A challenge from Justice Cuellar’s at the ABA Legal Innovation Summit.
Author: Margaret
Categories
Tino Cellar on legal innovation
We are in a new era, shaped by technology and globalization. How will we respond?
Judge Tino Cuellar’s challenge to the ABA.
I’ve been reading a bunch of behavioral economics texts & taking notes on how it all might be made useful for legal services design.
Here are some of my sketched notes from while reading Nudge by Cass Sunstein & Richard Thaler, and then another article by Richard Thaler & Will Tucker in Harvard Business Review on Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers.
I’m excited to see the development of Project Legal Link, a new type of resource that links social & legal services together in the Bay Area.
I was introduced to it last year by the woman who is making it happen — Sacha Steinberger. Sacha is a lawyer, & and decided to focus on the problem of how people other than lawyers can get the right legal help for their clients and users who have come for help on other kinds of social issues. She noticed that it’s hard for non-lawyers to figure out who to be reaching out to, how to make an effective referral, and how to get the right info from group to group.
The Tipping Point Community is funding her work & it is wonderful to see how the site has developed in a short time. She has built a visually appealing, uncluttered & graphic way to help non-lawyers figure out legal options for their clients. There is enormous value in building a system that ensures more holistic care for people with life problems (legal & otherwise) and coordinates warm hand-offs and info-sharing among different service providers.
Here is how the project is officially described, and then find some more screenshots of the site:
In partnership with Tipping Point Community, Project Legal Link assists social service providers to help their clients access legal services. Specifically, we train and equip caseworkers at social service organizations to identify legal issues and refer clients to the appropriate legal resources. We organize the legal landscape so caseworkers don’t have to, and we assist caseworkers in understanding and navigating it.
WHAT WE DO: Our work takes three primary forms:
Train: we train caseworkers to identify and refer legal issues;
Refer: we provide curated referrals for clients’ issues; and
Support: we provide support to caseworkers with questions such as whether a legal issue exists and what to do about it.
Ours is not a one-size-fits-all approach. We get to know each organization, we tailor our services to its staffs’ and clients’ needs, and we support the organization’s work by focusing on the removal of their clients’ legal barriers.
WHY WE DO IT: At Project Legal Link we know that:
The need for legal services is great: low-income households face an average of one to three legal issues each year. If unresolved, these issues are a barrier to meeting basic needs.
The legal system is not intuitive: the legal world is cumbersome, intimidating, and hard to navigate.
Social and legal services rarely coexist: on the social service side, most organizations lack tools such as legal screening devices, referral lists, and trainings related to the legal world.
Caseworkers are the link: caseworkers often become trusted advisors for low-income individuals. In a network of support, the relationship between caseworkers and clients are among the strongest.
Our bet is that caseworkers are a critical bridge between low-income people and the legal services they need. Project Legal Link aims to build on the trust between the caseworker and the client and assist caseworkers in moving their clients out of poverty.
In the world of access to justice, consumer law, and even big law services, we need to think more clearly about what kinds of new products and services we should be developing. Rather than being reactive or tech-driven, we should begin with what lay people want & need to do (these are the functions we should be providing them), and what preferences they have for learning information and taking action (these are the interfaces we should be delivering the functions through).
I’ve been running a host of workshops, design sprints, and hackathons to generate these new concepts and then to test them — which kind of legal products and services have enough promise to pursue?
From these exploratory events, and from user-testing for projects that I’ve been developing, I’ve seen patterns of what lay people want from legal services & what kind of interfaces they want to use.
There are three types of legal products/services that we (in the world of legal innovation) need to be focusing our development efforts:
- Better Portals for Legal Services
- Process Navigator Tools
- Decision-Making Tools
There are plenty of other categories of tools for development later — from quality checks, to intake of client data. Other categories have lots of work going into them right now — how to assemble documents together, how to match people with lawyers. But these three categories I’ve listed above — these are the families of products and services that users are showing high need for, and that we’re not currently working (enough) on.
Better Portals are online & offline entry points for legal help. This could be (one of my pet projects) a Google Search intervention, that catches legal-ish queries that a user enters into the search box, and then directs the user to good, quality, if not public & jurisdiction-specific legal resources. Or it could be real-world, situational entry-points — places in people’s everyday lives (in libraries, schools, hospitals, main streets) that allow them to get legal help in situations when they need it.
We as the legal community need to build a new set of on-ramps for people with problems to realize there can be legal relief for their ‘life problems’. And to be quality, engaging on-ramps, we need to find those touchpoints where people are open to seeking out legal help, and their preferred modes of doing so.
Process Navigator Tools are products or services that can guide a lay person (or even a novice lawyer) step-by-step through a legal matter. As the category title implies, it’s about taking a process-based view of how legal tasks can get done. We must break the procedures down into a concrete sequence of steps, and then for each step we give granular, plain English, visual guidance for how to get it done.
This kind of development work means exploding the usual ways we as lawyers convey legal guidance. No more static PDFs, no more hour long power point webinars, no more overly short & generic appetizer article about do’s & don’ts. Rather, we need a comprehensive & staged, thorough & interactive process navigator, that will lead a person through every nitty-gritty detail of getting a legal process done but do it in a responsive, smart, companion-like way.
It should be written in Plain language, it should allow a user to check tasks off, set reminders for others, save her progress, share her info & have it saved into the navigator, complete her forms and tasks on the platform, and generally be her all-in-one guide to getting this task done.
It should be like an expert paralegal, or court navigator, plus personal assistant to help a person complete all the steps of a legal procedure without missing paperwork, deadlines, or crucial small details. It should also help the person form an accurate timeline & workload expectation from the outset of a legal process, so she has a more transparent view of what’s coming & what she should be doing.
Decision Making Tools are interactive, customizable ways for a person to figure out how taking a certain action might play out. They allow a person to enter in her personal data (or an imagined version of it) and her preferences, and then it shows her potential outcomes that may result from different legal paths.
The value of these tools is in helping people to think through many scenarios, weigh their options, and see more long-term outcomes. One of the main barriers lay people express as they consider whether & how to engage legal help is ‘not knowing what I don’t know’ and ‘not being able to think through all the possible options’. People routinely express that they don’t want to pursue a legal course of action, because they’re not sure if it is comparatively the best fit for their situation & their goals.
Can we in the legal community build better tools, interventions, services that help people envision what consequences (short & long term, legal and otherwise) might result from different legal paths they take? Even if these envisionings aren’t perfectly accurate, if they help a person get a better overview of ‘what they don’t know they don’t know’ and start to play around with their preferences & resulting scenarios — they can go a long way in encouraging smarter decision-making.
These three camps of new products & services — better portals, process-based navigators, and decision-making tools — should be at the top of the agenda when we in the legal innovation community talk about providing better access to legal services. There is a need for each of these functions, if we are going to get people to realize that there are legal remedies for their life problems, and get them empowered to comprehend how they can get legal relief and how to choose the right path to pursue.
In later posts, I will show concept proposals, as well as examples and borrowed patterns, for each of these three product families. For now, the goal is merely to set these product families as an agenda for innovation. We need a more focused plan for how we are going to build better access to justice & legal user experience — these are three very needed & high-value targets for us to focus our innovative energy.
Categories
Argument Assistant
An idea for having a document-software plugin (think, for Microsoft Word) that would track its lawyer & law students’ mark-ups of legal documents, learn where the arguments were and what good arguments are, and then use those patterns to make smart recommendations to the lawyer as she is crafting arguments in her document. It could be an encoded-up knowledge bank of what makes for good arguments & logic, baked right into the current workflows of how legal professionals create arguments.
Categories
Legal Reviewer
A tool that would read contracts & legal documents so that you don’t have to. It would boil it down into key things that you should know — the essential conditions, trade-offs, etc.
Categories
Court Companion app
Could we have a tech-based companion for people going through a court process? It could have timing advice, location directions, and other support to make sure the person is prepared for their day in court.
The value of this design would be to coordinate all the resources into a single place — the app. It would assemble and time out the information, and remind people of it.
Categories
Strategy Options Calculator
An idea to allow a person with a legal decision to make to play around with possible variables & the outcomes that would result. It would be a way to see multiple different scenarios, and weigh options before making a decision.
The National Expungement Project. is a Maryland-based effort to guide people with a criminal record through an eligibility check (can I expunge my record) and then direct them to how they can follow through on this procedure (where can I find good — and maybe even free — legal help?). Right now, there is a Beta version of a Maryland-based version (ExpungeMaryland.org) and there are plans for more states’ versions.
The project is run by two JD/technologists based in Baltimore — Jon Tippens & Jason Tashea. Their vision:
In search of a better way, we created ExpungeMaryland.org for a local non-profit. It’s a web app that connects people who need an expungement with volunteer lawyers.
Since creating ExpungeMaryland, bar associations, legal service providers, and even a state supreme court have asked us about using tech to improve access to expungement in their states. Our experience building ExpungeMaryland and other projects makes us adept at scaling this project nationally.
Our vision is to bring expungement apps to 25 states by partnering with local stakeholders. This will capture 80 percent of the U.S. population, and 75 percent of its annual arrests. We will also make the code available to any other states interested in replicating the project.
Here are the interface flows —
