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Ideabook Work Product Tool

State Court Redesigns

Open Law Lab - State court - David Boies Ted Olson
Ted Olson and David Boies, the legal team behind Prop 8, have been working with the ABA, worked with a task force on the Preservation of the Justice System. They gathered input from stakeholders around the country on how the court experience could be improved — at the same time as state budgets are cut for courts. Here they are framing the problem space.

This work can be a rich source of on-the-ground research and insights that could fuel a tech- and design-driven process to build new interventions (even small, modest ones) that would improve both the efficiency of the court system & the stakeholders’ experience of it.

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Current Projects Procedural Guide

CUPS visual guides to public services

I’ve been searching around for good information & graphic design, to communicate laws to average people. I stumbled across some amazing booklets & posters from the Center for Urban Pedagogy, or CUP.

Open Law Lab - CUPS - Making Policy Public

One of their missions is to make law & policy comprehensible to normal New Yorkers. This is one of their processes, of how they get designers together with public service orgs or governments.

Open Law Lab - CUP - Legal Design

Here are some of their project areas:

Community Education

CUP works with advocacy organizations, policy experts, and designers to produce publications, workshops, and other teaching tools that explain important policy issues for the people who most need to know. CUP publications and teaching tools are made for and with specific groups in specific places, but they reach a national audience of people interested in civics education and graphic and information design.

CUP’s Envisioning Development Toolkits are workshops built around interactive tools that teach people about basic land-use terms and concepts, enabling them to participate meaningfully in neighborhood change. For example, the Affordable Housing Toolkit teaches participants about income demographics and the technical definitions of affordable housing to help them analyze proposed developments in concrete terms of units, rents, and incomes. The toolkits are developed in close collaboration with community organizations throughout New York, such as Good Old Lower East Side, the Fifth Avenue Committee, the Municipal Arts Society, and Tenants & Neighbors. For more on the Envisioning Development Toolkits, click here.

CUP’s Making Policy Public series facilitates close collaborations between policy experts and design professionals to produce foldout posters that make complex policy issues accessible. For example, The Cargo Chain helped 10,000 longshoremen understand their place in the global shipping network, and is also a bestseller at art and design bookstores in New York. Collaborators have included designers like Candy Chang, MTWTF, Alice Chung of Omnivore, and Thumb Design with organizations such as the Brennan Center for Justice, Community Voices Heard, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. For more on Making Policy Public, click here.

CUP’s Public Access Design series of multimedia organizing tools brings together designers and animators with community organizations on short-term collaborations that use design to make complex issues accessible to the New Yorkers most affected by them. Each project results in a short video or animation, a pocket-sized foldout, a small booklet, or an interactive website. Collaborators have included community organizations such as Damayan Migrant Workers Association and the Immigrant Defense Project, and designers such as Raj Kottamasu and Petra Farinha. For more on Public Access Design, click here.

Through our Technical Assistance program, community organizations and advocacy groups can hire CUP to create custom outreach and organizing tools. For example, we are working with the Participatory Budgeting Project and Community Voices Heard, along with designer Glen Cummings, to produce outreach and educational materials, as well as maps and ballots for a citywide effort to engage public participation in City Council budget decision making.

Here is one example of their work: a booklet for Street Vendors in NYC about their rights, the policy that applies to them, and what to do if they have interactions with the police or government.

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Categories
Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Courthouse Design: Insights from Zorza and Keating

In 1994, Richard Zorza and Judge Robert Keating published a paper full of insights from their attempt to redesign the interfaces that judges & court officials used when prosecuting drug offenders, in Midtown Community Court.

This quick 4-pager paper The Ten Commandments of Electronic Courthouse Design, Planning, and Implementation: The Lessons of the Midtown Community Court nicely summarizes their findings into ‘Commandments’.

Open Law Lab - 10 Commandments A2j courthouse

On his Access to Justice blog, Zorza also has some new reflections, two decades out, on the redesigns he proposed for the court interface. That blog post also includes images of his proposed redesigns (not included here) of what the judge would see when making sentencing decisions, and also follow-through mechanisms to make sure the court was keeping track of the defendant’s path.

Zorza writes that the point of their design project was giving court officials more oversight & resources when making sentencing decisions in drug courts.

…the key to the concept was to combine immediacy of actual consequences with close judicial monitoring, and real community input into policy.   As we designed the technology, a major goal was to ensure that judges got broad information before they made a sentencing decision, and also afterwards, so they could monitor ongoing compliance.  Important to the model was having a broad range of intermediate sanctions available for the judge to choose.

The pair proposed a design that would give a variety of information about the defendant to the judge, as well as tools to track & monitor the progress after sentencing.

Some of the designs weren’t accepted, but some user research came out of the project, in the form of the commandments. The commandments are sometimes particular to the project Zorza & Keating were working on, and not generalizable to other legal design projects. Others (in bold) are more relevant widely.

One: Start with an Electronic Judicial Desktop
Two: Build a Web of Electronic Relationships Between Court and Other Justice Agencies
Three: Design the System to Collect and Display Information About the Progress of the Case Within the Courthouse, as Well as Information About the Case Itself
Four: Imaging Is not Enough. The Issue is Document Collection and Display
Five: Use Graphical Interface Design for Courts
Six: Use Color, Flashing, and Positioning to Enhance Information
Seven: Use Technology to Enhance Community Access
Eight: Build Tools that Put Users in Charge; Do Not Make them Feel Controlled
Nine: Use Automated E-Mail to Build Connections Between People and Data
Ten: Recognize that an Integrated Computer System Has the Capacity to Make Fundamental Changes in the Way a Courthouse Works

Categories
Current Projects Procedural Guide

Pocket DACA

Here is another current initiative for Access to Justice through design/tech: Pocket DACA.

Open Law Lab - Pocket DACA 1

Pocket DACA is an app, released this summer for free for Android & IOS, to help people who came to the US as a child, who might be eligible for DACA.  It was produced by Pro Bono Net & Immigration Advocates Network.

The app is full of resources — primarily of which is a screening tool — that will let people understand if they can apply for DACA.

Open Law Lab - Pocket DACA 2

It also has other features, like finding legal services nearby, based on the phones geolocation, & discovering other resources for immigrant youth.

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The app is generally a redesign of a legal services website for a mobile experience — added in with an interactive ‘expert system’ that will help a user figure out if they can get on this legal pathway (DACA) or not.

Here’s a video review & summary of the app.


And some more screens:
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Categories
Ideabook Work Product Tool

Access to Justice Tech: Concepts

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice tech

I’ve been searching around for the current landscape of actual initiatives & concept designs for tech tools to provide more access to justice.

I went back to a presentation, Assisted Legal Decisionmaking, by law professor Josh Blackman at Stanford last year. He showed some screenshots of legal products he’s been thinking of.

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice app 2

The concept app would allow the user to input their question. The app would respond with follow-up questions to nail the issue down more concretely. And then it would direct the user to the right resources. It follows the Expert System model, with guided interviews, that the A2J author and other access tech has relied upon.

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice app

Categories
Advocates Current Projects

Legal Barbershop

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Another offline idea for Access to Justice (thanks to Briane for the mention!) — this time being piloted by attorney Donald Howard in New Britain, Connecticut. The Connecticut Tribune reports on how he has opened a barbershop inside of his legal office, as a hybrid-business to serve more people’s legal needs.  He cuts their hair & has his ears open for legal problems, which he can then follow up with.  It seems to be recently opened — I want to hear the experiences that are coming out of it.

It seems to take the idea of Legal Force (combo bookstore/legal concierge) and tweak it to a context (the barbershop) where people are already talking about their day-to-day lives and problems.  I see potential here — that people can be given legal diagnoses & resources before they realize they have a “Lawyer A-ha Moment” and reach out to a lawyer themselves.

From the Facebook page, it’s not clear how much law is going on at Legal Cuts, versus just haircuts — but the model seems to be a great inspiration for more, new models of legal services.

Barbershop-Law Office Combo On Cusp Of ‘Hybrid Business’ Trend

By DOUGLAS S. MALAN

Donald Howard

Donald Howard

Donald E. Howard II sees his new business venture as a natural combination: Everybody needs to get their hair cut and lots of people like to talk about their troubles at the barbershop.

So the New Britain attorney decided to open Legal Cuts, a legal-themed barbershop on West Main Street that also happens to be home to Howard’s law office, which is in the back of the building. He’s been open since early April and caters to people with all types of legal issues.

“I thought it was the perfect marriage,” said Howard. “People could feel comfortable in this environment and feel they can trust the lawyer. I want to make sure legal services are available to these people” who may be intimidated by walking into a traditional law office.

Howard’s new venture earned a mention on the ABA Journal website, as well as in an article on Findlaw.com that discussed a trend toward “hybrid businesses” launched by lawyers. The article’s author, attorney William Peacock, gave a thumbs-up to the concept.

“It really is intimidating for a client to go into a stuffy attorney’s office, while some pompous guy sits behind a massive desk in a $5,000 suit, and tells you that he wants a $3,000 retainer for your relatively simple case,” Peacock wrote. “If you can break that barrier, make yourself approachable, and calm the nerves of the client, developing that client-attorney relationship of trust will be much easier.”

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With his business still getting off the ground, Howard spends his days in Rockville Superior Court as a clerk and then checks in on his barbershop/law office three or four times a week. People who inquire about legal services when he’s not around are encouraged to leave their information and Howard returns their call. A whiteboard listing his flat-fee legal services for representation in DUIs, pardons and uncontested divorces are readily available at Legal Cuts along with his business cards.

“I’m still a struggling new attorney and in this economy, you have to step outside the box — and burn the box,” he said. “I believe the barbershop is the epicenter of the community. People can come in here and play checkers or chess and get to know their surroundings.”

Howard said he got the idea for Legal Cuts from a television show after seeing a California lawyer who offers legal services in a coffeehouse that is aptly named the Legal Grind. Howard decided on a barbershop because he took courses to become a licensed barber in Chicago and then cut hair during his undergraduate and graduate school days at Mississippi State University.

Moving around the country with his wife, who is in the Air National Guard, Howard earned a law degree from the University of Wyoming and served as a barber’s apprentice in Wyoming and Georgia before moving to Connecticut. Last February, he passed the Connecticut bar exam and started clerking in the state courthouse.

“I’ve handled some small claims, personal injury and criminal matters so far,” Howard said. While clerking, he’s trying to figure out what areas of the law interest him most. He’s leaning toward a career as a criminal defense and personal injury lawyer.

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Categories
Current Projects Professionals' Networks + Traiing

SF Law Open + Buildable

Open Law Lab - SF Open Law

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.

Open Law Lab - SF Open Law 2

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.

Open Law Lab - SF Open Law 3

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
Categories
Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

How Might We: Provide DIY Legal Diagnosis

Open Law Lab - How Might We Provide Legal Diagnosis DIY

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.

The map is a work in progress.

 

Categories
Current Projects Procedural Guide

Citizenship Apps

Open Law Lab - Citizenship Apps
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.

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Advocates Current Projects Training and Info

FlyRights: Mobile Discrimination Reporting

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.

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