Justice Innovation

Law High Schools

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.

California has two legal charter schools — Pacific Law Academy in Stockton, and Natomas Pacific Pathways Prep in Sacramento. The schools were created in partnership with University of Pacific Benerd School of Education and Pacific McGeorge School of Law. Natomas was founded in 2006, and some of its law courses are developed along with the McGeorge law professors, including topics on the foundations of law and criminal law.

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.

Tags Chicago, high school law, law charter school, legal charter schools, LEgal Prep, NP3, NP3 Peer Sentencing Court, Pacific Law Academy, teaching law at high school level

Current Projects Triage and Diagnosis

Legal Health Checklist

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.

Tags information design, Law and Design, Legal Health Check List, Legal Information online, new models of access to justice, redesigning legal information, State Bar of California

Background

Iron Tech Law & Teaching Legal Design

Post author By Margaret
Post date March 21, 2013
No Comments on Iron Tech Law & Teaching Legal Design

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

A quote from the Neota blog on the class & competition:

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 21^st 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.

Tags Creative Leaps in Law, Georgetown Law, Iron Tech Lawyer, Law by Design, Legal Design Classes, Roger Skalbeck, Tania Rostain, Teaching Legal Design, User Research in Law

Current Projects Training and Info

Compliance Law Games

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.”

Tags Compliance Games, Compliance Training, Gamefied Law, Gamification of Law, law games, legal ed, True OFfice, TrueOFfice

Advocates Current Projects

The Fate of Legal Clinics

Post author By Margaret
Post date March 19, 2013
No Comments on The Fate of Legal Clinics

A short cartoon I made while listening to Professor Nora Engstrom’s talk on Legal Clinics & attorney advertising at Stanford Law School last month.

Tags 1970s legal experiments, access to justice, affordable legal services, Hyatt Legal Clinics, law clinic, Legal Clinics, Nora Engstrom, Personal Injury Law

Current Projects Training and Info

Apps in Legal Education

Law as an app – technology in legal education » VoxPopuLII.

Christine Kirchberger & Pam Storr offer a great overview of where ‘apps’ (as conceived of now — and as they may develop in coming years) may play a role in giving lawyers more fluid working experiences, law students more interactive education, and general consumers direct access to the law they care about.

Their article also does a great job at laying out Key User Research Insights into how law students want to be learning with tech — and spelling out some possible models that lawyer-designers should be building upon.

They focus in on the potential for pushing forward certain types of legal ed outcomes:

managing risks is something that practicing lawyers and other legal service professionals must do on a daily basis. Law is not only about applying legal rules but also about weighing options, estimating possible outcomes and deciding upon which risks to accept. Legal education has not traditionally included this in the curriculum, and students have arguably very little experience of such training in their studies.

interaction between different areas of law is often hard to incorporate in legal studies, which follow a block or module structure. Each course provides students with in-depth knowledge of that particular legal area. However, the interaction between such modules is lacking, with teachers often unaware of the content of preceding or succeeding courses. For students, a problem with this module structure can be that they forget the content of a course studied at an earlier stage in their education.

problem-based learning is generally encouraged and applied in legal education. However, most problem-based learning (PBL) is reactive, asking students to evaluate the legal consequences of a scenario that has already played out, instead of training students purely in after-the-fact solutions, in other words “clearing up the legal mess.” PBL should be made more proactive, aiming to train students in identifying and counteracting problems before they arise. This can also be viewed as an implementation of the first aspect, managing risks.

After setting out these ideal outcomes, they explore what the current state of legal apps are — and what the future could look like. One possible way would be to have apps be the links and bridges between students’ various classes — which right now are taught like blocks rather than like a fluid whole.

Legal education, as mentioned, is traditionally taught in blocks or modules, with very few references and links between them. This setup clearly has its benefits, not least logistically. There are clear arguments in favor of such an approach; planning and studying becomes easier for teachers and students alike, time limitations mean that implementing an approach that makes connections between each subject is hard. This is where we believe that technology has the potential to play an important role. Technology is not bound to physical classrooms and attendance requirements of students or teachers. It has the ability to be accessed at a time of the student’s choosing, without placing additional demands on instructors.

A legal education app could provide the key in aiding students to make connections between their study areas; it could be made to fit alongside a law degree, assuming a student’s knowledge in sync with their level of study, by including content from both current and past courses. The app would offer an easy way to implement an interactive, problem-based learning approach. It could provide additional content, quizzes, exercises, social media functions etc. complementing the education and enabling a holistic perspective.

Another insight they offer: law students may have to use the mental model of an interactive app (rather than a linear text approach) to analyze the law and consider how best to represent, analyze, and communicate the law to clients. Actually building an app could be a terrific learning exercise in the law school classroom.

In the exercise, students would look at law from a different perspective, i.e. how legal regulations affect the individual or organization. Going away from a linear text approach, students would have to translate law into a format that users or apps can read. In other words, law would have to suit the user/app, and not the other way around. Students would, therefore, have to go beyond text and translate rules into flowcharts, diagrams, mind maps and other visual tools in order for the app to be able to follow the law’s instructions.

Implementing legal rules into technology, therefore, not only encourages students to think proactively but it also motivates them to identify solutions for the application of the law and how rules could be transformed into practice. From a pedagogical point of view the exercise would allow the students to think about different aspects of law beyond the traditional case or contract. It would also encourage a wider viewpoint of law as a tool in society.

They call out the current model of using tech in legal study, which does seem to fall short of the model they’re advocating:

Legal apps have already been introduced to help lawyers study for qualifying exams, e.g. BarMax. (These are often, however, still very topic-specific.) Implementing the same kind of thinking at the educational level would start to prepare students for their future workplace, allowing them to be better prepared for helping clients with real-world scenarios dealing with complex and interrelating legal issues. If students begin such thinking at the beginning of their legal studies, it becomes normal, arguably allowing for better educated graduates.

This last approach is perhaps a little future-oriented (although not as much as, for example, grading by technology), and it is of course not easy to implement at the university level; academics must work together with app developers to produce a tool of real value to students. However, even a slimmed-down version of such an app can be a tool for helping students prepare for exams, test their knowledge of legal areas, or simply make sure that they have understood concepts covered in teaching. Some examples of such implementations in legal education are shown here

Some final notes: the article calls out how this may be done — perhaps through reformed curriculum, in which professors teach students how to build apps, perhaps through competitions or hackathons that push students to learn on their own.

Technical assistance is of importance, in order for students to know what aspects to take into account and what schematics developers need in order to be able to create an app. The exercise could be set up as a competition (Georgetown Law School – Iron Tech Lawyer) with an expert jury consisting of practicing lawyers and developers.

And perhaps just having students analyze apps could be a first step:

The students would –from the perspective of their expert area–firstly investigate possible legal issues with a specific gaming app, for example. They would analyze the application of the rules and norms within their field and identify potential conflicts or loopholes within these rules. Their investigation would include testing the app itself, as well as looking at possible end-user agreements and other applicable contractual agreements between the user, the app store and the developer of the app.

The next step would be to identify and discuss possible overlaps, discrepancies and conflicts between the different areas of law in relation to the app. The exercise should result in a written and/or oral report of the different legal issues involved and solutions to potential conflicts between the law and the app.

Adding another layer of real-life scenario, each group could be asked to present their findings to an imaginative client who is the producer of the app. This simulation would allow the students not only to develop a legal analysis based on correlating fields of law but also to present the analysis to non-lawyers, translating legal jargon into understandable everyday language.

The exercise–analyzing an existing app–very much fits into the idea often conveyed in legal education that law is applied after an incident occurs. In order to add a level of proactivity, students could be asked to analyze an app under production, before it is launched. This would guarantee more proactive thinking by the students asking them to foresee potential conflicts and avoid them, rather than discussing legal issues after they have arisen.

Tags Apps in Law, Designing Legal Education, Law as an App, Legal Education TEch, User Research on law, VoxPopulLII

Background

InfoCamp Redesign Law

I went to InfoCamp today at Berkeley with the intention of soaking up best practices and inventive ideas from User Experience Designers and Information Junkies at the School of Information. I did do that — but ended up putting together an impromptu 50 minute presentation /slash/ participatory design session /slash/ user research focus group all on Redesigning the Law. Endria, also a Stanford Law 3rd year, was my co-leader & instigator, along with San Ng, who is a fellow at the I-School and works in international development/law/technology on innovating justice.

We put together a short game plan for how to get an audience full of designers, information scientists, programmers, entrepreneurs, etc. interested in the Wicked Problems of Law — and convince them that they should come work with us on tackling Legal Problems & building Legal Solutions.

Our opening gambit was to ask people:

How has law touched your life?
Have you ever had to hire a lawyer?
Have you ever used a legal document?
Have you ever had to go to court?
Have you ever looked up legal information online?

We were trying to learn ourselves, what are non-lawyers’ mental models of law — as well as their sentiments towards law, lawyers, and courts. Answer: a handful of people have had “legal experiences”, several of which have been Confusing, Opaque, Difficult to Navigate, Without Clear Guidance, Overwhelming. Some had business and corporate work done, or immigration assistance from their employers’ lawyers — and had fairly good experiences with lawyers (found by companies) who helped them out.

But when Endria asked what the first 3 words that came to their minds were, when the word Law came up, they were universally negative: Bureaucratic, Confusing, Opaque, Difficult, Boring, Expensive…

We moved from there to talk about the “Design Fails of Law”. We showed a House Bill about legalizing marijuana, and we showed a criminal Rap sheet on the overhead. The reactions: confusing, unclear what the topic is, full of information I don’t care about, not prioritized, where is the table of contents, how can I know what the topic is? Here are some of the information that the Bill was missing, that the users wanted:

So we had a 3 minute design challenge. We passed out pieces of blank white paper, and gave the room full of participants the chance to redesign the front page of the House Bill to make it more clear. Here are some of the results:

We also got some takeaways about how we might redesign all kinds of public-facing legal documents — as well as other user research insights of interest:

Documents should, on their face, provide glance-able, quickly navigable table of contents that will take you exactly where you need to go inside the pile of text
If law-makers and lawyers won’t create usable documents, we need to train intermediaries to build usable interfaces on top of this legal output
A bill or a law should have a front page that is Visual & Clean, featuring the information that users most want to know: what topics are talked about in this document (perhaps presented as tags), in particular: what changes does this bring from what was before, who is affected and who is not, what is the history/background/sponsor group for this.
Legal knowledge might be better passed through channels that resemble peer and family networks, because users don’t trust lawyers or legal officials (bad reputations, as untrustworthy, unfriendly, and not-on-the-user’s-side).
Law sounds BAD, Justice sounds GOOD.
The Bay Area may be treated just like ‘developing countries’ would be: we should build micro-justice resources that help people here find legal resources and help, just like some international development bodies are doing in Kenya and Thailand.
Users want lawyer reviews — they really want peer recommendations and data from courts & practices to be able to figure out what lawyer to use — this is a huge need.
Legal redesigners should look to the medical field to see how the nurse-practitioner vs. doctor movement might help law to move forward in bringing non-lawyers (or, significantly less expensive and more user-friendly lawyers) into the delivery of legal counsel and support.
Legal redesigners should find incentives to get people into the door for Preventative Legal Services — sign up for legal check-ins now, get discounts on legal services in the future? Force airport-goers, bus-riders, other random people to think about their legal futures? Build law games that sneak legal reflection & knowledge into people’s every day lives.
Law & governance redesigners need not just build better presentations of law, but figure out how to get people to care about law & government, to find their sites, to make the argument that Law Matters and You Should Participate in Your Government — Onboarding is more of a challenge than building beautiful interfaces.
Stanford d.school & Law School need to collaborate with Berkeley’s I.School & Law School to build a legal redesign program — that can convince developers, engineers, information scientists, designers, and more to come work with us on building incremental solutions to all these challenges.

And with all those insights, time to move forward to start playing with them and figuring out how to make some awesome stuff that takes on these challenges and addresses these needs!

Tags Berkeley, Endria Richardson, I-School, InfoCamp, Innovating Justice, Law Innovations, Law School Collaborations, Redesign Law, redesigning law, San Ng, Solving Legal PRoblems

Advocates Ideabook

An Angie’s List for Lawyers

Post author By Margaret
Post date March 16, 2013
No Comments on An Angie’s List for Lawyers

I have heard from a few people that they want an Angie’s List for Lawyers — a service they are willing to pay for, to get quality, real, vetted reviews of lawyers in the area. I decided to seek out some user research, from blog posts and other Internet discussions, to see what this ‘Angie’s List for Lawyers’ discourse is all about.

Here are some queries on Angie’s List itself.

Speaking as someone who logged in today to try to find an attorney, I see this category as one that’s exactly what I have my Angie’s List membership for:

1. It’s important that I find a good one
2. I’m not an expert enough to know myself who is a good one
3. The industry is full of advertisements and misinformation
4. I wish I knew what experiences other people have had

This points out the scope of the need. Some users find it very hard to navigate the (limited) information available about attorneys online and in other communications. They want to hear recommendations of others. They want to make a good investment — and feel that the choice is a very important one — but fear going down a wrong path. Importantly, they (or at least this user) is aware of the limits of their knowledge about law, and want to defer to those who have more expertise.

Some more discussion from another user on the site:

I was truly confused as to why Angies List does not provide a category for legal professionals. I was thinking of signing up because I needed a good lawyer and when I noticed that they dont provide such a category, I called them. They claim that they do not want to list attorneys because the services provided by attorneys cannot be effectively rated. I highly disagreed. People go to attorneys for specific help (i.e. file for bankruptcy, real estate closings, divorces, etc.) and the services that the attorney provides to the person (i.e. timeliness, cost, professionalism, promises, knowledge, etc.) can easily be rated. I am not going to pay a monthly fee for this service if it doesnt include all areas that someone needs help with. What I mean is, whats the point for paying a monthly fee for this site if I could find a plumber but need to pay another site to find an attorney. It should be all in one site. Really, there reasons for not having attorneys make no sense, and they should be added.

This shows the resistance of Angie’s List to jump into legal service ratings. Obviously there are some legal and quality dynamics behind the scenes, and Angie’s List feels it’s better not to take on the risks and difficulties of rating lawyers. But the user need is still there…

Another quote from the same site.

I think rating attorneys would be a very valuable service. I’m a middle aged woman that has many young adults come to me for advice. When I’m asked how they can find a good attorney I just hang my head and sadly tell them that they have to talk around. Hopefully they can get a free interview. This has not always been good advice and is not always possible depending upon their situation. If there was a resource to go to where an individual could read about previous experiences of the services provided by an attorney, it would be a great asset. In my mind, Angie’s List is a prime place for this kind of referral

And another, scouting out what a legal problem situation looks like…

Legal services are one of those things:

(1) that you use only occasionally,

(2) that you’ve GOT to get good consumer information about beforehand to avoid disaster, and

(3) that it’s almost impossible to research effectively without a big network of family, friends, and colleagues.

In other words, it’s perfect for Angie’s List!

I got lucky a few weeks ago, finding an attorney to help an elderly friend with a housing problem, but I’ll be needing a completely different kind of lawyer in a few months for a house sale – so here’s hoping Angie’s List gets this category up and running FAST.

Here is some pushback from another poster on the same site — that makes some points on why reviews are hard and may be misleading — and so there should not be an Angie’s List style of referral.

It is difficult to rate attorneys because not only are there a lot of them, but there are as many specialties as there in the medical field. That said, it’s not that it can’t be done or that reviews don’t exist. Most County Bar Associations, such as Dallas County Bar Association, will have an Attorney Referral Program. The good part about it is that they will set you up with an attorney, and for $20 (unless it’s changed), you get 30 minutes of an attorney’s time. Sometimes that is all you need, sometimes you will decide to work with that attorney, sometimes that attorney will know a colleague who will be a better fit, or you can go back to the Bar Association and ask for another referral. This is a low risk way to get started.

Another difficulty with rating attorneys is that they can be rated on several aspects including legal expertise, absence of Bar complaints, bedside manner, how their practice is set up, how many “wins”, etc. Sometimes a non-lawyer isn’t even sure what kind of lawyer they need and may be barking up the wrong attorney tree, so to speak. (Another good reason to contact the county’s Bar Association where you live or where the disputed transaction/conduct took place. Anyone rating a lawyer, like other ratings here, will be doing so as much on subjective expections and win/loss rather than the true compentency and professionalism of the attorney. If I need a trial lawyer to take my case to trial, I’d be less concerned about his bedside manner and more with how he/she does in the court room. (A bit like how I don’t care how nice my surgeon is as long as he/she is the best cutter in the field.) However, if I need a tax lawyer, family lawyer, or estate lawyer, for example, my relationship with the lawyer may require more contact, and I would want to know not only about competency, reputation, ethics, costs, but also whether there is a fit, I feel comfortable, I trust I will be dealt with in a manner to which clients are entitled, among other things. These factors can all vary depending on whether the firm is small, medium or large.

It is best, if possible, to meet with several attorneys. There are a number of ratings sites on the web, but there is not one single site of which I’m aware that can truly encompass all aspects of whether an attorney is right for you. However, looking at these various sites can be a good start of what to look for and where to go. For any name you find or get, you will want to go to the website of State Bar of Texas (or whatever state is involved) and check to see that the lawyer and/or the law firm is in good standing. There’s more, but that’s a quick overview.

Interesting about this last quote: though the user is writing saying that there should NOT be a review site for lawyers, in the 2nd to last paragraph, s/he seems to lay out a set of factors that a Lawyer Rating site could be compiling and creating a wonderful, accurate, reliable rating score for a lawyer. It could be an adjustable rating, based on the size of the practice, the type of practice, and the type of case.

Out of these user needs, an outline of a product may be coming together — not exactly like Angie’s List — but accomplishing ‘the trusted reviews of expert professional’ that are so in demand…

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