Categories
Current Projects Procedural Guide

Court Hearing SMS Reminder systems in Qatar and Australia

Two years ago, there started some talk about US courts using SMS and other phone-based communication to issue reminders for court hearings to people. It seems several other countries have already launched such pilots.

Court Hearing SMS - Qatar

The Qatari government’s Supreme Judiciary Council has one such program live, at Court Hearing SMS Reminder – Hukoomi – Qatar E-government. Any litigant can register online & in three steps, the Court will let them “receive text message reminders on selected court hearing dates and times.”

The steps the citizen needs to follow:

  1. Sign Up Online
  2. Enter ID number
  3. Enter mobile phone number
  4. Click the registration button

Qatar’s SMS reminder service is free and apparently beyond just a pilot stage.

Court Hearing SMS - Australia

Australia also has an SMS Reminder system, in Pilot phase. The Magistrates’ Court of Victoria runs the pilot in the Criminal Diversion Program. There is no way to register for the system online — like Qatar allows.  The Australian Court provides these details on its pilot:

In order to increase compliance with Criminal Diversion Plans, an SMS Reminder Pilot has been established statewide and administered from the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court. Offenders who have not finalised their Criminal Diversion Plans within a month or a week of their stated completion date, will receive reminders via SMS to do so.

The aim of the pilot is to increase compliance of offenders, reduce paper usage by the court, and in doing so, reduce the cost of administering the Criminal Diversion Program. The SMS Reminder Pilot commenced on Monday 2 July 2012 and has so far indicated a strong early result with respect to the aims of the pilot.

For more information, please contact your local Criminal Diversion Coordinator, available at all headquarter Magistrates’ Courts within Victoria.

Another court in Australia, the Adelaide Magistrates Court, also is issuing phone-based reminders to offenders and accused in criminal proceedings. Tessa Akerman in The Advertiser wrote an interview with one of the judges involved.

ACCUSED criminals can expect text messages reminding them to appear in court, as the state’s magistrates courts embrace the use of technology.

Judge Elizabeth Bolton, the state’s Chief Magistrate, told The Advertiser that people needed to realise the world had changed and we needed to “make the most of, within our resources, using those technological solutions”.

“We’ve still got some things in the pipeline from the process redesign project we did a year or two ago. I’m hopeful we will get around to the SMS project that might help people who, as many do, forget or don’t read their papers correctly, whatever it is, just as a reminder as you do from your hairdresser, your dentist,” she said.

But it would have to wait “a little bit” because computer resources were needed to complete the fines transition process, due to start in February.

Judge Bolton said shrinking budgets and changing needs were behind the court’s increasing take-up of technology.

“I think it’s incumbent on all of us to realise we are living in an age where there is much more technological facility than previously and if people habitually put all their stuff in their mobile phone rather than … write it on a piece of paper or have a calendar … then we just have to realise that’s how their minds operate.”

 

Categories
Background

Deborah Rhode on Access to Justice & Unauthorized Practice of Law

Deborah Rhode - unlicensed practice of law innovation and tech - Margaret Hagan

Categories
Background

A Legal Design Manifesto

Legal Design Manifesto - by Margaret Hagan 1 Legal Design Manifesto - margaret hagan 2 Legal Design Manifesto - by Margaret Hagan 4 Legal Design Manifesto - by Margaret Hagan 5

Categories
Background

Kiran Jain, City of Oakland attorney, on Law & Design

Lauren Dyson at Code for America wrote up an interview/discussion with Kiran Jain, an attorney in the City of Oakland who has been trained in design & is leading experiments in civic & legal design in the city.  She’s running workshops, launching projects, and piloting new ideas using the design methods she learned at the California College of Arts.

Here’s the interview with Kiran back in January, which is rich with examples of how design can be married with law for the sake of improved legal & public services for lay people — as well as to improve the work-life of lawyers and government workers.

Kiran Jain (@jainkiranc) is an attorney for the City of Oakland with a background in real estate, technology, and municipal law practice. She was also a 2012 Leading by Design fellow at the California College of the Arts. Kiran has worked to bring citizen-centered design into City Hall by leading a series of cross-departmental workshops in Oakland focused on using lightweight, user-centric design methodologies to rethink a cumbersome government process that affects many city agencies and community members: Special Event Permitting.

Kiran recently joined us for a conversation moderated by Cyd Harrell to share results and learnings of applying human centered design in municipal government. Watch the full video here, and read on below are some condensed highlights from the discussion:

Deputy City Attorney is not the typical job title people think of when they think about a “designer.” How did you come to incorporate design principles into your work?

I came to work at the City of Oakland in 2008, right at the height of foreclosure crisis. I was working in this environment where we had limited resources — but unlimited demand. The whole idea of trying to find another way of thinking about traditional government processes really appealed to me. A friend of mine suggested the fellowship at California College of the Arts (CCA).

After diving deeper, I actually found that there’s a lot of similarities between the fields of law and design. Our legal system is based on a set of rules informed by human experience. Those rules have led to layers and layers of process that we now refer to as our bureaucracy. Over time, I think our bureaucracy has become disconnected from human experience — and the intent and feelings that form that human experience. Through design, I’m hoping that we can get back to that intent, and form fresh policies and processes accordingly.

What did you set out to accomplish with civic design in Oakland?

We brought this civic design process to Oakland about a year ago. At that time, Oakland was experiencing about 20 furlough days a year. We were following that old adage by Winston Churchill, “We are out of money; now it’s time to think.” I looked to the design process as a way to rethink traditional government processes and policies in the time of deep budget cuts.

I wanted to apply the methodologies I learned through my fellowship at CCA to a specific process in Oakland. After initial meetings with different city officials, we decided to focus on special event permits. For any event in Oakland — like the Oakland marathon, a street fair, or the Lunar New Year Bazaar — organizers have to get permission from the City. We chose this process for two reasons: there was a deep interest in improving this process among various stakeholders internally, and it touched many different public agencies, including Police, Fire, Parks and Recreation, Public Works, the City Administrator’s office, and Communications. With all the different agencies that are connected to this process, there are many touch points which can lead to frustration not just for event organizers but also for city employees.

In a nutshell, how did you go about doing it?

We broke it down to three different phases. The first was the pre-workshop research, where we gleaned insights from internal stakeholders within government, as well as, external stakeholders who either organized or attended special events. Then, we went through a co-creation workshop with about 15 city employees based on our pre-workshop research, where we were able to learn more about the process and prototype some ideas and solutions for making this a better experience. The third part is execution — to actually develop some of the ideas or prototypes that we developed from our workshop.

What problems did you identify?

Through our pre-workshop research, including stakeholder interviews and a journey mapping exercise, we identified several pain points with the existing process:

  • The process and costs of permitting was not clear to event organizers or city employees.
  • Different city agency stops made the process more challenging and confusing for organizers. That was also felt internally.
  • Communication between our city agencies was not smooth.
  • When event details changed after the permit approval, it was hard to adjust the cost and services accordingly because the request moves between so many different departments.
  • There was no clear metric around the value of the event for the city

What was so interesting was that the pain points in the process for event organizers were very similar to those for city employees.

What solutions did you prototype?

After synthesizing our pre-research findings, we held a four hour workshop where we invited the City employees who touched this process to come in and do some brainstorming with us. There was a lot of white boards, post-its, markers, and the like. We presented our research to the folks in the room. The group made a decision early on in the workshop to focus on the process first, rather than the policy. As we discussed the research and the process, five main principles emerged:

  • Transparency through process visualization
  • Clearly outlined expectations for all stakeholders
  • Simple and codified forms
  • Consistent messaging
  • Create inclusion through feedback loops in the system

After we established these design principles, we had about an hour where we let people just focus on coming up with ideas that we could prototype. Two of our groups actually came up with a similar idea: the online permit platform. This would be a one stop shop where we collect event information online, complemented by designated intake person from the City to liaison with the event organizers, get all the information needed, and then work with other agencies directly to get permission and fees necessary. The online platform would:

  • Communicate overall reasons for the permit
  • Provide detailed instruction
  • Collect all information needed for each agency
  • Create a feedback loop with agency sign-off points

The team also mapped out the step-by-step intake process that would need to be followed to actually implement this idea.

As a follow up to this workshop, we are evaluating two different technology solutions for the one-stop-shop. What was so interesting with this process is that we actually started with stakeholder needs and are now trying to identify a technology solution — while what typically happens in government settings is that the technology solution is presented to us and we address the process concerns second.

How long did this process take?

A workshop like this can happen in a short amount of time, if designed correctly. We were very mindful of the fact that we were asking people to do something extra in their day at a time when they were working with very limited resources.

 

Categories
Current Projects Dispute Resolution

Online Court Project from the University of Michigan

I’ve started scouting out different courtroom based service & system designs.  Here is one, that my colleague Briane alerted to me: the Online Court Project based out of the University of Michigan.  It features new ideas to integrate tech and automation into court processes.

 

Led by U-M Law School professor J.J. Prescott, this Global Challenges project seeks to revolutionize how the public interacts with courts. Its technology-driven approach has the potential to create an entirely new case resolution process, one that improves performance and accessibility along numerous dimensions and makes courts better suited for the information age.

Background

Judicial systems exist to provide a way for societies to organize themselves around the rule of law. In order to accomplish this goal, courts need to be (1) accessible; (2) fair; and (3) cost-effective. Unfortunately, due to their reliance on antiquated, non-technological processes, courts in the United States have seen little improvement on these three measures in recent decades.

With respect to access to justice, American courts are notoriously difficult to understand and use, especially for people without attorneys. In significant part, this confusion results from the fact that courts are structured almost entirely around face-to-face, one-on-one interactions with judges and court personnel, which is comparable to providing banking services without ATM’s.

Even the simplest negotiation points in the process require litigants to physically go to court, a process that is time-consuming, opaque, and intimidating. Consequently, millions of people, who have relatively minor issues that require negotiation with the judge or prosecutor, are either inconvenienced or simply avoid interacting with the system. The magnitude of this problem is demonstrated by the approximately 30 million warrants currently outstanding for failure to appear for show cause hearings.

Likewise, the courts’ reliance on snapshot decision-making leads to sub-optimal decisions. One-on-one process simply does not provide judges and court personnel with adequate time to collect and analyze information about litigants. As a result, decisions are often based on little more than general impressions about litigants, opening the door for numerous undesirable outcomes, including:

  • Decisions influenced by subconscious biases.
  • Perceived arbitrariness, such as when misdemeanor defendants with substantively identical cases receive wildly different sanctions.
  • Due process failures, such litigants with unpaid fines being imprisoned due to incorrect assessments of their ability to pay.

Finally, already cash-strapped states and municipalities are crippled by fixed-cost legal infrastructure. Not only are current processes non-technological, they scale poorly; costs are high on a per transaction basis, and remain high even as volume increases, essentially imposing a tax on growth.

What is required is a scalable, web-based alternative to the one-on- one decision making process.

Project Goals

This project will harness emerging insights into how judges do their jobs to build an algorithm-based portal to allow litigants to engage in largely automated negotiations with courts online.

The project’s algorithmic approach is designed to replicate the outcomes generated by the traditional one-on-one consultative process, but with enormous transaction costs savings. This approach works by providing judges with a way to specify in advance what information is required to make a decision about a litigant’s case, and providing litigants with the ability to submit that information to the court over the internet.

Judges apply rules to factual information to generate decisions; these rules can either be clear-cut application of law or what are sometimes referred to as “decisions heuristics,” the individual rules of thumb that judges use to make repetitive decisions quickly. While some thought-leaders in the judicial community have encouraged judges to formalize decision heuristics for consistency purposes, this project goes one step further to achieve a truly novel result: by programming these rules into software, many of the high-volume transactions that currently require the in-person interaction can be handled online. The technology will have two basic components: (1) a dashboard interface where judges can enter decision rules based on the facts they view important; (2) a forward-facing portal where litigants can submit information and requests using a multiple-choice framework similar to TurboTax.

While this method can theoretically automate a significant amount of the work courts are asked to do, in Phase 1 we will create the system for one to three courthouses, designed to process resolutions for a limited subset of transactions, such as unpaid fines and minor misdemeanor charges.

Success in Phase 1 will involve identifying suitable courthouses for pilot deployment, assisting judges in mapping the decision rules they use to make repetitive decisions, building the technology so that it integrates with the court’s data systems, and then assisting the court in encouraging litigant adoption. Assuming Phase 1 is successful, Phase 2 will focus on expanding the types of transactions delegated to the software, and more importantly, scale-up to an entire county or even the entire state.

If successful, this project will result in the creation of an entirely new type of court, one well-suited to the information age. In addition to efficiency gains, the shift away from snapshot, one-on-one decision making will open the door for a more “data-driven” justice system. Finally, in addition to being scalable throughout the United States the technology has potentially strong applications for the developing world, where a lack of effective legal infrastructure acts as a major deterrent to foreign investment.

Project Team:

James. J. Prescott: Principal Investigator

Benjamin Gubernick: Project Research Director.

MJ Cartwright: Pilot Program Director

Court Innovations, Inc.: A U-M startup founded by Professor Prescott and Mr. Gubernick.

 

Categories
Current Projects Professionals' Networks + Traiing

The Parole Hearing Data Project

The Parole Hearing Data Project - Open Law Lab

Check out a new data-gathering & redesign project from Nikki Zeichner, The Parole Hearing Data Project. It could be of use to legal professionals and advocates who are building new tools, or evaluating stats and data to make better arguments.

The Parole Hearing Data Project is a repository of New York State parole hearing data based on:

1 records scraped from the New York State Parole Board’s website; and

2 parole hearing transcripts crowdsourced with help from attorneys, advocates and prisoners/the formerly incarcerated.

So far, we have gathered 30,000+ records and formatted them for analysis. This project is in development. Currently, we are focused on developing a streamlined system of gathering hearing transcripts in collaboration and with consideration of those who are close to this issue. We are also working with graduate students at NYU and Columbia University who are analyzing and visualizing what we have so far. One end product that we look forward to showcasing is a library of multimedia content based on both our data and on documentation of this project’s development.

WHY

We are building this dataset because in New York over 10,000 parole eligible prisoners are denied release every year, and while the consequences of these decisions are costly at $60,000 annually to incarcerate one individual, the process of how these determinations are made is unclear. A former parole commissioner stated recently that “[t]he Parole Board process is broken, terribly broken.” We believe that the first step towards fixing a broken system is understanding it; the data that we gather will tell valuable stories about crime, incarceration, personal change, forgiveness, stereotypes, power, fear, and race, among other themes.

WHO

The Parole Hearing Data Project was created by Nikki Zeichner, a New York City-based criminal defense attorney developing multimedia public projects that explore the U.S. criminal justice system. Her interest in examining the NYS parole board’s release practices grew out of her experience representing a prisoner who had been denied release 9 times before their work together. More of her storytelling projects can be found at the Museum of the American Prison’s website. For inquiries: info at museumoftheamericanprison dot org

Categories
Current Projects Work Product Tool

Tools for Citizens to keep themselves Private and Secure

The recent UX Sprint for Security & Privacy Tools in San Francisco featured a great list of projects that work to empower citizens. Most center on:

  • How can we enable citizens to communicate free of government surveillance? and
  • How can we help people report on & document atrocities and abuses?

Here is a list of the projects, with links to fuller documentation — as inspiration in what’s possible in empowering citizens and protecting them from government monitoring.

Guardian Project:
The Guardian Project creates easy-to-use open source apps, mobile OS security enhancements, and customized mobile devices for people around the world to help them communicate more freely, and protect themselves from intrusion and monitoring.

 

commotionCommotion Wireless:
Commotion is an open-source communication toolkit that uses mobile phones, computers, and other wireless devices such as routers to make it possible for communities to set up decentralized mesh networks and share local services. Deployed already in a handful of U.S. cities and internationally, it is a key tool for internet freedom, providing alternatives where surveillance and censorship compromise traditional infrastructure.

 

 

StoryMakerMartus
Martus is a secure and open-source human rights documentation system used by human rights initiatives to document and preserve evidence and testimonies of human rights violations.

 

 

 

StoryMaker
StoryMakerStoryMaker
is an open source app for making and publishing multimedia stories with any Android phone or device, as safely and securely as possible. It provides an interactive storytelling training guide, walkthroughs, and templates for users to follow as they plan their story and capture media. The app then helps assemble the content into a finished format that can be shared directly with social media or anywhere– no computer editing station required, even for video!

 

 

 

lanternLantern
Lantern is a network of people working together to defeat internet censorship around the world. Install and share Lantern, our new peer-to-peer censorship circumvention software, to give or get access to people in places where access is censored

 

 

 

the serval projectThe Serval Project:
Serval is a telecommunications system comprised of at least two mobile phones that are able to work outside of regular mobile phone tower range due thanks to the Serval App and Serval Mesh.

 

 

guardianChatSecure:
ChatSecure is a free and open source encrypted chat client for iPhone and Android that supports OTR encryption over XMPP. ChatSecure was originally available for only iOS devices, but is now also available on Android via The Guardian Project’s similar app, formerly named Gibberbot.

 

 

Open Whisper Systems:
Whisper Systems produces simple and easy-to-use tools for secure mobile communication and secure mobile storage. Their products include RedPhone and TextSecure, which allow encrypted VoIP phone and text (SMS) communication between users

 

 

 

People’s Intelligence
guardianPeople’s Intelligence is an award winning idea that makes use of USSD, SMS and voice to establish a conversation with victims and witnesses of mass atrocities. The envisaged tool helps victims and witnesses to better document and verify their stories and provides them as well as relevant organisations with actionable information, thereby facilitating early warning and targeted assistance. It supports analysis and allows networking between affected communities, relevant organisations and experts through the use of ubiquitous technologies.

 

 

 


Mailvelope:

mailvelopeChMailvelope allows individuals to encrypt and decrypt email in their favorite webmail provider following the OpenPGP standard. This includes, among others, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, and GMX. It integrates directly into the webmail user interface; its elements are non-intrusive and easy to use in a user’s regular workflow.

 

 

 

Categories
Advocates Current Projects

Fixed: Parking Ticket advocacy

Fixed – The easiest way to fix a parking ticket.

Fixed is an app that lets you hand off your parking ticket to the company, for them to fight it for you on your behalf. You pay them nothing if you lose the contest and have to pay the fine. You have to pay them 25% of your prospective fine if they win the ticket for you.

Here is a sampling of their apps’ interactions

It’s outsourcing a small bit of legal advocacy — so you don’t have to deal with traffic and parking court. The interactions couldn’t be simpler: you just take a photo of the ticket, make a few selections, and then you get notified of your advocate, your chances of beating the ticket, and other details about the process.

This is a possible model for other Legal Advocacy – Outsourcing products & services. Its’ cleanliness and simplicity make it seem quite promising.

For more details on the company and its business model, here is a CNN article by Heather Kelly about Fixed:


Few things enrage normally calm people like finding a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper of their car.

Parking tickets can be infuriating, especially when they seem undeserved. (Officer, there’s no sign saying I can’t park here!). But most people don’t want to invest the time and energy to would take to dispute them.

Now there’s a new iPhone app, Fixed, that will fight parking tickets for you. The app, expected to launch next week, will do the heavy lifting of contesting a ticket: suggesting reasons it might be invalid, gathering supporting evidence and submitting the proper appeals paperwork.

If the driver beats the ticket, they pay Fixed 25% of what the citation would have cost. If they can’t get out of the ticket, Fixed doesn’t charge them anything.

In this way, Fixed hopes to add navigating bureaucracy to the list of urban tasks and nuisances — catching a cab, ordering food, finding a place to crash — made easier by popular tech startups.

Fixed hopes to capitalize on people’s feelings of injustice over unfair parking tickets.

“When you mention parking tickets to people it engenders such an emotional reaction … because so many people think they’ve received an unfair parking ticket,” said Fixed co-founder David Hegarty, who came up with the idea after getting six parking tickets in one day. Much of this anger is directed at local governments, which many people see as using parking tickets to fill budget gaps.

That emotional response, as well as a desire to not shell out $100 for blocking a couple inches of someone’s driveway, could make Fixed a hit. But its success will depend on how good the service is at navigating parking laws, which are often a confusing hodgepodge of local and state ordinances.

Here’s how Fixed works: When someone gets a ticket, they snap a photo of it on their iPhone and enter the violation code. The Fixed app will tell them what percentage of those types of tickets are usually overturned and then show a list of possible reasons it could be found invalid. For example, a street cleaning sign might be obscured by a leafy tree, or a parking meter could be broken.

If the motorist thinks they have a case, the app will prompt them to capture any additional photographic evidence with their phone and then digitally sign a letter.

Fixed has contracted with a team of legal researchers fluent in local traffic laws who will review each case before printing out the letter and submitting it via snail mail to the city. Over time, Fixed hopes to learn more about what methods and which errors have the highest success rates when contesting tickets. That information will be used to make the system more automated.

“It will always be reviewed by human eyes before it’s sent, but I’m pretty confident that we can get to the point where 80% of tickets are 95% automated,” said Hegarty.

Fixed is expected to launch in the Apple App store next week, although its service will only be available in San Francisco at first. The startup has been testing its service with a small group of 1,000 people, mostly friends and friends of friends, and there’s already a waiting list of 25,000 people wanting to sign up.

Hegarty and with Fixed’s other two co-founders, David Sanghera and DJ Burdick, hope to expand into the top 100 U.S. cities over the next 18 months.

San Francisco is fertile ground for motorists who can effortlessly rack up hundreds of dollars in parking tickets. As in many cities, parking in San Francisco is an exercise in frustration, with a limited number of spaces on the street and parking garages charging top dollar.

The company hasn’t had any official talks with the city. But Hegarty hopes his service is not seen as adversarial. Rather, he thinks Fixed could help people pay their legitimate parking tickets in a more timely manner.

“We do not have concerns if people want to use a third-party service, but there is no secret to overturning a citation if it has been issued erroneously. If someone feels that their citation was written in error, they might want to consider protesting themselves, for free,” said Paul Rose, a spokesperson for San Francisco’s transportation agency.

San Francisco issues about 1.5 million parking tickets every year, typically for $45 to $115 each (there are also some significantly pricier violations, such as having an expired plate or abandoning a car on a highway). The fines add up to about $95 million a year, according to Hegarty.

Of those 1.5 million citations, only five percent are actually contested. And of that small amount, only 30% are actually overturned, according to Rose. There are three rounds of appeals — two by mail and a court hearing.

Fixed will only handle the first two appeals for the time being.

The number of overall citations in San Francisco has fallen in recent years as the city has rolled out its own technological tools, such as pay-by-phone and meters that take credit cards, in an effort to make payment easier.

“We’d much rather have people pay the meter than pay a fine,” said Rose.

Fixed’s business model isn’t completely new. There are companies that handle driving and parking violations for large corporations such as FedEx and UPS. In New York City, commercial delivery companies account for 20% to 30% of the city’s 10 million parking tickets every year, according to Crain’s New York Business.

The difference is that Fixed is making this service available to individuals. Hegarty can see eventually expanding into speeding tickets and other small financial annoyances, such as cable company fees. He thinks Fixed could help in any area where the fee amount is small enough not to protest in person, but still big enough to make someone angry.

“That’s our sweet spot,” he said.

Categories
Advocates Current Projects

NYC Housing Court Navigators

via NYC Housing Court – Resolution Assistance Program (RAP).

New York just began a pilot program of Court Navigators for Housing Courts in some jurisdictions.  Non-lawyers would help self-represented litigants navigate the court system.

The Court Navigator Program was launched in February 2014 to support and assist unrepresented litigants – people who do not have an attorney – during their court appearances in landlord-tenant and consumer debt cases. Specially trained and supervised non-lawyers, called Court Navigators, provide general information, written materials, and one-on-one assistance to eligible unrepresented litigants. In addition, Court Navigators provide moral support to litigants, help them access and complete court forms, assist them with keeping paperwork in order, in accessing interpreters and other services, explain what to expect and what the roles of each person is in the courtroom. Court Navigators are also permitted to accompany unrepresented litigants into the courtroom in Kings County Housing Court and Bronx Civil Court. While these Court Navigators cannot address the court on their own, they are able to respond to factual questions asked by the judge.

In addition to this court-based program, the courts will also be utilizing non-lawyers to provide legal information and access to homebound individuals.

The Navigators would perform the following functions in certian proceedings:

In General

The Court Navigator Program trains college students, law students and other persons deemed appropriate by the Program to assist unrepresented litigants, who are appearing in Nonpayment proceedings in the Resolution Part of Housing Court or the Consumer Debt Part of the Civil Court.

Nonpayment proceedings are cases where landlords sue tenants to collect rent. In these disputes, tenants and owners/landlords face the possibility of losing their homes through eviction or foreclosure. Consumer debt proceedings involve credit card companies, hospitals, banks or any other person or company that a litigant may owe money to. Despite the high stakes, most litigants appear in court without an attorney to advocate on their behalf.

In Kings County Housing Court, the Program operates in partnership with the non profit organizations University Settlement, and Housing Court Answers.

The goal of the Court Navigator Program is to help litigants who do not have an attorney have a productive court experience through offering non-legal support. Participating volunteers work in the courtroom under the supervision of a Court Navigator Program Coordinator. They have the opportunity to interact with judges, lawyers and litigants, and to gain real-world experience. Whatever a student’s goal is in volunteering — helping people in need, making new contacts, learning more about assisting a person in court or developing professional skills — the Court Navigator Program sets the stage!

For more information contact: courtnavigator@nycourts.gov

What do Court Navigators do?

Court Navigators:

  • Help in using computers located in the courthouse to obtain information and fill out court forms using the Do It Yourself (DIY) computer programs.
  • Help find information about the law and how to find a lawyer on a website called Law Help        
  • Help persons find resources in the courthouse and outside the court to assist in resolving their cases.   
  • Help persons collect and organize documents needed for their cases.   
  • Accompany persons during hallway negotiations with opposing attorneys.   
  • Accompany persons in conferences with the judge or the judge’s court attorney.   
  • Respond to a judge’s or court attorney’s questions asking for factual information on the case.   

Court Navigators do not give legal advice or get involved in negotiations or settlement conferences. Generally, court navigators also do not give out legal information except with the approval of the Chief Administrative Judge of the Courts.


Training                   

A two and half hour seminar and a training manual will provide information on what a navigator can do to help.

Training topics include:

  • Civil and Housing Court Overview
  • Basics of Consumer Debt Cases and Nonpayment Proceedings
  • Interviewing and Communication Skills
  • Using the DIY Computers and Law Help

Prospective volunteers are trained at their school or at one of the Civil Court of the City of New York courthouses.

 

Categories
Background

Better Lawyering for the Poor

via Better Lawyering for the Poor – NYTimes.com.

Access to Justice image people tech laweyers

The New York Times Editorial Board published a piece spotlighting various New York-based initiatives that might transform the structure of the legal industry, and thus open more access to legal resources.

These highlighted projects include

New York State’s chief judge, Jonathan Lippman, is making some innovative changes to the education and training of lawyers as well as to the workings of the court system that bear close watching around the country.

Here is the full, short editorial:

Starting next year, a new program will let third-year law students take the bar exam in February instead of July, in exchange for spending their last semester doing free legal work for the poor under the supervision of seasoned attorneys. The plan enlarges on existing law school internships and previous steps by Judge Lippman to increase the involvement of law schools and students in helping the indigent. Giving third-year students full-time practical training, along with earlier admission to the bar, could help improve their job prospects.

Judge Lippman is also seeking to have more non-lawyers assist unrepresented litigants in housing, consumer debt and other cases. A pilot project in Brooklyn and the Bronx will allow trained non-lawyers called “court navigators” to accompany unrepresented litigants to court and respond to questions from a judge, though not address the court on their own. The legal profession has no reason to feel threatened by this since the navigators will be helping people who cannot afford a lawyer and have no alternative form of representation.

On another front, Judge Lippman is trying to reduce the harmful consequences of old misdemeanor convictions, which can prevent people from finding work and housing or obtaining professional licenses and government benefits.

Starting in April, at his order, the court system will no longer include misdemeanors on the records of people it sells to background screening agencies, if the individuals involved have no other criminal convictions and have not been arrested for 10 years. (There will be exceptions for sex offenses, public corruption and drunken driving.) The judge also plans to submit legislation in Albany that would spare individuals with a clean record for seven years from having to reveal old misdemeanors when applying for a job (with the same exceptions), and give judges authority to seal nonviolent felony convictions after 10 years.

These are all sensible reforms that Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature should get behind.