This past week, I had the privilege of attending the State of Privacy event in Rome, with policy, technical, and research leaders from Italy and Europe.
I was at a table focused on the intersection of Legal Design, AI platforms, and privacy protections.
Our multidisciplinary group spent several hours getting concrete: what are the scenarios and user needs around privacy & AI platforms? What are the main concerns and design challenges?
We then moved towards an initial brainstorm. What ideas for interventions, infrastructure, or processes could help move AI platforms towards greater privacy protections — and avoid privacy problems that have arisen in similar technology platform advancements in the recent past? What could we learn from privacy challenges, solutions, and failures that came with the rise of websites on the open Internet, the advancement of search engines, and the popular use of social media platforms?
Our group circled around some promising, exciting ideas for cross-Atlantic collaboration. Here is a short recap of them.
Learning from the User Burdens of Privacy Pop-ups & Cookie Banners
Can we avoid putting so many burdens on the user, like with cookie banners and privacy pop-ups on every website? We can learn from the current crop of privacy protections, which warn European visitors when they open any new website and require them to read, choose, and click through pop-up menus about cookies, privacy, and more. What are ways that we can lower these user burdens and privacy burn-out interfaces?
Smart AI privacy warnings, woven into interactions
Can the AI be smart enough to respond with warnings when people are crossing into a high-risk area? Perhaps instead of generalized warnings about privacy implications — a conversational AI agent can let a person know when they are sharing data/asking for information that has a higher risk of harm. This might be when a person asks a question about their health, finances, personal security, divorce/custody, domestic violence, or another topic that could have damaging consequences to them if others (their family members, financial institutions, law enforcement, insurance companies, or other third parties) found out. The AI could be programmed to be privacy-protective, to easily let a person choose at the moment about whether to take the risk of sharing this sensitive data, to help a person understand the risks in this specific domain, and to help the person delete or manage their privacy for this particular interaction.
Choosing the Right Moment for Privacy Warnings & Choices
Can warnings and choices around privacy come during the ‘right moment’? Perhaps it’s not best to warn people before they sign up for a service, or even right when they are logging on. This is typically when people are most hungry for AI interaction & information. They don’t want to be distracted. Rather, can the warning, choices, and settings come during the interactions — or after it? A user is likely to have ‘buyer’s remorse’ with AI platforms: did I overshare? Who can see what I just shared? Could someone find out what I talked about with the AI? How can privacy terms & controls be easily accessible right when people need it, usually during these “clean up” moments?
Conducting More Varied User Research about AI & Protections
We need more user research in different cultures and demographics about how people use AI, relate to it, and critique it (or do not). To figure out how to develop privacy protections, warning/disclosure designs, and other techno-policy solutions, first we need a deeper understanding of various AI users, their needs and preferences, and their willingness to engage with different kinds of protections.
Building an International Network Working on AI & Privacy Protections
Could we have anchor universities, with strong computer science, policy, and law departments, that host workshops and training on the ethical development of AI platforms? These could help bring future technology leaders into cross-disciplinary contact with people from policy and law, to learn about social good matters like privacy. These cross-disciplinary groups could also help policy & law experts learn how to integrate their principles and research into more technical form, like by developing labeled datasets and model benchmarks.—Are you interested in ensuring there is privacy built into AI platforms? Are you working on user, technical, or policy research on what the privacy scenarios, needs, risks, and solutions might be on AI platforms? Please be in touch!Thank you to Dr. Monica Palmirani for leading the Legal Design group at the State of Privacy event, at the lovely Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia in Rome.
In July, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at Stanford hosted the “AI and Legal Help Crossover” event, for stakeholders from the civil justice system and computer science to meet, talk, and identify promising next steps to advance the responsible development of AI for improving the justice system.
Here are 3 topic areas that arose out of this workshop, that we’re excited to work on more in the future!
Topic 1: Next Steps for advancing AI & Justice work
These are the activities that participants highlighted as valuable for
Events that dive into AI applications, research, and evaluation in specific areas of the justice system. For example, could we hold meetings that focus in on specific topics, like:
High volume, quick proceedings like for Debt, Traffic, Parking, and Eviction. These case types might have similar dynamics, processes, and litigant needs.
What are the ideas for applications that could improve the quality of justice and outcomes in these areas?
What kinds of research, datasets, and protocols might be done in these areas in particular, that would matter to policymakers, service providers, or communities?
Innovation hot areas like Eviction Diversion and Criminal Justice Diversion, where there already are many pilots happening to improve outcomes. If there is already energy to pilot new interventions in a particular area, can we amplify these with AI?
Local Justice/AI R&D Community-building, to have regional hubs in areas where there are anchor institutions with AI research/development capacity & those with justice system expertise. Can we have a network of local groups who are working on improving AI development & research? And where local experts in computer science can learn about the opportunities for work with justice system actors — so that they are informed & connected to do relevant work.
Index of Justice/AI Research, Datasets, Pilots, and Partners, so that more people new to this area (both from technical and legal backgrounds) can see what is happening, build relationships, and collaborate with each other.
Domain Expert Community meetings that could attract more legal aid lawyers, self-help court staff, clerks, navigators, judicial officers, and those who have on-the-ground experience with helping litigants through the court system. Could we start gathering and standardizing their expertise — into more formal benchmarks, rating scales, and evaluation protocols?
Unauthorized Practice of Law & Regulatory Discussions to talk through where legal professional rules might play out with AI tools – -and how they might be interpreted or adapted to best protect people from harm while benefiting people with increased access and empowerment.
National Group Leadership and Support, in which professional groups and consortia like the Legal Services Corporation, State Justice Institute Joint Technology Committee, CiTOC, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Department of Justice, or National Center of State Courts could help:
Define an agenda for projects, research, and evaluation needs
Encourage groups to standardize data and make it available
Call for pilots and partnerships, and help with the matchmaking of researchers, developers, and courts/legal aid groups
Incentivize pilots and evaluation with funding dedicated to human-centered AI for justice
Topic 2: Taskswhere AI might help with justice systems research.
AI for litigant decision-making, to help a person understand possible outcomes that may result from a certain claim, defense, or choice they make in the justice system. It could help them be more strategic with their choices, wording, etc.
AI to craft better claims and arguments so that litigants or their advocates could understand the strongest claims, arguments, citations, and evidence to use.
AI for narratives and document completion, to help a litigant quickly from their summary of their facts and experiences to a properly formatted and written court filing.
AI for legalese to plain language translation, that could help a person understand a notice, contract, court order, or other legal document they receive.
Service Improvement themes
AI for legal aid or court centers to intake/triage users to the right issue area, level of service, and resources they can use.
AI for chat and coaching, to package experts’ knowledge about following a court process, filling in a form, preparing for a hearing, or other legal tasks.
Accountability themes
AI to spot policy/advocacy targets, where legal aid advocates, attorney general offices, or journalists could see which courts or judges might have issues with the quality of justice in their proceedings, where more training or advocacy for change might be needed.
AI to spot fraud, bad practices, and concerning trends. For example, can it scan petitions being filed in debt cases to flag to clerks where the dates, amounts, or claims mean that the claim is not valid? Or can it look through settlement agreements in housing or debt cases to find concerning terms or dynamics?
Research & System Design themes
AI to understand where processes need simplification, or where systems need to be reformed. They could understand through user error rates, continuances, low participation rates, or other factors which parts of the justice system are the least accessible — and where rules, services, and technology needs reform.
AI for understanding the court’s performance, to see what is happening not only in the case-level data but also at the document-level. This could give much more substance to what processes and outcomes people are experiencing.
Topic 3: Data that will be important to make progress on Justice & AI
Legal Procedure, Services, and Form data, that has been vetted by experts and approved as up to date. This data might then train a model of ‘reliable, authoritative’ legal information for each jurisdiction about what a litigant should know when dealing with a certain legal problem.
Could researchers work with the LSC and local legal aid & court groups that maintain self-help content (legal help websites, procedural guides, forms, etc.) to gather this local procedural information – -and then build a model that can deliver high-quality, jurisdiction-specific procedural guidance?
Court Document data, that includes the substance of pleadings, settlements, and judgments. Access to datasets with substantive data about the claims litigants are making, the terms they agree to, and the outcomes in judgments can give needed information for research about the court, and also AI tools for litigants & service providers that analyze, synthesize, and predict.
Could courts partner with researchers to make filings and settlement documents available, in an ethical/privacy-friendly way?
Domain Expert data in which they help rate or label legal data. What is good or bad? What is helpful or harmful? Building successful AI pilots will need input and quality control from domain experts — especially those who see how legal documents, processes, and services play out in practice.
Could justice groups & universities help bring legal experts together to help define standards, label datasets, and give input on the quality of models’ output? What are the structures, incentives, and compensation needed to get legal experts more involved in this?
As more lawyers, court staff, and justice system professionals learn about the new wave of generative AI, there’s increasing discussion about how AI models & applications might help close the justice gap for people struggling with legal problems.
Could AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google Bard help get more people crucial information about their rights & the law?
Could AI tools help people efficiently and affordably defend themselves against eviction or debt collection lawsuits? Could it help them fill in paperwork, create strong pleadings, prepare for court hearings, or negotiate good resolutions?
The Stakeholder Session
In Spring 2023, the Stanford Legal Design Lab collaborated with the Self Represented Litigation Network to organize a stakeholder session on artificial intelligence (AI) and legal help within the justice system. We conducted a one-hour online session with justice system professionals from various backgrounds, including court staff, legal aid lawyers, civic technologists, government employees, and academics.
The purpose of the session was to gather insights into how AI is already being used in the civil justice system, identify opportunities for improvement, and highlight potential risks and harms that need to be addressed. We documented the discussion with a digital whiteboard.
An overview of what we covered in our stakeholder session with justice professionals.
The stakeholders discussed 3 main areas where AI could enhance access to justice and provide more help to individuals with legal problems.
How AI could help professionals like legal aid or court staff improve their service offerings
How AI could help community members & providers do legal problem-solving tasks
How AI could help executives, funders, advocates, and community leaders better manage their organizations, train others, and develop strategies for impact.
Opportunity 1: for Legal Aid & Court Service Providers to deliver better services more efficiently
The first opportunity area focused on how AI could assist legal aid providers in improving their services. The participants identified four ways in which AI could be beneficial:
Helping experts create user-friendly guides to legal processes & rights
Improving the speed & efficacy of tech tool development
Strengthening providers’ ability to connect with clients & build a strong relationship
Streamlining intake and referrals, and improving the creation of legal documents.
Within each of these zones, participants had many specific ideas.
Opportunities for legal aid & court staff to use AI to deliver better services
Opportunity 2: For People & Providers to Do Legal Tasks
The second opportunity area focused on empowering people and providers to better perform legal tasks. The stakeholders identified five main ways AI could help:
understanding legal rules and policies,
identifying legal issues and directing a person to their menu of legal options,
predicting likely outcomes and facilitating mutual resolutions,
preparing legal documents and evidence, and
aiding in the preparation for in-person presentations and negotiations.
How might AI help people understand their legal problem & navigate it to resolution?
Each of these 5 areas of opportunities is full of detailed examples. Professionals had extensive ideas about how AI could help lawyers, paraprofessionals, and community members do legal tasks in better ways. Explore each of the 5 areas by clicking on the images below.
Opportunity 3: For Org Leadership, Policymaking & Strategies
The third area focused on how AI could assist providers and policymakers in managing their organizations and strategies. The stakeholders discussed three ways AI could be useful in this zone:
training and supporting service providers more efficiently,
optimizing business processes and resource allocation, and
helping leaders identify policy issues and create impactful strategies.
AI opportunities to help justice system leaders
Explore the ideas for better training, onboarding, volunteer capacity, management, and strategizing by clicking on the images below.
Possible Risks & Harms of AI in Civil Justice
While discussing these opportunity areas, the stakeholders also addressed the risks and harms associated with the increased use of AI in the civil justice system. Some of the concerns raised include over-reliance on AI without assessing its quality and reliability, the provision of inaccurate or biased information, the potential for fraudulent practices, the influence of commercial actors over public interest, the lack of empathy or human support in AI systems, the risk of reinforcing existing biases, and the unequal access to AI tools.
The whiteboard of professionals’ 1st round of brainstorming about possible risks to mitigate for a future of AI in the civil justice system
This list of risks is not comprehensive, but it offers a first typology that future research & discussions (especially with other stakeholders, like community members and leaders) can build upon.
Infrastructure & initiatives to prioritize now
Our discussion closed out with a discussion of practical next steps. What can our community of legal professionals, court staff, academics, and tech developers be doing now to build a better future in which AI helps close the justice gap — and where the risks above are mitigated as much as possible?
The stakeholders proposed several infrastructure and strategy efforts that could lead to this better future. These include
ethical data sharing and model building protocols,
the development of AI models specifically for civil justice, using trustworthy data from legal aid groups and courts to train the model on legal procedure, rights, and services,
the establishment of benchmarks to measure the performance of AI in legal use cases,
the adoption of ethical and professional rules for AI use,
recommendations for user-friendly AI interfaces, that can ensure people understand what the AI is telling them & how to think critically about the information it provides, and
the creation of guides for litigants and policymakers on using AI for legal help.
Thanks to all the professionals who participated in the Spring 2023 session. We look forward to a near future where AI can help increase access to justice & effective court and legal aid services — while also being held accountable and its risks being mitigated as much as possible.
We welcome further thoughts on the opportunity, risk, and infrastructure maps presented above — and suggestions for future events to continue building towards a better future of AI and legal help.
More about the May event from the American Academy : “Increasingly capable AI tools like Chat GPT and Bing Chat will impact the accessibility, reliability, and regulation of legal and other professional services, like healthcare, for an underserved public. In this event, Jason Barnwell, Margaret Hagan, and Andrew M. Perlman discuss these and other implications of AI’s rapidly evolving capabilities.”‘
You can see a recording of the panel, that featured Jason Barnwell (Microsoft), Margaret Hagan (Stanford Legal Design Lab), and Andrew M. Perlman (Suffolk Law School).
A new initiative, Frontline Justice, has just been launched to build a new set of justice workers who can serve people with legal needs & close the justice gap.
This new group is planning to grow a workforce of justice workers, reform policies and regulations around who can provide legal help, and engage communities in how people are served.
The National Center for State Courts has a working group of justice leaders who have released a December 2022 report “Just Horizons” — pointing to systemic vulnerabilities in the court system and opportunities for building a better future, where the institutions are strong, the public is served, and there is a healthy justice ecosystem.
There are 6 areas of Vulnerabilities & Opportunities laid out, where justice institutions can invest to strengthen their performance, impact, and infrastructure. These include a focus on the future, using data, private entity management, emergency preparedness, future-ready workforce, and user-centered design.
These areas all resonate with our work at the Legal Design Lab:
A focus on the intentional design of civic systems: government institutions like courts should be looking to the future to see what kinds of services, relationships, infrastructure, and outcomes they want to be having. They should work with diverse stakeholders to set this future agenda, and scope out projects to reach this better future.
Prioritizing the users of the government institutions, rather than just the institutions themselves: many times, when we talk about what government institutions like courts should be doing, the focus is on internal metrics — efficiency, cases closed, calendaring, staffing, and budget. These are important factors, but they must be balanced out with metrics that reflect the interests of the people the institutions are meant to help and serve.
Participation of diverse stakeholders in providing feedback about the status quo, finding and scoping new solutions, and evaluating new revisions to ensure they are serving the audiences as intended.
As more courts use text messages to improve litigants’ access to justice, many wonder exactly how to set up texting.
What are the words, schedule, and flow of text messages for a court to use?
From our experience with working with criminal, traffic, housing, and other civil courts in doing text message projects, we have some options for courts to use.
There are 3 models:
Straightforward reminders
Reminders including services/self-help
Interactive flow with services and accommodation help
We go through each texting model and share a sample script that courts have used in the past.
Texting Model 1: multiple-day countdown to the hearing.
The goal of this reminder text message flow is to increase participation rates, and reduce default rates for a hearing. It is a straightforward reminder script, focused on dates, times, and locations. There is also a mention of the consequences of default.
A straightforward 10-5-1-day reminder flow for court hearings
Texting Model 2: Reminder Plus Services
A second model for court reminders adds more services into the messages.
It can have a 10-5-1 day reminder schedule, but the messages also add in links and referrals to self-help services.
These could be links to workshops, self-help centers, hotlines, right to counsel, navigators, or other expert assistance services.
A reminder message with links to services
Texting Model 3: Interactive Service and Accommodations
In this model, the focus is less on reminders and more on connections to services.
The text message flow would start if the litigant texts a keyword into a court phone number, signaling that they want to find services or accommodation. The court summons might have this phone number and keyword on it, for litigants to follow.
The message flow is interactive, allowing the litigant to choose what kind of information or connections they would like.
The court sets up the interactive menu of options and provides phone numbers, hours, and other details about how to get legal aid, assistance, self-help, court directions, and disability or language accommodations.
At the LSC ITC conference 2023, the legal help website People’s Law School in British Columbia, Canada shared their strategy to measure what works on their website.
They were motivated by knowing ‘What works?” They want to know if the website is making a difference or not. Did they help people who were seeking guidance and assistance with their problems?
They did this by asking discrete, one-off questions throughout their website.
Is this helpful?
Will this help you resolve your issue?
Would you recommend this to others?
These questions usually had five star rating scales. In addition, there were free text boxes. The data was then saved into a database and presented as a data dashboard.
The website administrators could then see rates around empowerment, satisfaction, net promoter score, and suggestion and comments.
The data dashboard would be a driver of regular iterations and improvements.
Lessons Learned from the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab cohort
As eviction rates go back up following the court shutdowns and emergency moratoria during the pandemic, communities are struggling with the question: how can we prevent evictions?
How can we help people stay in their homes, avoid lawsuits to force them out of their houses or pay extra fees, and have a scarlet ‘E’ on their credit report for years to come? And how can we help mom-and-pop landlords who are trying to avoid a costly lawsuit and turning a unit over to find a new renter?
The past several years have seen a tide of new programs, policies, and technology initiatives all aiming to prevent evictions in different ways. What are all of these initiatives, and how can we expand them to help more communities across the US?
The Eviction Prevention Learning Lab, a peer-to-peer network of local city leaders, has just concluded our cohort. This program engaged teams from 30 municipalities in 22 different states, totaling roughly 400 individual participants. The EPLL cohort operated from early 2021 through autumn 2022 and uncovered many promising practices around how evictions can be prevented, — as well as barriers that stand in the way of local leaders looking to move the needle on housing stability.
After working closely with the city leaders over the past 18 months, our organizing team at Stanford Legal Design Lab and NLC have synthesized the cohort’s progress, insights, and next steps in this essay. These insights & patterns from the 30 cities in the EPLL can help other regions’ government agencies, courts, nonprofits, and community leaders to use in their eviction prevention work.
Why have an eviction prevention cohort?
Communities across the country are struggling with a growing eviction crisis, in which tenants are at risk of lawsuits, forced moves, and other strategies to displace them from their rental homes. Evictions lead to housing instability and homelessness, as well as collateral consequences for people’s credit reports, education, employment, health, and finances.
So what are ways to prevent evictions? In the past, local leaders have had to struggle with this question on their own. Eviction laws and housing market dynamics are often highly local. Different cities and states have different rules, protections, policies, and market forces. This fragmented landscape makes it hard to address the crisis. Local leaders often have to take the lead in navigating their local stakeholder groups, legislation, court rules, and funding relationships to find solutions.
The EPLL helped local leaders know what programs and policies are possible, what’s been tried in other similar regions, and how they can deploy these new initiatives successfully. Throughout the 18 months, EPLL cohort members learned what is happening throughout the country to deal with the eviction crisis, through presentations, interactive meetings, design workshops, and technical assistance engagements. They were trained in new data and communication skills, they heard detailed case studies about how new services or policies roll out, and they built relationships with their counterparts in other regions. All of these webinars, meetings, and share-outs have led to a strong national network that can adapt and scale the most promising practices to address evictions. The EPLL participants have used the cohort to create new innovative solutions that work for their local dynamics.
What have the past 18 months of eviction prevention been like?
At the closing meetings of the EPLL, our organizing team asked city leaders about what they have accomplished since the start of 2021. Here are some of the big accomplishments they highlighted:
Emergency rental assistance distribution to keep people in their homes
The biggest accomplishment most leaders shared from the past two years was the huge volume of rental assistance used to prevent evictions. Significant amounts of emergency rental assistance were successfully distributed to tenants and landlords at risk.
For example, $304 million dollars were distributed to people in need in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, it was $52 million. Local leaders created completely new emergency rental assistance programs during the pandemic and successfully used ERA money to keep people in their homes and resolve landlord-tenant disputes.
Court partnerships, rule changes, and programs.
Many EPLL leaders were able to bring city agency, nonprofit, and court leadership together to create new court-based interventions. These are key to preventing evictions by getting support, mediation, and financial assistance to tenants and landlords struggling through a conflict. Some of the innovations included new diversion programs to turn lawsuits into settlement agreements, changes to courtroom setups that connect litigants with more holistic services and guidance, outreach strategies to encourage participation, and co-located services to help litigants get financial and housing navigation.
Some courts even changed their rules about how eviction cases proceed, with more judicial management, mediation sessions, integrations with ERA programs, and support for people without lawyers. These court pilots are now being formalized and spread through initiatives like the National Center for State Courts’ Eviction Diversion Initiative.
Innovative, equity-focused outreach efforts
The EPLL members, with guidance and assistance from our NLC and Stanford team, created new ways to connect tenants and landlords with eviction prevention help. This included new on-the-ground community networks and in-person assistance. City leaders and nonprofits in places like Louisville and Chattanooga have brought services to people in their neighborhoods, with door-knocking campaigns, pop-up offices, and on-site training. They built these community-based outreach efforts in order to reach people with strong word of mouth, particularly in areas where there was a high risk of eviction.
In addition to community-based outreach, the EPLL members also developed strong digital and visual outreach as well. They created (and shared) new style sheets, social media campaigns, landlord-tenant websites, text message lines, and intake partnerships with other social service groups. These outreach materials made use of many different modes and leveraged the power of the Internet to reach different audiences. These strategic outreach efforts helped increase awareness about new programs like ERA and eviction diversion programs and encouraged equitable participation in them.
The establishment of strategic coalitions and networks
EPLL cohort members, including city teams in Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Milwaukee, highlighted this theme as a key priority to deploying any new individual initiative. To really prevent evictions, city leaders discovered that it was necessary to build a local strategy group that spanned different agencies, nonprofits, courts, legal aid, and community groups.
EPLL city leaders coached each other on how to build an effective local network. One key step was aligning courts, city government, legal aid, nonprofits, and foundations around the notion of ‘eviction prevention’ as a common goal, which could help them understand how they could collaborate in new ways. Often this meant having regular meetings, having staff members at each others’ locations, finding ways to share data, and teaching each other about their own institutions. This was particularly helpful in setting up new ERA programs and then also winding them down. These ongoing strategic networks can help the leaders and communities respond to the opportunities and hurdles that emerge.
The importance of national networks
The EPLL helped city leaders to find inspiration, guidance, data, and other evidence that could support their own local work. At the EPLL sessions and in their peer-to-peer meetings, these cross-jurisdiction relationships bloomed in order to help city leaders get evidence, blueprints, strategies, and outreach templates that could help replicate and scale successful efforts. These national networks also provide an undercurrent of support to professionals who often are stressed and over-committed. Because they could find peers dealing with similar challenges in other locations, the EPLL relationships ended up being a place for leaders to recharge.
What’s next for eviction prevention?
Now regional leaders are turning to the next phase of eviction prevention work. When we asked them what their current goals and challenges are, here is the agenda they laid out for the next several years:
Moving to longer-term planning for sustainable innovation
Beyond local programs and short-term mandates, city leaders want to use what they learned during the short-term planning of the emergency to design permanent eviction programs, that also fit into the bigger picture at the state and national levels.
Shift to mediation and problem resolution
Now that there is less money to support ERA programs, local coalitions are exploring how to revise their prevention programs — especially court diversion programs. Many are focusing on community mediators, preventative outreach in high-risk neighborhoods, and mandatory pre-filing diversion programs to help landlords and tenants resolve problems without going through an eviction.
State government involvement
City leaders have also discovered the limits of what they can do at the local level to stop evictions. More are now exploring what they might be able to do in partnership with governors, state legislatures, and other statewide agencies. In some cases, this might be about statewide programs.
In other places, it’s legislative changes or funding. For example, some cities are trying to deal with statewide laws that prohibit eviction record sealing. Other leaders are cautious about proposing reforms to statewide landlord-tenant laws, for fear that once the law is open for changes, there might end up being changes that inhibit eviction prevention.
Strengthening local coalitions
Now that some agencies are moving away from eviction prevention as a core priority, leaders are working on how to keep their pandemic-era coalitions intact and stronger. Many cities are exploring more service co-location, referral networks, and funding plans. Some coalitions are considering breaking into different themes or seeking out common funding in order to keep the coalition strong.
Special attention to court involvement & judge leadership
A particular concern is court and judge involvement in these coalitions. Many cities have had difficulty getting local judges and court executives to collaborate on eviction diversion.
In response, they are creating data to show court leaders the impact of current court practices on the community’s housing and homelessness situation. They are also spotlighting how courts can better administer the justice system when they partner with other agencies on eviction diversion programs, resource networks, record sealing, and other efforts.
Judges can play a role in setting better court rules, scheduling, and courtroom setup that allow more participation in court, and more services to get a better outcome for both tenants and landlords.
Infrastructure around common models and data efforts
Groups are also thinking about regional and national coordination efforts that can spread best practices more efficiently and establish more knowledge about the eviction system. Groups are working on national data standardization and sharing efforts, like those led by New America. Some groups, including a coalition in Philadelphia and states in the Justice For All program, are considering how to make standardized, well-designed legal documents like court forms, eviction summons, settlement agreements, and leases, that improve prevention efforts. Some city teams are considering investing in broader public awareness of housing rights and equity, so that more people see how these interconnected programs around rental assistance, court diversion, mediation, affordable housing, and homelessness prevention all work together.
Working Towards Sustainable Eviction Prevention
The past two years have been a flurry of eviction prevention innovation, with new initiatives like emergency rental assistance, court diversion efforts, and community justice navigators starting up in regions across the US. But will these fledgling new initiatives take root, to become permanent, growing eviction prevention efforts?
Much of that will depend on what happens in the next year. Local leaders, as well as our NLC and Stanford Legal Design Lab, will continue to work on innovative, coordinated new efforts to help prevent evictions and all of the harm they cause to families and communities.
The federal government is newly focused on Customer Experience (CX). That has meant that their teams are creating better websites, tools, and forms that can help people get their business with agencies done more easily.
The Department of Labor has a team working on modernizing Unemployment Insurance. See their examples & guidance about how to use better design and tech to improve people’s experience with the government.
These strategies and examples can be used by courts, legal aid groups, and other justice system actors to improve their processes, as well. These practices include:
