The San Francisco city government launched SF Open Law this week — to make all of its laws open for people who code, build, and design to use. Legal professionals can use it to build new tools.
It’s a repository for hackers to make better legal apps & tools for the city. And it’s a collaborative too, allowing people who have made things to add it to a collective resource.
Here’s the initiative’s self-description
Open Law represents a commitment by the City and County of San Francisco to releasing one of our most important pieces of information—the law—to the public in formats that make it more accessible. Following on our landmark Open Data Policy, the laws of San Francisco are released in technologist-friendly formats that can power new applications that enhance understanding, improve access and lead to new insights about the law.
These applications have yet to emerge, but we believe giving unprecedented access to the law will unleash creativity from the community. Imagine, for example, if you could:
Discover all the laws impacting small businesses in an easy, modern, browsable format
Find amusing or outdated laws from a bygone era
Explore the legal actions and ordinances that led to Municipal Code changes more easily
Share and discuss laws and get answers from certified legal resources in the community
For a paper I’ve been working on, here is a preliminary mind-map I’ve been sketching out.
It’s a quick brainstorm of how DIY legal tools may be provided to non-experts. It considers what models might be breakthroughs, how technology might interact with the person, and what challenges might block their success.
Citizenshipworks is building online and mobile apps aimed at non-citizens in the US — trying to give them resources and tutorials to navigate their way through citizenship.
They have checklists, expert system interviews, and tutorials to help the users along.
Damian Thompson of the Knight Foundation, writes of the new app.
I’m also proud to report on last week’s launch of the CitizenshipWorks mobile app for iOS and Android. Knight Foundation is the chief funder. Tony Lu, one of the app’s developers, says its combination of features is unique, integrating citizenship eligibility tools, such as a “trips calculator” and a document checklist; a legal directory; and study aids.
Those resources are immensely helpful for people navigating the path to citizenship. For example, green card holders who want to become citizens have to list every trip they’ve taken abroad on their applications. Imagine if you had to list every trip you’ve taken over the past five years. It would be a nightmare, especially if you didn’t keep systematic records. This is where the trips calculator can help.
The SikhCoalition has put together an ingenious app out to crowdsource reports of discrimination at airports and on airlines. If the government and companies won’t release information about how many complaints they have received, then why not ask people to report their complaints themselves?
The app lets a person report an incident as soon as it happens, and the report will be filed with the TSA & the DHS — and it will also allow others to maintain counts of how many incidents actually occur.
The Immigration Legal Resource Center (ILRC) has put out a sketched-out (at least in part) guide for a young non-citizen audience — trying to equip them with some basic legal knowledge & set of strategies. Some excerpts are below. There are a lot of great starting points in the PDF — though I would advise moving away from the “Pamphlet Approach” ASAP. If it lived on a scrollable or sliding website, at least that would be a minor step in the right direction >> away from bulky online pamphlets, towards a lightweight and mobile-friendly interface to bring the target audience in contact with this info.
I’ve been searching around for pre-college legal curriculum. When is law taught to young people in America, other than in pre-law classes in university?
I took a Civics class in my public high school, which reviewed some basic First Amendment rights, and was oriented around the rights of young people. It was enjoyable enough, but also taught by the school’s gym coach and not taught with much rigor or expectation.
In my basic Internet searches, I’ve found there are a handful of new Legal-oriented charter schools popping up around the States. The schools’ websites are fairly limited, so it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what kind of legal curriculum they are teaching, or what methods and tools they use to do so. I’m excited by the promise of youth-oriented legal education.
Chicago’s Legal Prep Charter Academies is a legal-themed high school that opened in August 2012 with 200 freshman students enrolled. It’s located in South Side Chicago, in the West Garfield Park neighborhood. It will be adding a grade per year until it has 4 grades with 800 students.
Legal Prep’s mission is to prepare Chicago’s youth to succeed in college and in life. Through a rigorous curriculum and a culture of high expectations, Legal Prep will empower its students to achieve their full potential. Legal Prep will focus on the skills that all great lawyers possess: excellent written and oral communication, critical thinking, problem solving, and advocacy. While not all of our students will go on to be lawyers, all students will gain an appreciation and respect for the law. These “21st century skills” will prepare students for success in any number of postsecondary paths.
To help accomplish, Legal Prep is working with the entire Chicago legal community and other area businesses to provide the resources and exposure to our students so that they know that they can excel in college and pursue a legal education. There are numerous ways for corporate legal departments, law firms, bar associations, and individual attorneys to be involved so please let us know if you are interested in supporting Legal Prep or would like to learn more about the school.
It does not have an explicit list of the courses it offers, but the school says that it will prioritize legal topics in education.
Legal Prep will offer its students a college prep curriculum with legal topics infused into the core subjects, where appropriate. Legal Prep will also provide law-themed courses and extra-curricular activities. The legal content is a way in which students can learn and hone their writing skills and oral presentation skills, as well as apply logic, analysis, and critical thinking to legal issues. Law curriculum uses strategies that engage students in learning, foster civic participation, and promote meaningful relationships with professionals.
Diverse attorneys are vastly underrepresented in the legal profession – only 11% of attorneys are diverse, compared to 36% of the U.S. population. Legal Prep presents an exciting way to increase the pipeline of diverse students to the legal profession. Legal Prep will not only provide exposure to the legal profession and attorney support, but also prepare students for the rigors of college and professional life.
I am writing a paper on ways to bring good design to create new models of access to justice. I have been scouting out some such threads, to see what might be worth developing further.
In my browsing, I came across this pdf pamphlet from the State Bar of California. It is an overarching list, meant to apply to all kinds of common situations that might arise in a person’s life. It’s not about litigation as much as planning & abiding by regulations a person may not be aware of.
The list is a bit over-general — trying to cover everything from obligations on those turning 18, to those just having a baby, to those buying a home, to those stationed in California with the military. It also would do well not to be buried in a .doc/.pdf file, but rather live on the web, and more easily searchable and reachable.
I can’t really imagine the use case of who the Bar expected to be using this, or how. Perhaps they imagined that a person would print this out and just keep it around their home, and check back in periodically — o yes, I’m making plans to get married, and I know I should be doing something legal, but I don’t remember exactly what, let me go find that pamphlet!
I don’t envision myself or many others doing this — much more likely, they would type in a quick search “legal requirements getting married” and do their best to navigate the chaos that would result.
But regardless of the form of presentation and delivery, the checklist does have some interesting content. It includes a general ‘stay healthy’ protocol for any person.
The pamphlet also outlines some basic alternatives to getting a lawyer, should such a problem arise. Again, I ask, why is this buried in a .doc and not prominently on the web? This is a good first step to legal self-management for consumers — letting them know their options and plan out for themselves.
This info could be made more helpful it was all linked out to richer explanations, examples, and how-tos.
I love the concept of the pamphlet, and would like to see it (or make it) brought to life in a more linked, lively, and findable instantiation.
Georgetown Law is holding its 2nd ‘Iron Tech’ Lawyer competition, in which students who took a semester seminar –“Technology, Innovation & Law Practice: An Experiential Seminar” — by Professor Tania Rostain and Law Librarian Roger Skalbeck. The second competition will be held on April 17 in Washington DC.
A video from Georgetown Law, giving an overview of last year’s program:
Coverage of last year’s apps competition by Nightly Business Report:
The apps seem mainly to be developed using a proprietary software system Neota Logic, that’s intended for non-coders to develop web apps — mainly to build ‘legal expert systems’.
From what I can tell based on the coverage, the apps seem to follow a pattern: make the software the ‘associate’ gathering information, and then have it generate a ‘memo’ which can be delivered to a real human lawyer, who takes this memo-report and can proceed with more well-informed lawyering.
The pattern:
Ask the ‘client’ questions through software interfaces
Adjust future questions based on previous responses
At the end of the question-answer experience, deliver a report to the ‘client’ (or directly to a real lawyer) for future use.
This pattern is a similar one to those in use by the A2J Software authoring programs. It may be nice to see them side-by-side — or to actually see how these various projects could be synced together. I would love to see a website (perhaps, I should build it…) that has all of the projects and tools generated out of these various law school programs assembled together. Even if they have been abandoned before being brought to market (or made available on the web), they are of interest as concept designs.
The pattern of these apps clearly has some promise, having been built using the offline pattern of how an intake process would work at a legal clinic or sit down with a lawyer. I would love to see some more playfulness or radical rethinkings of what else could be done, to make the experience less clinical and more human. How can warmth, trust, and confidence be built into these systems — and how can they encourage deeper reflection and provoke better answers from the clients? It seems
Tanina’s courses give students experiential learning by making applications designed to be deployed to an active user community. Tanina and Roger can be regarded as the pioneers of The Maker Movement in law. Her students are learning the skills to make applications to deliver straightforward advice and/or to triage and more efficiently route tougher problems to those legal aid resources best able to deal with the issues identified during a logic driven online interview. Georgetown is creating a road map for the practice of law in the 21st century.
I am enjoying the comparisons to the Maker Movement & a Law-By-Design movement. At the Reinvent Law Silicon Valley conference earlier this month, there were a few mentions of the Law World taking inspiration from the 3D printer revolution and Makers around us — how can we build this DIY, tinkering, and hacking culture into Law? I can see this class & competition as a nice step forward.
What would be particularly valuable to gather, from this class are lessons learned. I understand law schools’ interests in trumpeting their programs as being innovative & progressive. But what is needed is a better understanding of where these type of classes fail, break down, don’t come together like they should.
Similar lessons learned could be drawn from some other law/design/tech classes I’ve been a part of — like the Law Without Walls program (based out of Univ. of Miami, but coming from law schools all over), or from the Ideas for a Better Internet classes (based out of Harvard & Stanford over the past 2 years).
These classes all generate a lot of interest and lots of creativity, but when the programs end — the ideas and all of the pain points of trying to get law students working to build better legal services all disappear into notebooks, hard drives, and trash cans. I want to hear from students and instructors about what really didn’t work, why many of the projects aren’t viable, what they would do differently next time, and what it would take to have these classes building viable, inspiring and creative approaches.
My last point: when building new tech to deliver access to justice, we don’t have to be constrained to replicating ‘offline’ processes ‘online’. The new tech gives us as legal-designers chance to explore this space as if it were new, and come up with radical new ways to deliver the outcomes that the process are about. Classes in the vein of the Iron Tech Lawyer should be teaching students not just how to structure an expert system — but also how to do the user research, brainstorming, and prototyping that will lead to creative leaps that can build amazing new legal products.
I just came across the company TrueOffice that is putting together (inspiring!) games for businesses to train their employees on ‘compliance’ issues. Think sexual harassment, information security, or ethical behavior in the office.
The issue is that these trainings are typically boring, unimpressive, without lasting impact — more of a burden on the employees than a lasting instructional session.
TrueOffice takes a ‘Gamification’ approach to the problem (with strong reliance on the attraction of narratives, comic books, and police procedural tv shows).
Their market is clear: businesses that are obliged to train employees about certain rules & policies, and then provide some assurance that the employees have digested the training. Their approach, though, holds lots of inspiration for a wider range of markets and possible products.
Though these game apps are marketed as enterprise solutions for ‘compliance’ — they are bordering on the world of law.
It uncovers a few insights that could be used for legal service delivery & legal education:
Embed what you want to communicate — laws, rules, strategies, etc — into larger narratives — if the apparent point of an experience is more to follow the story, find out the outcome, or solve a problem — and less just to intake material for the sake of remembering it long enough to pass a test — the user will be more engaged and more likely to be actively learning the material. It is better to teach through experiences, narratives, storylines, and personas, than to just teach the material cold, section by section. This has clear implications for how we educate lawyers, but also holds true for other communications. How we communicate to clients, to juries, to others we are trying to persuade or educate — we need to embrace users’ love of stories & narratives, and use this for its persuasive & engaging force.
Give users ‘agents’ or ‘personas’, whose roles the user can take on — this will help the user see situations more critically, and from different kinds of perspectives than their own. This may be particularly important in training lawyers. It may also be a playful tool for legal service delivery, in which the client needs to do more self-diagnosis or self-service — this persona-playing may provide a reflective space for better information sharing & engagement with online legal services. Users like to be active — and in created virtual worlds, they are willing to make leaps outside of their typical mental models & expectations, and perhaps also be provoked into new modes of thinking, planning, valuing, and action.
Provide quick feedback, regularly throughout the experience — whether in the form of check-in quizzes, or progress bars, or a user journey map which will show the user that they are making progress — and will help them locate themselves on the overall service’s map. Don’t wait until the end of an experience to tell the user how they are doing, or provide encouragement or other feedback. Weave it throughout the experience, and the user will be much more engaged. That’s a more general lesson — to ‘onboard’ users into a product, system, or even a conversation, you must give quick easy rewards, and then steadily make the experience more challenging.
Play can work in the workplace — if TrueOffice is to be believed, employers and employees both have an appetite for games, cartoons, and other ‘play-like’ experiences to serve work purposes. Perhaps law firms is another frontier — in which such ‘play’ will not be allowed for a good while — but I take it as a positive that some ‘serious’ workplaces may be inching open to more inventive, interactive, and creative approaches to delivering services.
I have scouted around for some info on whether there is a market there for TrueOffice. They’re a fairly young venture out of Boston, and it seems in January 2013 they received $3mil in Series A funding from, among others, Rho Ventures, the Partnership for New York City Fund and Contour Venture Partners (as reported by Kyle Alspach in the Boston Business Journal).
True Office said the funding will be used to expand its business within the financial services sector, and to move into other highly-regulated markets such as health care.
In the release, Sodowick said there are currently few options for businesses to effectively help their employees understand regulatory and compliance issues. But, he said, “a well-designed game has the power to engage employees and at the same time, produce analytics that can help the banks identify and reduce operational and compliance risk.”
