At Georgia Tech’s school of architecture, they are investigating the physical design of the courthouse experience.
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Apps to Manage Lawyers
Here’s an article by Jennifer Smith in the Wall Street Journal on new crops of apps that help clients find and monitor lawyers. It mentions Viewabill (tracking how much their lawyers are charging them, in real-time); Rocket Lawyer’s mobile app (create basic legal documents and buy plans for low-cost access to advice); Attorney Proz (lists area lawyers, who have paid to be listed); Ask a Lawyer (ask lawyers in Kalamzoo about basic legal questions and get free answers to your e-mail); and soon to be a LegalZoom app.
Now that people use apps to bank, order food and even monitor eBay auction bids, it was only a matter of time before they called in the lawyers.
Appearing in app stores are programs to help people keep track of their attorneys’ bills, draft legal documents and locate nearby lawyers.
Attorneys are doing more work on smartphones and tablets, and they have a whole host of apps at their disposal to help look up case law, track client calls and even assist with depositions and jury selection.
But until recently, few options existed for clients who wished to track cases or seek advice using mobile devices. This new crop of apps aims to add transparency, and a measure of convenience, to the process.
One new app, Viewabill, lets people track how much their lawyers are charging them in real-time. The idea is to head off sticker shock when business owners and company lawyers open up their monthly bills.
The app acts as kind of a client nanny-cam. It captures information as law firms enter it into their billing systems and transmits it to clients’ mobiles and desktops. Users select how often they want to get updates, set alerts pegged to certain dollar thresholds and can mark questionable items. The app can also be used to track hours logged by accountants and other professional service providers.
The app is now being used by a handful of companies and law firms on a beta basis, with a wider launch planned this month, said Florida-based entrepreneur David Schottenstein, who co-founded the enterprise with an attorney friend, Robbie Friedman. Firms would pay an annual cost of $25 to $40 per matter, depending on volume, or $25,000 for unlimited use, said Mr. Schottenstein.
“It helps them to understand what we do,” said Brian Baker, a bankruptcy lawyer at Ravin Greenberg LLC in New Jersey, which has been testing the app.
Errol Feldman, general counsel for JPay Inc., a Florida company that provides payment transfers and other services to inmates at corrections facilities, has been using Viewabill to make sure firms working to resolve contract disputes do so in a timely fashion.
Legal consultant Susan Hackett said the app was the latest example of a push for greater communication between lawyers and clients, who increasingly want more involvement in the work they assign to outside law firms.
Some companies with big in-house legal departments have already invested in software programs that let clients track the progress of legal matters or monitor law firm bills from their desktop computers. Such systems don’t come cheap, and not many clients use them yet—fewer than 20% of general counsel, according to a 2011 poll by the Association of Corporate Counsel.
Not all law firms may welcome the additional element of client control on the legal side of things. For Viewabill to work, for instance, lawyers have to enter their hours in a timely fashion.
“These technologies may scare people,” Ms. Hackett said. “But they are all productive parts of the march towards clients and lawyers having conversations in real time.”
This month online legal services company Rocket Lawyer Inc. is debuting a mobile app tailored to its customer base: consumers and small business owners who log on to the site to create basic legal documents or buy plans that provide low-cost access to legal advice.
Charley Moore, Rocket Lawyer’s founder and executive chairman, said more site traffic is coming from tablets and smartphones these days, reflecting his customers’ increasingly mobile bent. Many are small business owners who spend much of their time on the road, he said.
“Their office is their dashboard, so we have to deliver the tools,” Mr. Moore said.
Customers can use the app to create a non-disclosure agreement (more forms will soon be available) or modify existing documents they have already created. The app itself is free, and users can access some functions gratis.
Users can also locate nearby attorneys from Rocket Lawyer’s network—the app is integrated with Google GOOG +0.53% Maps—and punch in basic legal questions, although the reply, which is supposed to arrive within one business day, may not be swift as some might hope.
A handful of other apps offer similar services. Attorney Proz also lists area lawyers, who pay to be included. Ask a Lawyer, an app linked to Kalamazoo, Mich., law firm Willis Law, also offers free answers to basic legal questions, with replies sent to users’ email addresses.
Not to be outdone, online legal services company LegalZoom.com Inc., a Rocket Lawyer competitor, also has an app in the works, a company spokeswoman said.
A version of this article appeared March 11, 2013, on page B5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Apps Help Find Lawyers, And Keep an Eye on Them.
A USDOJ report on Law Schools’ Access to Justice programs:meaning, what pro bono & public service offerings the schools have.
The report allows schools to present what offerings they have, but it is a more a spotlight on programs, and less a detailed or critical summary of what’s working & what’s not.
Overall, it’s a nice school-by-school summary, but still a little too short and self-reported to be fully useful.
The description:
At the October 13 Champions of Change event, Stanford Law Professor Deborah Rhode noted that it is a “shameful irony that the country with the highest concentration of lawyers in the world does such an abysmal job of ensuring that they are available for the vast majority of low-income people who need them, and whose needs are greatest.” When millions of people in the United States cannot get legal help that is often critical to their wellbeing and freedom, all parts of the legal profession need to be engaged to address the crisis. There is no better place to begin than when future lawyers are at the very start of their careers – when they are still in law school.
Champion Martha Bergmark, President of the Mississippi Center for Justice, noted with some envy that when she was in law school, clinics were only just beginning. But as most Champions observed on October 13, times have changed and law schools now offer a wide range of opportunities for students to learn about legal issues involving poverty and equal justice, and get hands-on experience helping victims of domestic violence, or people with a criminal record get a second chance, or provide defender services for Native Americans.
What are law schools really offering? The U.S. Department of Justice Access to Justice Initiative asked participating law schools to discuss how they are institutionalizing their commitment to pro bono and public service. They were asked to address two questions: 1) What is your school doing to support a public service ethic in every student?; and 2) What new public service opportunities are you offering in the 2011-12 academic year?
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Access to justice, the problem
A drawing I had made during the Law Without Walls conference, based on a great passing comment…
I am on a design team, working on how to redesign the small claims mediation & family mediation (that now would occur offline, in a court house, in a room with a mediator and the parties) into an online experience.
My team interviewed a mediator who has expertise in these offline mediations — these are my notes & insights.
Green: possible failpoints, where a mediation could go wrong online.
Yellow: best practices she recommends.
Red Pink: insights into how mediations work & what the stakeholders want.
Bright Pink: miscellaneous comments.
Stay tuned — we are moving towards mocking up basic flows and interfaces for an online mediation experience…
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Law Kiosk in action
Back in 2004, the Legal Services Corporation sponsored a law kiosk for an “online legal service center” on Navajo territory in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Read an article from back when it was debuted. It meant to deliver access to justice, specifically for consumer and tax law.
“DNA Peoples Legal Services installed computer kiosks throughout the 25,000 miles of Navajo and Hopi Nations located in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico through a Technology Initiative Grant from Legal Services Corporation. These web-based kiosks connect to the Internet via satellite and DSL allowing users to access legal information through either spoken instructions delivered in English, Hopi or Navajo or written instructions in English. To further increase accessibility, DNA created custom graphic icons to help clients navigate the website. These touch-screen kiosks, installed in each of its nine offices located on or near Hopi and Navajo reservations, provide information through DNA’s internal web server on issues such as Consumer Law, Tax Law, Trash and Recycling, and information on free income-tax seminars. These kiosks allow DNA People’s Legal Services to better serve these Southwestern Native American communities, which spans across an immense geographical area.
DNA Legal Services was supplied by a kiosk company, NBG Solutions. A 2002 article from Portland’s Business Journal gave more explanation to the project.
DNA is a nonprofit agency providing free civic legal services to low-income people in its service areas—which happen to cover Navajo and Hopi reservations.
DNA was awarded a technology grant by the Legal Service Corp. to find an innovative way to deliver legal services to clients spread over a vast area— more than 25,000 square miles—with a very small staff.
DNA’s task is challenging: to provide help with legal chores such as name changes, simple divorces and guardianships.
The help is sorely needed. Much of the population in DNA’s service area is under-educated, and poor enough to lack such basic amenities as a phone in the home, let alone a computer.
Language is also an issue for DNA’s clients. “Most of our clients don’t speak or read English,” said Chris O’Shea Heydinger, director of development and information technology for DNA.
“They certainly don’t read in their native languages,” an accomplishment that is limited only to university graduates who pursue the study of Native American languages as an academic subject. Neither Navajo nor Hopi was codified as a written language until the mid-20th century.
A technological solution of some sort was required, rather than simply offering stacks of self-help brochures at DNA offices, precisely because written materials would be no help at all to most clients.
DNA’s answer, built by NBG Solutions, is a kiosk equipped with a touch-screen web browser that can be navigated using custom-designed icons supplied by DNA—for example, a traditional hogan (Navajo house) denoting the home page, and an arrowhead denoting “back” or “forward.”
With the kiosks already delivered and waiting, DNA is in the last stages of designing its web site to deliver spoken information in Navajo or Hopi, depending on where the kiosk is located.
Clients will be able to navigate the graphics-intensive web site to the services they need, and will be able to listen to instructions in their native language, then print out forms as they need them.
The web site, “a labor of love,” according to Heydinger, will go live in April.
The kiosks will be connected to the internet via satellite, because the reservations are so far from the internet backbone.
Canada — in particular British Columbia — has been the leading light in using online tools for providing dispute resolution to citizens. They have found most success in small property & zoning disputes, and also with consumer protection cases.
They have done some empirical research and found that people in family law disputes actually DO want online tools in their disputes. Particular use has been found in divorce settlements, dividing up joint property.
The court there is also considering building a full scale online tribunal.
B.C. plans to create the first-ever tribunal in Canada that offers a full array of online tools to allow British Columbians to solve common strata and small civil claims outside of courts, Minister of Justice and Attorney General Shirley Bond announced today.
If passed, the Civil Resolution Tribunal Act will create an independent tribunal offering 24/7 online dispute resolution tools to families and small business owners as a speedy and cost-effective alternative to going to court. The tribunal would address disputes by providing parties with information that may prevent disputes from growing and resolve disputes by consent or, where necessary, by an independent tribunal hearing. Resolving a dispute through the tribunal is expected to take about 60 days, compared to 12 to 18 months for small claims court.
Giving families alternatives to seeking solutions in court is among the B.C. government’s justice reform initiatives to achieve efficiencies and deal with growing resource pressures. The February 2012 Green Paper, Modernizing British Columbia’s Justice System, identified tribunals as a simple and less expensive solution to easing delays in the court system.
A blog post from Richard Zorza’s rich blog on Access to Justice discusses an issue I am currently working on — whether the Internet is a usable and effective resource for non-lawyers to get legal information and support.
Some findings of particular interest:
- Non-lawyers use search pages to find legal information to diagnose their situation.
- They rely on the top search results as their primary resources, regardless of whether they are from the user’s jurisdiction, and without taking measures to check their quality.
- The users sped through pages. Text and interfaces were scanned through quickly, and they flipped through sites quickly, back and forth. There was little slow, deliberate, consideration.
- The users found some information to help address their legal issues, but they were not confident that their new knowledge was sufficient to truly help them.
- After consulting Internet sources, the users were more likely to try non-legal processes to resolve their problems, and they did not register the urgency of taking legal means to protect themselves.
Research on Young People’s Use of Internet to Get Legal Information
I am happy to report on, and post, a presentation by, Catina Denvir at the University of London, on preliminary results on research on young people’s use of the Internet in the UK. I think these prelimnary results are important and helpful in our ongoing planning and design.
The researcher, after observing that there were high levels of access but low levels of use in this area, decided to conduct an experiment to test actual impact from this use of the Internet. Users were given hypotheticals and then tracked and surveyed in employment and housing law. These are some of the results.
Changes were Subject Specific (example housing):
“Landlord
• Before -‐ Knowledge poor in regards to eviction without a court order and whether the landlord’s employees can remove you from the property• Uncertainty as to what constituted a breach of the lease
• After -‐ improvement across the board, but uncertainty about who can evict a tenant”
Lots of Searching and Churning Through Pages
Average time on a page less than a minute
Jurisdictional Errors
Did not limit searching to UK — It would be interesting to know about the extent to which people in the UK now assume US law rules (or dear, in some areas of poverty law.) We obviously have the same problem in the US in terms of distinguishing between states.
Lots of back and forth between sites
Little discrimination as to which sites reliable
Order of Search Results was Very Important
Used top page and top result regardless of reliability. (So we need to do a better job of getting our stuff at the top, and educating public.)
After use of Internet, Greater Emphasis on Informal Mechanisms to Resolve Matter
Failure to understand legal processes
Failure to appreciate urgency
May Increase Knowledge, but not Confidence in Ability to Deal with Problem
This is consistent with other research in which I have been involved.
Obviously, this all opens up huge areas of additional inquiry. Some of the most obvious:
- How can we do better with search results (like expanding the LSC Google partnership so that it gets more broadly to trusted ATJ sites?
- How can we use community eduction so people know to trust ATJ sites (how about a national certification system and courts and legal aid jointly promoting the reliability of those sites?
- What would people need to have better confidence in their ability to navigate the system — would better descriptions do it, or does the system itself need to be easier? Some of this could be tested.
Further information about the research is available from Catrina Denvir, catrina.denvir.10(at)ucl.ac.uk, at University College London.
A great article from Slate on Tech being used for Legal Aid & Access to Justice, with lots of specific examples of how SMS and other basic tech can give reminders, process updates, basic advice, and more lawyering to people who can’t afford lawyers.
The concepts:
- Automated Call Back Systems from legal services to people who have reached out
- SMS reminders from courts to litigants about what expectations are
- Using data for legal services to better track their work & targets
- Virtual office kits to provide legal services on the go, or outside of legal offices
- An app that gives checklists to lawyers to ensure they’re catching all the issues
“Don’t Forget Your Court Date”
How text messages and other technology can give legal support to the poor.
It has been three years since the Great Recession ended, but the nation’s courthouses are still swamped with eviction cases, foreclosures, and debt collection suits. If overdue bills and late rent were crimes, all low-income tenants and debtors could get a public defender for free. Because those cases are civil suits, though, the state doesn’t provide an attorney. Which means that in civil court, most people don’t have a lawyer in their corner—even though their homes and financial stability are on the line.
What many do have in their back pockets, however, is a smartphone. And soon, they might be able to find some legal help there, too.
Like everyone else, lawyers for the poor are trying to do more with less, as government grants and private funding have dried up. Increasingly, that means turning to tech, using new tools to deliver information to clients, support volunteer lawyers, and improve their own systems. They’re using text messaging, automated call-backs, Web chats, and computer-assisted mapping.
A crush of new clients is pushing the growing reliance on technology, as the old systems just can’t keep up. For years, people seeking help have called their local legal services offices, only to wait on hold for 20 minutes or more. If someone has a pay-by-the-minute cellphone, as many low-income people do, that gets expensive fast. Many callers just give up, says Elizabeth Frisch, the co-executive director of Legal Aid of Southeastern Pennsylvania. So Frisch and her team are piloting an automated call-back system, using voice over IP, to reduce hold time and save those precious minutes.
Text messages can also improve efficiency. If courts sent SMS reminders to litigants, that would help move along cases that get postponed over and over when one party doesn’t show up, says Glenn Rawdon. Rawdon runs the technology grants program at the Legal Services Corp., the federal program that funds legal aid groups. A text could also help people remember to bring documents to meetings with their overworked lawyers. “It’s very time-consuming if they come to the appointment and say, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot to bring the papers,’ ” Rawdon says. And SMS can be used to deliver basic legal information, like what to look for when signing a lease, or the laws surrounding a wage claim. Legal aid groups in Georgia, New York, Washington, Illinois, and Pennsylvania are all piloting text-based campaigns this year.
For simple questions, technology can help deliver information to clients. For more complicated problems, only a lawyer will do. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough lawyers to go around. That’s particularly true outside of cities.
For example, 70 percent of Georgia’s lawyers are in the Atlanta metro area, although just under 30 percent of the state’s population lives there, according to the State Bar of Georgia. Six counties have no lawyers at all.
“It’s really expensive to deliver legal services in a rural area. Lawyers have to travel,” says Michael Monahan of Georgia Legal Services. Some lawyers at his organization cover six or seven counties, he says, working in the field three or four days a week.
So five years ago, Georgia Legal Services created virtual office kits, with laptops, portable printers, and scanners. They also got an assist from Sprint, which provided free air cards for mobile Internet access and an “extremely low data rate” for unlimited usage.
In Ohio, which also has big rural areas and a shortage of lawyers to serve them, Web chat can help volunteers reach more clients.
The system “allows us to address an imbalance between where the attorneys are and where our clients are,” says Kevin Mulder, executive director of Legal Aid of Western Ohio.
But logistics aren’t the only hurdle for volunteers. They can be “a little uncomfortable taking cases that are outside their practice area,” says David Lund, who runs the Legal Aid Service of Northeastern Minnesota.
If you’re used to dealing with real estate contracts, for instance, a Medicaid case can be intimidating. So he’s developing a set of checklists for specific issues, optimized for tablets, that lawyers can use when they’re volunteering.
They’ll use it at the start of a case, as they’re laying out a client’s options, and at potential settlements, to make sure that they haven’t missed anything crucial. In eviction cases, for example, a landlord can get a judgment of possession. This allows the tenant to leave without paying back rent, but it’s still a judgment against him, which means it can jeopardize eligibility for future subsidized housing, like Section 8. An experienced landlord-tenant lawyer would know that. An occasional volunteer would not. Which is where the checklist comes in.
Some things are best left to full-time legal aid lawyers. But since there are so few, groups are using data analysis and mapping to better focus their scarce resources. Prairie State Legal Services in Rockford, Ill., is using its “incredible mass of data” to develop a mapping project, plotting addresses and legal needs. Director Michael O’Connor says this will help them answer questions like, “Are there clusters in certain communities where lots of people are facing issues with access to public benefits, or substandard housing?” Armed with that information, his staff can do targeted outreach campaigns or ramp up for litigation.
No one thinks technology is a cure-all. Even the best app or website can’t stand next to you in front of a judge, responding to the opposing counsel.
And despite these promising tools, unmet need is enormous. Many clients want more support than they can get from an app or a chat, but limited funds make that unlikely. “For a large percentage of those folks, [help via technology] will be it. That will be the most that we will be able to offer,” says Deb Jennings, who manages a phone helpline at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Toledo, Ohio. And the use of new tech tools is in the early stages—many projects are somewhere between concept and beta.
The tools that are in use show great promise. Groups across the country have developed self-help websites, and they’ve been hugely popular. In 2012 so far, more than 3 million people downloaded resources from LawHelp.org, a nonprofit site that offers legal information and legal aid referrals. Through an affiliated site, people can answer simple questions and produce documents ready to file in court. More than 300,000 people have created documents this year, for things like wills, leases, and custody agreements.
In an ideal world, everyone who needs one would have a lawyer. But few people know better than lawyers for the poor just how far from ideal this world is.
Relying on technology “is a bit waving the white flag and saying we acknowledge we’re not going to help everybody, so here’s a second best solution,” O’Connor says. “And it is second best, but it is at least providing help to some people who otherwise wouldn’t get anything.”
This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.
CanLii is an app out of Toronto that allows for easier searching of Canadian law. It’s an effort to make the legislation more accessible, and hoping that trickles down to more numbers of people in Canada being in control of their legal pathways.
New mobile app gives free access to legal resources, legislation and jurisprudence:
by Mitch Kowalski
While RIM flounders, other Canadians in the legal tech field continue to make giant strides.
The newly released app, WiseLii, Canada’s Mobile Legal Research Tool is now available free of charge from iTunes.
This new app was developed with the permission of CanLii (although not affiliated with CanLii) and gives increased mobile access to legal information, legislation and case law for all Canadians.
According to the app’s creator, Toronto lawyer Garry Wise, “This project is an access to justice initiative, bringing legal information, legislation and jurisprudence to all Canadians, free of charge, on the iPhone mobile platform.”
Garry, who is a fervent legal blogger, speaker and one of Canada’s top social media influencers, has been working on this passion project for more than a year.
“I began hearing about law firms building apps,” he said. “I was intrigued but wanted to do something that went beyond the typical “mobile business card” that I was seeing. Increasingly, I found myself reaching for my iPhone at pretrials and mediations, looking up cases, legislation and blogs that were relevant to issues that came up, but the results were hard to read on mobile and the process was not so nimble. A legal research app seemed like an obvious direction. One of our former articling students, Chris Bird was instrumental in developing the idea. As it evolved, the app’s usefulness to the general public as an access to justice tool became increasingly clear – free information democratized justice. That’s the beauty of CanLii.”
Wise pauses for a moment. Then a sly smile appears. “But truth be told, we built it because I wanted to use it myself. “
