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Current Projects Ideabook

New Generation of Tech for Access to Justice

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.

Cellphone

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.

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Current Projects Training and Info

Open Law app in Canada

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.

image

New mobile app gives free access to legal resources, legislation and jurisprudence:

http://business.financialpost.com/2012/07/27/new-free-mobile-app-gives-greater-access-to-justice-to-all-canadians/

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. “

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Background

Redesigning Court Experiences for people without lawyers

The Chicago-Kent School of Law and IIT completed a massive study of how to build better tools for self-represented litigants (pro-se). Their 470+ page write up includes a variety of concept designs and prototypes for each of 5 stages of the pro se process. IN the past decade since the study was released, a few projects have tried to take advantage of the study’s insights (see: A2J Authoring tools and related apps).

Inside the write-up, there are many concepts waiting to be prototyped and tested. The above map captures the main flows the study envisions.

A great starting point…

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Ideabook Work Product Tool

Assisted Legal Decision Making

Open Law Lab - Assisted Decision Making
Assisted Decision Making from Josh Blackman

Here is the presentation from today’s Stanford Law lunch, with law professor Josh Blackman discussing his startup to rival Pacer in distributing case information in a more usable way, with better ways to see relations between firms, judges, cases, companies, etc.

Assisted Decision Making from Josh Blackman

He also mentioned the possibility of developing a Siri, Attorney at Law, in which a non-lawyer could ask a simple question to their mobile phone: “My landlord won’t fix my heat, what should I do”. The phone would then suggest possible paths of action the non-lawyer could take: call tenant rights’ group; file a pro se suit against the landlord; find a lawyer; or compose a legal document complaining of the problem.

Blackman made the argument that these kinds of future legal tech could be an important means of access to justice — people could get solutions to their legal problems without the hassle and wait of going to a legal services office and waiting for help.


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Dispute Resolution Ideabook

Can Online Dispute Resolution reduce the justice gap?

Open Law Lab - ADR and Technology

LawTechCampLondon from tmcgn7

A presentation from a member of the VirtualCourthouse.com team, on the current problem of Access to Justice, and looking at how online tools — particularly around online dispute resolution and diy legal tools for pro se individuals — could address it.
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Dispute Resolution Ideabook

Against Alternative Dispute Resolution

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Dispute Resolution Ideabook

Mobile phone Dispute Resolution with m-Jirga

Open Law Lab - Process FLow mjirga

 

The M-Jirga from Colin Rule

A presentation by Colin Rule, of Online Dispute Resolution fame, on a concept design for a mobile traditional justice platform. The m-Jirga program would mimic an elders council meeting in a town square or mosque, that would hear disputants’ sides of a conflict, then vote and issue a ruling on who will prevail.

The M-Jirga from Colin Rule is a presentation from a few years ago, with an initial sketch of what a mobile-phone based dispute resolution system would look like.

The m-Jirga was proposed for a rural Afghan audience, but wasn’t ultimately implemented. As a concept design, it is a useful starting point. How might we design systems of justice — that lets a person bring a dispute with another, get a chance to advocate her position, and receive an enforceable ruling — that could be accessed on dumb mobile phones or basic smart phones?

And, how might we let people who are disadvantaged in traditional justice systems (likely: young women, minorities, very poor) present their position in semi-anonymous way, so that their typical disadvantage is erased?

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Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

What about a WebMD for law?

For the excellent Legal Tech class I’m taking at Stanford Law School on the future of legal technology, I am proposing to build a WebMD for law.

My central question is ‘how might we build tech that could help a lay person diagnose their own legal problems’? I am asking it because most legal technology currently is being built for a few audience segments:

1) Big Law lawyers who want to cut costs and make their practice more efficient

2) Law students to do research and construct arguments better

3) Fairly well-educated consumers who want to accomplish discrete tasks — making a will, incorporating a business, getting a marriage or divorce agreement, electronically signing a contract

I am interested in getting legal services & counsel to people not in these three categories: those people who lack the legal grounding to know what their legal problems are, and how they can go about fixing them.

The target audience for ‘a WebMD for law’ would be people with a legal itch — they have a problem in their life that is worrying them, and they think it might be tied up with something to do with the law.  Their dentist botched a root canal. Their landlord is asking for more money. Their employment interviewers are asking about immigration status. A policeman confiscated their camera at a protest.

There are many services currently online for people to look up statutes, cases, commentaries, and other sources of law. See Legal Information Institute, Google Scholar, PlainSite, Ravel Law, Wikipedia — and if you have money in your pocket, WestLaw and Lexis. But these legal tech products are not useful to a person unless she first knows what she is looking for.

There is a gaping need for a technology that can bridge the lay person from ‘I have a problem’ to ‘What is the law to help me with my problem’.  This technology would provide the lay person with the understanding: ‘This is my problem in legal terms. These are the specific legal matters that are at issue’. It would do what first year law students spend all their free time doing: issue-spot.

I am interested in this for a wide variety of ‘lay people’. It would be best to support those who are most removed from the legal system, people who don’t have the money, time, proximity, or knowledge to access legal counsel & services. But it would also have enormous benefit to the many people who are well-educated, living relatively well, but when it comes to the law — feel totally out of their depth, don’t know a tort from a criminal action, and can’t navigate the jargon of the legal system.

These slides are from a presentation, “Is There a WebMD Effect: open access to law, the public, and the legal profession” up on SlideShare by a lawyer, T. Bruce, who was also thinking about the possibility of a WebMD for law.  The presentation highlights that there is a need to serve this ‘latent legal market’ — while also warning that giving greater access to legal diagnosis tools may induce ‘cyberchondria’ in the general public.

People could find more legal issues in their lives than they actually have (or than actually matter), and this could have negative effects — overtaxing the legal system with more frivolous lawsuits, inducing people to seek costly legal help when in fact they do not need it, giving false confidence to people that they can represent themselves with their new legal knowledge.

This 15th century concern — that ‘reading the law without right understanding’ might lead to people harming themselves with legal knowledge — cannot be ignored. But it does not outweigh the need for a technology that can bridge people’s legal itchiness with a capacity to use the many legal resources now available online.

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Background

The Problem of Legal Tech & Access to Justice

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice

A blog post by solo practitioner Carolyn Elefant detailed her issues with the current legal start ups that supposedly increase ‘access to justice’, but in her estimation are just providing more cut-rate, less-than legal services which don’t really serve the under-served.

Instead, she encourages start ups and Silicon Valley investors to refocus on providing legal tech solutions to improve the quality of non big-law lawyers — solo practitioners, small firms, more personal lawyers.

She sets out an abbreviated laundry list of wicked problems in her practice, that tech or design solutions might alleviate:

1) inefficient courts, where lawyers are often stuck waiting three hours for a case call and can’t work on any other matters in the process for fear of offending their client or the judge. (Solution: incorporate teleconferences or web for simple status calls or make wireless and work rooms readily available where lawyers can follow proceedings without sitting on a bench in the court)

2) courts that don’t have e-filing and require lawyers to dispatch a messenger and make multiple copies every time they have to make a filing

3) the cost of deposition and trial transcripts

4) the cost of expert witnesses and investigators

She leaves some parting words on legal tech & access to justice:

The Start Ups That Give Access to Justice Are Already Here

by Carolyn Elefant on March 22, 2012 · 3 Comments

in MyShingle Solo, Tech & Web, Trends

Initially, I was excited when I saw this headline, Meet the startups that are giving everyone affordable access to justice. Great, I thought — an article that finally recognizes what solos — who are, after all, start-up lawyers – are doing to ensure that meaningful access to justice isn’t reserved for deep-pockets. But after a sentence or two, I realized, to my dismay, that the piece merely echoed the growing chorus singing the praises of techno-enabled websites that deliver DIY or cut-rate legal services.

But do these legal start ups really serve the underserved? To be sure, there’s a need for affordable legal services, which are priced at the upper end of even most middle class budgets. And the problem is far worse for the poor, where there are more than 6400 open cases for every lawyer willing to handle one pro bono, says the article.

Still, how many of these cases can be resolved by forms or automation? An ABA survey of judges released a year ago found that pro se litigants suffer most in courtroom proceedings because of lack of training and courtroom experience. How-to guides may be useful for a small claims case, where procedures are relaxed — but they won’thelp pro se’s more effectively cross examine an adverse party or ensure that evidence makes it into the record in a formal proceeding.

In fact, many past efforts to automate the wheels of justice have had disastrous results. Automated debt collection cases have clogged courtrooms with unfounded lawsuits while robosigners and bare-bones foreclosure teams caused much of the housing meltdown to begin with. Technology unchecked isn’t much better than unchecked lawyers.

Meanwhile, services like Shpoonkle, that force lawyers into bidding wars, or capping legal fees at $89 for traffic ticket defense or $275 for a divorce aren’t all that much better. Granted, these services will get clients a warm body, which for truly simple matters may be all they need. But again, how much of a defense can a lawyer put on in a misdemeanor case that heats up when he’s only bid $500 to handle it?

The trouble with many of these legal start ups is that they address the wrong problem. That’s because they begin with the assumption that the high cost of legal services is due to lawyers’ aversion to technology or greed. For example, one of the company founders quoted in the article talks about how lawyers spend 50 percent of their time copying and rearranging citations which grossly inflates their rates. Um, maybe that’s the case at some of the nation’s largest law firms, but most solo or small firm lawyers I know don’t do much photocopying since they run largely paperless shops – and rely on Shepardizing or lower cost law clerks or paralegals to cite check.  Contending that lawyers don’t make use of technology is not only insulting, but just plain ignorant.

Likewise, the article quotes an average billing rate of $284/hour which doesn’t say much either. Sure, $284 isn’t pocket change, but if a lawyer can resolve a matter in a couple of hours, the rate isn’t exorbitant. In fact, Legal Zoom isn’t much cheaper. Take a look at the $99 incorporation package. Many lawyers –even those without support staff — could easily bang out three Legal Zoom incorporations (total = $300) in an hour and wouldn’t even require a 7-10 day turn-around. The reason that many lawyers don’t is because they also spend time to understand clients’ goals and assist in selection of a business entity. Truth be told, if clients don’t want to pay for full service, many lawyers will direct them to incorporation forms available online or give them necessary forms for free .

Of course, most of these tech start ups don’t realize any of this since they’re completely out of touch with how solo and small firm lawyers operate and what types of services would allow us to charge less or better help our client.  That’s not surprising either, because if you take a look at many of these companies’ founders or board members, you’ll see that they’re comprised of Silicon Valley techies and big law expatriates who don’t have a clue as to many of the mundane factors that drive the cost of legal services.

Like inefficient courts, where lawyers are often stuck waiting three hours for a case call and can’t work on any other matters in the process for fear of offending their client or the judge. (Solution: incorporate teleconferences or web for simple status calls or make wireless and work rooms readily available where lawyers can follow proceedings without sitting on a bench in the court) Or courts that don’t have e-filing and require lawyers to dispatch a messenger and make multiple copies every time they have to make a filing. And don’t even get me started on the cost of deposition and trial transcripts. Although video and voice recognition technology could eliminate the need for in-person reporters and the exorbitant $5.00/page cost per page, most courts won’t accept anything other than an official, reporter-prepared transcript – which can add thousands of dollars to civil suits and appeals. Then, there’s the cost of expert witnesses and investigators, which also take another chunk of change out of a case.

None of the tech start ups do much to address these costs. In fact, by spending so much time braying about the high cost of legal services and pitting lawyers against each other to lowball fees, the tech start ups make the problem of access to justice even worse. After all, a lawyer who’s getting $2000 for a murder trial isn’t likely to blow $1000 on an investigator or an expert witness. Rather, he’ll dispense with those services to the detriment of his client.

Moreover, tech companies incorrectly assume that technology is always the answer. Maybe so — but tech ain’t always free either. E-discovery search tools are far more powerful than combing through documents one page at a time — but many are really pricy and out of small lawyers’ price range. Other services with value-adds like legal briefs or expert write-ups that large firms can afford cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a year. True, there are forms and products available for solo and small firm lawyers, but truth be told, much of what I’ve seen so far (with the notable exception of Ken Adams’ NDA and a few others — please chime in if you’re one of them) are, quite frankly, garbage and insulting to solo lawyers and our clients. It’s no wonder that many lawyers have to resort to drafting contracts from scratch when the majority of available templates are completely subpar.

From what I can tell, many of the newest generation of tech start ups aren’t using technology to improve the quality of legal services or lower the costs. Instead, they’re focused on bashing what lawyers do and trivializing the legal problems of the middle class and poor. These start ups aren’t trying to make good lawyers more widely accessible, or to help middling lawyers gain the tools to become better. Instead, they’re all about convincing the public why bottom feeders and robots and forms are good enough to serve the legal needs of the “common folk” when those same services won’t do for complex or important matters like multi-billion dollar mergers or a anti-trust actions. Ultimately, the tech start up companies widen the gap between haves and have nots by suggesting that it’s OK for a large portion of society to do without lawyers at all.

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Dispute Resolution Ideabook

What would an SMS-based dispute resolution system look like?

Open Law Lab - Sanjouwa Hatowa

Sri Lankan tech researcher & TED fellow Sanjana Hattotuwa has laid out some of the basic capabilities that mobile phones in the field can be used in dispute resolution and rule of law.

Data gathering

  • Plotting the GIS coordinates of the disputed territory, including details of the location, resources and details of adjacent territory
  • Details of disputants, including audio and video testimonies, multimedia footage and documentation of case details
  • The in-field mediator or contact person can make his or her own notes and add them to the case file – through text, multiple answer questions via SMS, audio notes or video recordings
  • Rapid entry of key case details, which the mediator can then go back and expand

Real time ODR

  • System generated messages can be handed out to disputants to follow up with a voice message system that gives them the status of the case in the vernacular
  • Mediators can be informed of similar cases in real time using intelligent comparisons of data and disputes
  • GIS boundaries of land can be plotted and sent to regional centres which can print out the maps and hand them over to the disputants to visually aid the process of mediation
  • Case details can be semantically linked to provide mediators with expert systems that are able to generate options to help with decision making
  • F2F synchronous and asynchronous mediation using mobile video conferring technologies

Offline ODR

  • Indexed case histories can feed into knowledge repositories that can be accessed offline, in print or as audio files to help train and build mediation capacities of ADR mediators
  • Anecdotal input by mediators can be indexed to create expert system that examine semantic linkages within and between such input to influence options generation – for instance, the family history of a particular disputant, the structural underpinnings to a land dispute which may be linked to loss of face and other observations
  • Ability to access thematic or issue based case studies over a given period of time, or examine a particular case against possible options and the probability for resolution based on historical data, or access to case histories in a particular context, region or identity group (ethnic, religious or gender).
  • A central repository of information on past and on-going ADR and ODR processes, grouped by issue, region, ethnicity, mode of settlement, mediator etc

Settlement process

  • Disputants get vernacular SMS notification of settlement. Those who cannot read also get a voice mail with relevant details. Simple disputes can be resolved on the spot with expert systems that help in options generation for the dispute.
  • Video conferencing via mobile phones can aid where disputants are far removed from ADR centres. Mediated voice conferences can aid in settlement processes along with asynchronous video, wherein parties get to see and hear each other’s viewpoints.
  • Mobile systems can complement and strengthen traditional face-to-face (F2F) meetings but reducing the need for physical meetings, reserving F2F meetings for the most intractable disputes, facilitating virtual F2F meetings between active disputants and those that have successfully resolved similar disputes in the past in the same region or on the same issue, enable mediators themselves to interact with each other to discuss, transfer knowledge and share information between each other.