of their central agenda items, and it would be terrific to see this happen.
What would an all-in-one collaboration platform look like, for clients & lawyers to work together? If there could be one place that coordinates a person’s journey from having a legal problem, to seeking help, to actually carrying through resolution of the problem — it could help reduce so many of the barriers to getting legal things done, and increase a person’s sense of control and empowerment.
Could we create a Schedule & Alert system to let litigants and court people know what the busy-ness & traffic level are?
Especially for litigants who have a choice about when they come into court (say to contest a traffic ticket) – couldn’t we help them decide when to come in, so that they can be in the least possible traffic.
It could be available online, on a website. You enter in your type of hearing and court building, and then you see approximate wait times. You could even get live reports if you’re thinking about going on a specific time today.
During the Legal Design Bootcamp that I was running last week, one of the participating groups came up with a very interesting concept that I wanted to share.
We spent one day going through a design cycle, and they began by choosing a very particular user — a young Guatemalan girl, aged around 16 year old, who ends up in California after having journeyed across land, via Coyote, and is now going through immigration proceedings.
The team explored many different directions about designs to serve this girl — including lowering hurdles inside the legal system that she needs to pass through, having Walmart-style greeters welcome her whenever she comes into the court, drastically simplifying the forms she needs to fill out, and more. They arrived on one idea that had particular promise & began to develop it out.
Their insight: rather than put the burden on her to gather & coordinate all the possible legal services, plus social services, plus logistics to transition to life in the US, what about doing this gathering & coordinating for her? How could we provide her not just with a suite of resources, but with a way for her to easily & intuitively access these resources, without having to seek them out or coordinate them herself?
Can we make navigators that are game-like, or make games that allow a person to do a prep-run of what an actual legal procedure will be like?
This concept came out of a workshop on improving immigration support. It was for a board game that a group could play together, to learn the scenarios and pathways of immigration law.
It would be a jumpoff point for questioning more about law, and thinking through how immigration rules could apply to him.
An idea for gathering intake information & triage-ing users to the right legal resource by giving them video scenarios/stories to watch and then figure out which best corresponds to their situation.
I’ve been prototyping various means to deliver & build legal knowledge — with a specific consideration of bolstering Access to Justice. One pathway, of course, is Visualized Law.
I’ve been playing with it with cartoons and illustrations, and in other forms (hyperlinked, layered checklists — visual expert systems).
One promising prototype is the Visual Mind Map, that is hyperlinked & lively with images, videos, & other cues that can guide the user through. The promise of such a map is that it lets the user locate themselves in a specific cluster of resources within a broader field of information. They can see the broad scope of the area they are in, while still focusing in on what precise information they need to retrieve & actions they need to pursue.
What would such an interactive legal mind map look like in practice? See this embedded Popplet for a first generation play with this format. I’ve used Popplets a lot for my own brainstorming, paper-writing, research, and collaborations with teams. I know there is great potential in scoping out a version of such a mind-mapping specifically for legal resources.
I see a future mash-up of interactive mind map diagrams with a curated, semi-open wiki format. I would love all the legal knowledge and advice out there on a specific legal problem to be extracted out of forums, pamphlets, q-and-as, blog posts, news articles, and other random clips of text around the web — and diagrammed out clearly & visually (if not beautifully too).
I can understand legal topics better when they are composed on the page in a meaningful way, and my guess is that most people with legal problems who are searching around the Internet would also benefit from a Legal Map to ground them & guide them. No more blocks of text!
Another kind of navigator, that shows you how to get from point A to point B, from problem to resolution — this one came out of our immigration hackathon.
An idea to help lay people go through legal processes by giving them interactive and customized guides to going through them step by step.
It is a website that gives a serialized set of prompts and information. We have made a first version of this as Navocado.
Could we use the same methods of those television lawyers who bombard daytime-tv-watchers with ‘Are you injured? Can you sue? Call now to find your rights!’ — to increase lay people’s awareness of their rights, of civil remedies, of free or low-cost legal services?
On Friday July 24th, 2015 the Bay Area NPR-affiliate, KQED, reported on a local juvenile court that takes a unique user-oriented approach to justice.
Matthew Green’s report Inside Oakland’s Youth Court, Where Kids Call the Shots describes the Centerforce Youth Court, that takes on offenders who are juveniles with first-time misdemeanors. Most everyone working in the court are also juveniles — including the jurors judging the offender, the attorneys prosecuting and defending her, and the bailiffs and clerks ensuring the court operates correctly. The only non-juvenile is the judge.
The overarching goal of the program is to reduce recidivism, promote restorative justice, and reduce the mainstream court’s caseloads by redirecting these types of juvenile cases to this special design — which promote more community involvement and workshops.
This style of youth court exists throughout the US, with more than 1000 nationwide and some 120 in California.
What would other radically redesigned court systems look like — particularly ones that take the peer-to-peer model to heart? Could other specific types of cases be siphoned off the mainstream criminal/civil systems into courtrooms & organizations designed to be more community-oriented, rehabilitative, and understanding from the lay-person’s perspective?
On a recent evening, kids waited nervously in the hallway for their trials to begin. The court serves about 120 offenders each year, usually referred by police or school officials. To participate, offenders have to first confess to their crimes.
The docket was full that night – cases ranging from vandalism and minor drug possession to theft — as in the case of one shy young lady named Preva, who stole some makeup before a piano recital.
“Preva wanted this night to be perfect, every little thing, so she went to a store and stole some makeup,” Gabrielle Battle, a petite 13-year-old serving as Preva’s attorney, tells the jury.
“She was blinded by the idea of perfection and looking perfect for her big night. … I will prove to you, the jury, that Preva was just a young kid making a mistake, and she is sorry for what she did.”
Following opening statements, the jurors ask the defendant questions and then deliberate. Decisions are legally binding: If defendants complete the sentences, their records are closed, as if the crime never happened.
“At the end of the day, their record is closed to the public,” explains Angela Adams, the court’s program coordinator. “On some job applications, there’s a form where they check off the box, ‘Have you ever committed a crime?’ and they’re able to check the box that says ‘no.’ ”
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“When you come here, you actually get to, like, go to workshops, do community service, do things that can actually give back to the community,” says Akili Moree, another feisty 13-year-old who joined the program voluntarily last year and works the courtroom like a mini Perry Mason. “And you can learn from your mistakes, instead of just receiving a punishment that you’ll really get nothing out of.”
For Michaela Wright, things ended much better than she expected. The jury gave her 12 hours of community service, three workshops and two jury duties. She plans to start college this fall, with a clean record.
Wright says she appreciates that the process wasn’t just focused on punishment, and wishes she could say the same for her parents, who were none too pleased about her arrest.
When asked if she got in trouble at home after her arrest, she simply replied:
“Oh, yeah … oh, yeah.”
Read the full story here at KQED’s site.