Justice Innovation
What if we made templated, user-tested Cover Sheets to all legal tasks (whether it’s filling out forms or going through a procedure) so that people have great introductions and orientations to the task before being asked to do it?
A colleague working on improving the legal system in New Zealand from a user-centered design perspective mentioned this phrase to me in a recent email: Simple at the Front, Smart at the Back. Now it’s my constant refrain.
What does it mean? That when we build tools, guides, explainers, or anything else for laypeople to deal with the legal system, they should be simple, intuitive & clear for the person. But this interface should be covering up a very intelligent and robust complex system. We aren’t actually ‘simplfiying’ so much as improving the user experience of the system through tools that make people feel that navigating the system is simple. Using the power of coordinated, interactive, smart technology (and planning) we can make complex systems seem simple.
Next week I am convening a working group on how we can make the internet a better place for legal help.
This is one of the three main themes of work this year at my Legal Design Lab at Stanford. The main question is how we can make it incredibly easy for a lay person who is using Google or the starting point to find legal info, to get them from their Google search to essential information about their situation, tools and information to help them make smart decisions, and then actually follow through on them.
My goal is to promote more coordination among the many organizations that currently (and could possibly) provide these online services right now.
These are not a standard group of people. Some of them are non-legal — search engine providers like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, or referral services like 211 & United Way. Others are legal help site maintainers, or courts, or the attorney general office, or consumer law companies, or startups, or legal aid groups, or non-profits, or legal publishers. So many different entities, all potentially with value to offer a person on their journey from “Do I Have a Legal Problem?” to “I Got My Problem Resolved.”
The future I see is one of coordination of all these various service-providers so that a layperson in search of help can journey between their services seamlessly — with all their personal information in tow, knowing how to get from one provider to the next, not getting confused or lost after one service’s offering ends, and having the different providers help her along to resolution.
To get to this seamless user journey & enjoyable online user experience, it might be tempting to call for a Mega Portal. This would be the one amazing, well-designed, user-friendly, comprehensive website that can get a person from problem-query to answers, appointments, and tools.
This is a pie-in-the-sky dream, and also not that close to what different people actually want. There will not be the one almighty legal site that everyone in the country will go to. The closest we will get on that front is Google. There is simply no strong enough legal brand or comprehensive-enough resource that can cover all the many touchpoints a person must go through in a typical legal process.
Rather than bank on this one almighty Mega Portal, I see a future where we can build a whole lot of different ways to access this coordinated legal system. It would be full of different apps, websites, in-person stations, court and self-help kiosks, text messaging systems — and whatever new technology is coming our way in the next decades. We don’t need one perfect portal, we need a rich ecosystem of new & cutting-edge tools that can get different kinds of people to the same legal help.
And to achieve this vision, what’s the key thing — the first step? It sure doesn’t sound sexy, but I am increasingly obsessed with it: Data Standards. APIs. Getting all these different kinds of Internet-based legal service providers to make sure that their systems can talk to each other, that they accessibly present their databases of information about what legal help exists, who can access what, what rules apply to whom, what documents to submit, where to submit them, and on & on….
We can’t afford to live in the current siloed & proprietary world, where vendors and agencies hoard data & don’t talk to other service-providers. Where groups build a legal services tool and then don’t let this tool talk to other tools or pass a user over to next steps on her journey. We need to set requirements that providers must coordinate with each other, for the sake of the legal user. The layperson’s attempts to find help are going to be disjointed, confusing, and frustrating to the point of giving up if all these different providers don’t talk to each other, and help the person go from an Internet search to a trustworthy, supportive path of legal help.
Now’s the time to be investing in the infrastructure of the Internet for Legal Help. It will make Google search results better — surfacing jurisdiction-correct and public help resources, instead of spammy and irrelevant hits. It will allow for a new generation of legal tools to be built by young entrepreneurs and lawyers, who have ideas for better ways to present legal resources, or who just want to experiment in this space. It will foster innovation in access to justice, by giving a solid backbone of content and resources for innovators to draw from and a network of other tools to link to.
That’s how we’re going to get to “Simple in the Front and Smart in the Back” — with investment in coordinating the underlying system of how service providers present their info & share it with other providers, and by opening up the consumer law/access to justice space for more experimentation and creation.
Here is a small sketch I made while listening to talks at the Legal Service Corporation’s 40th Anniversary celebration in downtown San Francisco last month. It was from Justice Jonathan Lippman, the Chief Judge of NY’s Court of Appeals.
The conversation was about the growing momentum from courts and lawyers to invest in new ways of providing services, getting legal information to laypeople, and giving support mechanisms to help people through the complicated court system. Chief Judge Lippman has been a consistent & vocal advocate for more user-friendly & innovative court systems, and he said that more legal professionals are coming around to this point.
I’ve been thinking systematically over the past few months, as I’ve been looking back over design work and initiatives going on in the world of legal innovation, and bringing design into law. Here’s one of the schematics I’ve created, to make sense of what I’ve been observing.
These 6 Orders are the categories of interventions we working to improve access to justice — laypeople’s access to and empowerment within the legal system. I’ve drawn them out at an abstract level, but tried to hint at what kind of tools and policies would be contained in each.
I’ve listed them out in order of ambition too. Like I’ve written earlier on this blog, I’m eager to move conversations about user experience and usability beyond just making more Plain Language — or even beyond just making more visual and clean-composition interventions. Those are important, but they are also just the first orders of what could be happening.
I am pushing for interventions that are more ambitious — giving laypeople more ability to understand and customize legal info, legal processes, legal options for their own wise planning. Access to Justice requires more than just presenting info — it requires creating comprehension and decision-making tools for people, who are stuck in complex systems.
And, of course, the big target is making the system less complex. Why must procedures be so laborious and obscure? If we can change regulations and procedures within courts and legal services, then we can make big strides in improving laypeople’s comprehension & ability to navigate these systems.
I was excited to discover the OpenJustice Initiative, a move from the California DOJ to make its data more open, and provide a basis for more usable tools, interfaces, and processes for people who interact with the DOJ. See it in action: State of California Department of Justice – OpenJustice
OpenJustice is a transparency initiative led by the California Department of Justice that publishes criminal justice data so we can understand how we are doing, hold ourselves accountable, and improve public policy to make California safer.
It launched this year & has several data sets already available, on arrest rates, deaths in custody, and law enforcement officers killed/assaulted.
It’s great to see the justice system open up their data (if not also their processes) so that others outside the government can build better tools, interfaces, and intelligence on top of it.
This is the vision I have for how we get better access to justice & more usable government/court systems: these systems must structure, coordinate, and open their information up, and let non-governmental bodies who specialize in design & development figure out how best to make it understandable & usable.
Here is the POV of OpenJustice:
OpenJustice is a data-driven initiative that embraces transparency to strengthen trust, enhance government accountability, and improve public policy in the criminal justice system. Recent events in California and across the nation have highlighted the need for an important conversation between law enforcement and the communities we are sworn to protect. It is important that part of it be in a universal language — numbers.
OpenJustice advances Attorney General Kamala D. Harris’s “Smart on Crime” vision by leveraging statistical data maintained by the California Department of Justice (CA DOJ) and other publicly available datasets. OpenJustice includes three major components:
- A Justice Dashboard that spotlights key criminal justice indicators with in-depth analysis, integration of other publicly available datasets, and user-friendly interactive visualization tools;
- An Open Data Portal that publishes data from CA DOJ’s statewide repository of criminal justice datasets in an open-source and downloadable form; and
- An ongoing effort to improve criminal justice reporting in California.
OpenJustice underscores the CA DOJ’s commitment to improving public safety and increasing transparency through innovation; it represents one of the largest open government criminal justice data initiatives of any state in the U.S.
In the coming months, OpenJustice will expand to include more dashboard metrics across the justice system and a broader array of datasets and take steps to improve criminal justice reporting in California. Building safer communities requires trust and data-driven criminal justice policy. This starts with transparency.
OpenJustice Principles
As OpenJustice moves forward, these are our guiding principles:
- Proactive transparency
- Release information online that increases civic engagement and government accountability
- Adopt a presumption in favor of openness unless the data is designated as protected or sensitive
- Prioritize the publication of high-value datasets
- Privacy and sensitive information safeguards
- Comply with all regulations and laws regarding privacy and disclosure of personally identifiable information
- Limit the publication of personally identifiable information to that which is both legally authorized and relevant so as to minimize the risk of inappropriate identification and to protect the privacy rights of individuals (living or deceased)
- Take into account the foreseeable consequences and privacy implications of releasing any de-identified data, including the risk of the “mosaic effect” of data aggregation
- Inclusivity
- Incorporate public perspectives into open data policy
- Explore potential partnerships to leverage the impact of open data
- Broad accessibility
- Provide all data license-free
- Publish in open standards (e.g. CSV), in machine-readable formats (with a preference for machine-processable), and open-source
- Create public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for accessing information
- Data quality
- Develop processes to improve data quality and reporting
Talking to Bonnie Hough of the California Judicial Council last week, she recommended checking out several great projects coming out of Canada — specifically British Columbia — for inspiration about how courts can be more user-friendly. Many of them are efforts of the Justice Education Society, which is a public-oriented organization that is developing new tech tools & new user-oriented approaches to delivering legal services.
One example is the Small BC platform online. It is an online dispute resolution system to at least get a person started with filing the forms & tackling the process to resolving a small claim.
Notice also the lady in the bottom right corner — she’s a virtual assistant who speaks in a friendly, conversational way to tell you what the site has to offer and get you started with using the services.
This page gives you the two main options they have to help you recover your claim — giving you a diagramatic view of what each has to offer & what you can start doing now. It’s action-oriented as well as informative.
Inspired by the civic technology project CityVoice, that lets any person call up to leave a voice message about a problem they’re experiencing with their city government or infrastructure — can we provide a similar feedback loop in court and legal services?
What if people in the legal system had ways to give their feedback, so that the courts, lawyers, and other professionals could improve their services based on user experience metrics?
The metrics could be:
– comprehensibility
– accessibility
– ease of use
– sense of fairness
– positivity/negativity of experience
This is a simple feedback card — a piece of paper — from Uniqlo, a clothing store. Could we use these cards along with SMS text lines, phone voice lines, a visual ideas board, or other ways to gather user input into what their baseline current experience is, and what they would prefer.
At courts, at community centers, at libraries, at cafes — can we have interactive boards full of resources and services that people could access?
Using a large touch screen, a court or clinic could have a Triage screen, a Resources Screen, or a Directions Screen. People could come up to ask a question or find resources.
The person could jump to the most relevant content — making it a more personalized experience, and to have an interactive experience akin to a human-to-human one.
How can we develop new solutions in agile, responsive ways? So that if we see a problem or hear a user need — that we take action, try something in a lightweight way, small way — a hack, rather than a huge undertaking?
This is the idea that is coming out of the world of government improvements, that I’m hearing again and again at the Code For America summit. Moving from the ‘Waterfall’ method of developing new things, to the ‘Agile’ method. Could we bring this into the world of Courts & Legal Aid?
That’s what I’m starting to play with with my projects & teams at Stanford’s Legal Design Initiative — it would be great to expand this into the institutions themselves. Could we open up a court room or two to be sandboxes, in which we researchers and designers can come in and try new interventions that respond to user needs in really quick, but also very real ways, so that we can gather data & refine them quickly? Instead of overplanning & deferring innovation, can’t we act sooner and then use the data and feedback to figure out the idea’s worth and figure out the best way to solve the needs?