Justice Innovation
Some quick sketchnotes of a talk from Jim Greiner of Harvard Law School, speaking with Univ. of South Carolina Law School about how to engage people in debt procedures — how to get them to show up in court. They tried to reach out to people in debt proceedings with paper-based, cartoon-based interventions. They created a cartoon character and storyboards to explain the coming proceedings & try to orient and activate the litigants.
I’ve been thinking systematically about the suite of tools that we need to be building for better access to justice. I wrote earlier about the different product families — what some of these different camps of tools are. One I’m circling around with some intent is the Triage Tool.
A triage function would help take a person searching for legal remedy, and help them figure out what their condition is called in legal terms and what legal processes are open to them to achieve some kind of resolution.
Other terms for Triage tools: Eligibility-Checkers, Diagnostic Tool, Intake-and-Bucketing.
The main task of the triage tool is collecting essential info from the user, and then matching it with the system’s rules about what terms and paths fit their info.
I’ve been collecting many different examples of tech-based triage tools, and I’ll be publishing a pattern library with a discussion of what the main types of triage tools are, with examples of each. In the meantime, here’s a sketch I made as I start to group together this typology.
Do you know any triage tools that you think work well? Send me links, images, or write-ups — I will include them in my pattern library!
From my notebook, sketches from a brainstorm around what possible models for access to justice initiatives might be.
One item on my ever-growing Access to Justice agenda is an online hub full of worthy software solutions for legal organizations to use. Ideally, with software that is affordable if not free — and designed to be easily updated & changed. As opposed to software that is proprietary to one company, who, after they sell it to a court or a legal aid group, continues to extract money from them for updating and adapting the software.
Such a hub could set best practices for what tech legal organizations should be deploying. It could guide non-techies as to the essential categories of tech they should be using to manage their cases, interact with clients, and promote efficient and satisfying workflows inside the org. And it could house advice, tutorials, and support for how to use these tools well.
Actually setting up such a hub is not that difficult — just a matter of a website and then some initial content curation:
What’s more challenging is getting the brand of the site elevated enough to reach all of the courts & legal aid groups that need this guidance. Building awareness and engagement — so that the users can find it and then trust it enough to follow through with its resources — that’s a harder undertaking.
I have been working over the past few months on a research paper about how people use the Internet for legal help. I’ve been doing online questionnaires to develop insights into who legal users are — what a core typology of user types are, what their mental models are when searching for legal help for a problem in their lives, and what their preferences are for how to find and comprehend legal help.
I’ve followed those up with task analyses — having users use different legal websites to try to find information & see how they fare and react to various types of website designs.
Though writing is taking me longer than I wish it would, the results are truly fascinating & I’m excited to get them published in the near future. In the meanwhile, here are some of my notebook sketches from my initial plans of what my study would look like.
If you’re also interested in this topic, or have reading suggestions or thoughts for me — pass them along!
The National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership has a New issue brief on medical-legal partnership and health centers. Marsha Regenstein, PhD, Joel Teitelbaum, JD, LLM, Jessica Sharac, MSc, MPH, and Ei Phyu authored the piece “Medical-Legal Partnership and Health Centers: Addressing Patients’ Health-Harming Civil Legal Needs as Part of Primary Care.” You can download it as a PDF here.
The brief explores the link between social & economic issues — like income, housing, education, employment, legal status, and personal/family stability– and how civil legal aid and health care can combine to provide positive impact on these issues.
Civil legal aid becomes an ‘enabling services’ that allows people who have come in as medical patients to a health care facility to get the appropriate government services and support. Legal aid supplements and reinforces the medical care, by addressing root issues that have led to medical problems. Legal help in hospital help patients to deal with health-harming civil legal needs, like those around housing and utilities.
Medical-legal partnerships train clinicians and health care staff to know enough about the law to spot when a patient has a potential legal issue. Then this health care worker can hand the patient off to an in-house legal worker (who may be part-time or permanently at the facility) to get the legal support for their problem. Sometime the lawyer comes into the medical exam room, sometimes they may schedule a follow up off site.
The majority of patients seen at health centers are living at or below the poverty level, and because of this, they have unmet legal needs — related to housing, public benefits, education — that negatively impact their health. Medical-legal partnership is an approach to health that integrates the expertise of health care, public health and legal professionals and staff to address and prevent these health-harming civil legal needs for patients, clinics and populations. There are currently 60 FQHCs and Look-A-Like health centers that operate medical-legal partnerships with civil legal aid agencies across the United States. In the fall of 2014, HRSA released guidance, which clarified that civil legal aid services may be included in the range of enabling services that health centers may choose to provide to meet the primary care needs of their patients.
This issue brief explores the medical-legal partnership approach to health in the context of health centers. It is intended to help health centers understand the benefits – to patients and to their institutions – of partnerships with civil legal aid agencies, and to introduce additional resources that can help health centers implement these programs.
Last night, I helped organize a group of lawyers & designers to kick off a longer design process, about reimagining how we convey Know Your Rights materials to lay people. We had a great mix of people who work on Know Your Rights initiatives as a part of community law groups, legal aid groups, and advocacy orgs. And we had a few designers who are interested in making legal services better.
It was an introductory session — introducing the participants to the design process & the mission of user-centered legal design. But we got to start through developing some new ideas for Know Your Rights initiatives, focusing on certain users, use cases & needs — and then brainstorming out some initial ideas.
I will write up a fuller report later — for now, here are some of the brainstorms!
The Official Google Blog has a post “A remedy for your health-related questions: health info in the Knowledge Graph”. It announces that Google is going to treat certain health-information searches differently from the average search.
If a user searches a query that likely relates to some common health conditions, Google will surface reliable knowledge — set apart from typical search results — to direct the user straight to trustworthy, straightforward answers. Google will tell you what health problem it might be — and what the symptoms and treatments are, and how critical & contagious the disease might be.
This is exciting in itself — but it also could be a great model for legal knowledge searches. I wrote earlier about the potential for Google to be a more usable legal help portal. This model, with trustworthy & clear information surfaced in response to a common query, would work to help people with legal problems.
Here is more from Google on this new health info initiative:
Think of the last time you searched on Google for health information. Maybe you heard a news story about gluten-free diets and pulled up the Google app to ask, “What is celiac disease?” Maybe a co-worker shook your hand and later found out she had pink eye, so you looked up “pink eye” to see whether it’s contagious. Or maybe you were worried about a loved one—like I was, recently, when my infant son Veer fell off a bed in a hotel in rural Vermont, and I was concerned that he might have a concussion. I wasn’t able to search and quickly find the information I urgently needed (and I work at Google!).
Thankfully my son was OK, but the point is this stuff really matters: one in 20 Google searches are for health-related information. And you should find the health information you need more quickly and easily.
So starting in the next few days, when you ask Google about common health conditions, you’ll start getting relevant medical facts right up front from the Knowledge Graph. We’ll show you typical symptoms and treatments, as well as details on how common the condition is—whether it’s critical, if it’s contagious, what ages it affects, and more. For some conditions you’ll also see high-quality illustrations from licensed medical illustrators. Once you get this basic info from Google, you should find it easier to do more research on other sites around the web, or know what questions to ask your doctor.
We worked with a team of medical doctors (led by our own Dr. Kapil Parakh, M.D., MPH, Ph.D.) to carefully compile, curate, and review this information. All of the gathered facts represent real-life clinical knowledge from these doctors and high-quality medical sources across the web, and the information has been checked by medical doctors at Google and the Mayo Clinic for accuracy.
That doesn’t mean these search results are intended as medical advice. We know that cases can vary in severity from person to person, and that there are bound to be exceptions. What we present is intended for informational purposes only—and you should always consult a healthcare professional if you have a medical concern.
But we hope this can empower you in your health decisions by helping you learn more about common conditions. We’re rolling it out over the next few days, in the U.S. in English to start. In the long run, not only do we plan to cover many more medical conditions, but we also want to extend this to other parts of the world. So the next time you need info on frostbite symptoms, or treatments for tennis elbow, or the basics on measles, the Google app will be a better place to start.
I have been reading through articles documenting how ‘Plain Language’ came to be a standard by which legal communications are judged — and which courts, firms, and companies are willing to invest money and time in. From my limited research, I’ve been able to trace the rise of ‘Plain Language’ as a standard from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, when it became much discussed in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia-New Zealand. Government commissions began to investigate what Plain Language would look like in practice, how much it would offer to the end user of legal documents, and if it was worth investing in.
The conclusion seems to have been a resounding ‘yes’, as Plain Language became a dominant metric against which legal writing, explanations, outreach, and work product is judged. President Clinton mandated that federal agencies author their work using Plain Language techniques. Courts, self-help centers & legal aid groups hire plain language companies to ensure the text they release out to the public meets the Plain Language standard. And firms and corporations put an emphasis on how they offer clarity to their users, with a commitment to Plain Language communications.
Plain language is more than just what words you use to communicate — it is the way in which you compose your sentences, and the tone and voice your communication. It is about making your text more user-friendly by adopting a consciousness of who your target audience is, thinking of how they would best understand what you’re trying to get across, and ensuring that you speak and write in the most direct way to get your point across to this audience in the most succinct yet clear way.
This emphasis on usability is where there is a strong link between the Plain Language standard, and the legal design work that I have been so focused on as late. What I see is that to make a communication user-friendly & usable, we must think of more than just the language we use. It is more than vocabulary choice, sentence structure, tone, and voice.
Designing for usability of legal communications means thinking of all of the other factors that affect (and potentially enhance) an audience’s comprehension of a communication. Beyond just Plain Language, we must also focus on:
Legal Design work could be as powerful as the Plain Language standard has been. My goal is to get more legal organizations invested in making their communications as understandable & engaging as they can. This is both for the sake of the lay person consumer, but also for other lawyers and professionals. Better designed information can enhance the experience of even the most educated person, who is not intimidated by legalese — they don’t necessarily want to read through badly designed legal communications either.
Reading through the descriptions of how Plain Language has gone from movement to standard, I’m inspired to think how we can set more standards, guidelines, and best practices for how legal professionals communicate. I want to see legal orgs invested not just in Plain Language, but in Wholly Better Designed work product — that is Visually Composed, Interactive, Illustrated, and Service-oriented. We need more than just improved language to really make legal communications connect with lay people.
I came across this video essay by Laura Walker Hudson, the CEO of Social Impact Lab, which houses the open source messaging system Frontline SMS. She speaks of her experience trying to implement scalable implementations of tech-for-good. She profiles why it’s so hard to get projects off the ground — from the complicated tech questions, to getting the human-centered design right, to finding sustainable project partnerships.
Her focus is on implementing tech-based interventions in the developing world, in the context of ICT4D (info/communications tech for development). But the lessons & struggles she’s talking about apply to improving legal services in the US, Canada, Europe and elsewhere.
This is essential watching for anyone working on a project to get good tech pilots off the ground — to help them prepare for working with partners in a healthy way, thinking about long-term sustainability, and navigating decisions about privacy, data, payment models, and engagement of users.
It’s easy to hope that implementing a well-designed, excellent technical solution will go smoothly — but it’s necessary to prepare for the human factors of how to get organizations to change their workflows & mindsets — as well as how to get users onto the platform you’re building.
Watch it to hear some of the common problems, as well as some takeaways to better plan for implementations.
Some of the takeaways:
