Author: Margaret

Categories
Current Projects Procedural Guide

Visualizing Immigration Journeys

 

I’ve just posted a project summary up for my team’s work at the FWD.us DREAMer Hackathon at the Program for Legal Tech & Design’s site. Come over & read about what we built, see our demo, and read about our future plans. And I uploaded my entire photo log of the event, from Day 1 dinner to Day 3 demos. Here’s a clip:

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This past week, I was invited to serve as a Design Mentor for the Fwd.Us DREAMer Hackathon. The event featured a group of 20-some immigrants, most of them without documentation, leading up small teams of designers & coders. Each team was tasked with coming up with an idea to help immigrants, or the immigration reform movement. We would work for 2 days at the LinkedIn headquarters in Mountain View to come up with a working demo of our idea.

I was mentor to team NoblePaths.

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Our goal was to create a visualization app that would empower immigrants to tell their personal story in a share-able, if not viral way. The point was to make the complicated (if not, outright broken) immigration system visible, and in human terms rather than in cold, formal, legalistic ways.

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Current Projects Training and Info

Judgepedia & crowdsourcing court-user info

Open Law Lab - Judgepedia
I just found out about Judgepedia, a site that collects information about courts and judges, in a shared wiki. Its primary user seems to be someone interested in how the judicial system in the US works, and how individual jurisdictions have established judicial systems. It’s a project out of the Lucy Burns Institute.

Judgepedia aims to provide greater clarity to citizens about who runs the courts, how much money they spend, how elections are run, and how the system operates.
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It lets the user get straight to their local court system & try to navigate through how it is run & who the relevant judges are.

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You can look up a brief bio & information on a particular judge.

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This site is great in that it compiles disparate information that is available on lots of random sites around the web, and then creates a standard & searchable single experience for a user to more easily navigate.  The standardization is a great benefit.

Still, there is lots of potential to expand from this basic educational information & get to a new service for consumers of court services. When I first saw the title Judgepedia, I was expecting more info for the legal user — for someone who will be encountering the judicial system and wanting to know how to deal with a certain judge.

That kind of product would provide stats & metrics about lawyers and judges — which seems like a forbidden territory in the legal domain.  Even if such an evaluative product could be developed, it seems there would be serious vested interests that would block its implementation.

But still, that seems to be where the real need is.

The more I study legal consumers, the more it becomes clear that a main unmet need of lawyers & clients is to build better strategies to get legal tasks done. This is where there is huge promise in crowdsourced information.  If we can share information on what strategies work best within specific parts of the legal system & with certain judges — and which ones fail — this would be a huge benefit to litigants. Or if we could build a stats system that tracks judges’ behavior & preferences, this would similarly equip legal users with ways to better prepare their strategies.

The outstanding challenge, then, is how to gather, check, & share this crowdsourced information (which would be a huge undertaking in itself) — and to do it in a way that would survive challenges by lawyers, judges, and others who have a vested interest in resisting evaluation.

Categories
Advocates Current Projects

Finding & Hiring a Lawyer – how can we redesign this?

I’ve been thinking a lot about Consumer Law Design — meaning, how do we build new products & experiences for lay people who want to get their legal tasks accomplished well. These are the subdomains of Consumer Law that I’ve drawn out — step by step in a linear process.

  1. How to figure out you have a legal task to get done at all
  2. How to put a name on exactly what this task is & why it’s important
  3. How to prepare yourself to know what steps are needed to accomplish it
  4. How to find the resources or advocate that will help you accomplish it
  5. How to actually get the task done, step-by-step
  6. How to evaluate whether you’ve gotten the task done sufficiently (& perhaps also give feedback to the resource-provider or advocate about how the process has been)

Of course not all consumers of law will follow these steps in order, or need help on all 6. But it’s useful to think of the entire possible flow. If you are looking to design a new legal venture, there are many of these steps that are yet to be tackled. If you are already selling consumer law products, then there is a possibility to integrate support for more of these steps along the chain.

Many of the current crop of legal startups are focused on Step 4 — how to find a lawyer to help you get your legal task done. For example, Mary Adkins on the Huffington Post has a new article on the startup Priori Legal which focuses on how to get a consumer a better lawyer. (HT to Umbreen for sending this article along to me.)

Adkins interviews the co-founders of Priori Legal, Basha Rubin & Mirra Levitt, about what their model is & what kind of consumer law model they are looking towards.

Priori Legal

Some themes are echoed here, which have been becoming increasingly clear to me of late. They could be useful to anyone interested in building new legal tech:

  1. The DIY-forms model is not enough. Helping a consumer put forms together is a low-hanging fruit that some companies may do well, but there are many more opportunities for consumer law
  2. Finding a great lawyer to work with is not an easy task online. The website experience is not rich enough with cues, advice, and signals for an average consumer to feel supported or in a trustable environment. Getting a consumer coming to a website to trust a lawyer she meets on the site is a huge hurdle, that companies need to pay a lot of attention to. I have some ideas for experiments in this space — but the general insight is that putting a photo and a name of a lawyer on the site & then saying “trust him” is not enough.
  3. How to balance trust with efficiency? Building trust online is a long process, lots of talking & meeting to make up for the lack of our usual signals that we get in a face-to-face context, when we have more sources of information about whether a potential lawyer is trustworthy enough. But the consumer also wants to just get their legal task done. So how can we get the consumer who is both hesitant to trust and also in a perceived rush to get the task done? Striking this balance, of having a quick & efficient process and also building up trust & supporting the consumer to make quality choices in hiring a lawyer — is going to be a particular challenge.

Now on to the article, and Priori Legal’s approach:

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How does Priori work?

There are already lots of ways to find a lawyer on the internet. Some sites aim for comprehensiveness and produce pages upon pages of results—accuracy notwithstanding. Others are bargain-basement cheap, where you can hire a lawyer for $99.99 without the slightest nod toward quality.

What we’re doing is different than anything else out there. You get a short-list of vetted lawyers and pre-negotiated pricing options at a 25% discount off market rates with fixed fees, where possible, for comparison. Then, after you’ve chosen a lawyer, you schedule a half-hour complimentary phone call through the site. If you decide to work with the lawyer, all payment and billing happens through the site, as well.

Who can use Priori? Your site says “for small businesses,” but what does that mean? Could an artist who is a freelancer use it?

Anyone who wants to talk to a lawyer for a business-related matter. Our lawyers practice in a wide range of areas that service small businesses and can help from a straightforward trademark matter to complex litigation. Which is to say: Freelancers can definitely use it, too. Freelancers encounter many of the same legal issues and questions that small businesses do but often don’t have the time or business infrastructure to handle those issues. We have many lawyers in our network who are extremely interested in working with freelancers—both to resolve legal issues and think more proactively about avoiding future problems.

What kinds of lawyers use it?

Small-practice lawyers with an entrepreneurial, innovative mindset who are passionate about providing high-quality legal counseling to small businesses. We vet all the lawyers we work with through personal interviews and reference checks. It’s certainly no free-for-all. These are people who went to top schools and worked at top firms, but decided they wanted to strip away many of the inefficiencies of big firm practice to offer services and advice to small businesses owners and individuals at competitive rates.

How much does Priori actually save people on legal fees?

Straight math answer: 15%. Priori negotiates a 25% discount with each lawyer on our site, and we take 10% on fixed fees for our Management Fee.

More holistic answer: In our conversations with small businesses, we hear a lot of, “I meant to hire a lawyer to deal with [insert issue here] but I couldn’t find the time and I didn’t know how to go about finding the right lawyer in the first place.” Time is money for small businesses. Our business makes it possible to easily connect with a lawyer saves money down the road.

How is the field of law going to change, and do you envision Priori playing a role in this?

Economic pressure on fees has existed for years now. New technologies–everything from document production services, e-discovery, predictive coding, and services like ours–are changing the way lawyers spend their time, increasing the value of certain legal skills and decreasing the value of others.

Many consumers have noticed the proliferation of do-it-yourself (DIY) document sites, such as LegalZoom. These sites make it easier for consumers to go it alone and not hire a lawyer. Though proceeding without a lawyer is problematic except for the most basic legal issues, these site have already—and will likely continue to—greatly enhance access to the forms required to complete simple legal tasks.

But these kinds of DIY services have barely scratched the surface of how technology is going to change the way consumers find and relate to legal services because they address such a limited swatch of the legal market. Though there may have to be a contraction in the total number of lawyers, many of these technologies mean lawyers can have more control over their practices and be able to spend more time advising clients and less time processing paperwork. We see Priori as very much part of this movement.

Is Priori like the health insurance marketplace for law? Are there tiers named after metals?

Yikes. We hope it’s less confusing!

Categories
Background

Berkman Center Report on Access to Justice in courts

I just discovered a rich design document & user research study conducted by a team out of Harvard’s Berkman Center in 2010.
It looks at how more access & usability can be built into current civil court processes. And one of its co-authors is Phil Malone, who has just joined Stanford Law School’s team, as director of the new Innovation Clinic.

Open Law Lab - Berkman access to justice

The report is extremely valuable in the concrete suggestions & insights that it establishes. Any team who is working on a redesign of a court service should read it now.

Or, if you are designing interfaces for lay consumers to understand a legal process or to go through a legal system, you should also take a look at its recommendations.

I’ve pulled out some here, for a quick overview of some of the points to pay attention to.

What does a usable interface look like?

Open Law Lab - Berkman Center - Access to Justice 7

 

 What are the most crucial needs of lay litigants?

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Open Law Lab - Berkman Center - Access to Justice

 

How can a legal service orient & prepare lay people?

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How can electronic systems help lay people to get legal tasks done?

 

 

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Categories
Ideabook Work Product Tool

State Court Redesigns

Open Law Lab - State court - David Boies Ted Olson
Ted Olson and David Boies, the legal team behind Prop 8, have been working with the ABA, worked with a task force on the Preservation of the Justice System. They gathered input from stakeholders around the country on how the court experience could be improved — at the same time as state budgets are cut for courts. Here they are framing the problem space.

This work can be a rich source of on-the-ground research and insights that could fuel a tech- and design-driven process to build new interventions (even small, modest ones) that would improve both the efficiency of the court system & the stakeholders’ experience of it.

Categories
Current Projects Procedural Guide

CUPS visual guides to public services

I’ve been searching around for good information & graphic design, to communicate laws to average people. I stumbled across some amazing booklets & posters from the Center for Urban Pedagogy, or CUP.

Open Law Lab - CUPS - Making Policy Public

One of their missions is to make law & policy comprehensible to normal New Yorkers. This is one of their processes, of how they get designers together with public service orgs or governments.

Open Law Lab - CUP - Legal Design

Here are some of their project areas:

Community Education

CUP works with advocacy organizations, policy experts, and designers to produce publications, workshops, and other teaching tools that explain important policy issues for the people who most need to know. CUP publications and teaching tools are made for and with specific groups in specific places, but they reach a national audience of people interested in civics education and graphic and information design.

CUP’s Envisioning Development Toolkits are workshops built around interactive tools that teach people about basic land-use terms and concepts, enabling them to participate meaningfully in neighborhood change. For example, the Affordable Housing Toolkit teaches participants about income demographics and the technical definitions of affordable housing to help them analyze proposed developments in concrete terms of units, rents, and incomes. The toolkits are developed in close collaboration with community organizations throughout New York, such as Good Old Lower East Side, the Fifth Avenue Committee, the Municipal Arts Society, and Tenants & Neighbors. For more on the Envisioning Development Toolkits, click here.

CUP’s Making Policy Public series facilitates close collaborations between policy experts and design professionals to produce foldout posters that make complex policy issues accessible. For example, The Cargo Chain helped 10,000 longshoremen understand their place in the global shipping network, and is also a bestseller at art and design bookstores in New York. Collaborators have included designers like Candy Chang, MTWTF, Alice Chung of Omnivore, and Thumb Design with organizations such as the Brennan Center for Justice, Community Voices Heard, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. For more on Making Policy Public, click here.

CUP’s Public Access Design series of multimedia organizing tools brings together designers and animators with community organizations on short-term collaborations that use design to make complex issues accessible to the New Yorkers most affected by them. Each project results in a short video or animation, a pocket-sized foldout, a small booklet, or an interactive website. Collaborators have included community organizations such as Damayan Migrant Workers Association and the Immigrant Defense Project, and designers such as Raj Kottamasu and Petra Farinha. For more on Public Access Design, click here.

Through our Technical Assistance program, community organizations and advocacy groups can hire CUP to create custom outreach and organizing tools. For example, we are working with the Participatory Budgeting Project and Community Voices Heard, along with designer Glen Cummings, to produce outreach and educational materials, as well as maps and ballots for a citywide effort to engage public participation in City Council budget decision making.

Here is one example of their work: a booklet for Street Vendors in NYC about their rights, the policy that applies to them, and what to do if they have interactions with the police or government.

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Categories
Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Courthouse Design: Insights from Zorza and Keating

In 1994, Richard Zorza and Judge Robert Keating published a paper full of insights from their attempt to redesign the interfaces that judges & court officials used when prosecuting drug offenders, in Midtown Community Court.

This quick 4-pager paper The Ten Commandments of Electronic Courthouse Design, Planning, and Implementation: The Lessons of the Midtown Community Court nicely summarizes their findings into ‘Commandments’.

Open Law Lab - 10 Commandments A2j courthouse

On his Access to Justice blog, Zorza also has some new reflections, two decades out, on the redesigns he proposed for the court interface. That blog post also includes images of his proposed redesigns (not included here) of what the judge would see when making sentencing decisions, and also follow-through mechanisms to make sure the court was keeping track of the defendant’s path.

Zorza writes that the point of their design project was giving court officials more oversight & resources when making sentencing decisions in drug courts.

…the key to the concept was to combine immediacy of actual consequences with close judicial monitoring, and real community input into policy.   As we designed the technology, a major goal was to ensure that judges got broad information before they made a sentencing decision, and also afterwards, so they could monitor ongoing compliance.  Important to the model was having a broad range of intermediate sanctions available for the judge to choose.

The pair proposed a design that would give a variety of information about the defendant to the judge, as well as tools to track & monitor the progress after sentencing.

Some of the designs weren’t accepted, but some user research came out of the project, in the form of the commandments. The commandments are sometimes particular to the project Zorza & Keating were working on, and not generalizable to other legal design projects. Others (in bold) are more relevant widely.

One: Start with an Electronic Judicial Desktop
Two: Build a Web of Electronic Relationships Between Court and Other Justice Agencies
Three: Design the System to Collect and Display Information About the Progress of the Case Within the Courthouse, as Well as Information About the Case Itself
Four: Imaging Is not Enough. The Issue is Document Collection and Display
Five: Use Graphical Interface Design for Courts
Six: Use Color, Flashing, and Positioning to Enhance Information
Seven: Use Technology to Enhance Community Access
Eight: Build Tools that Put Users in Charge; Do Not Make them Feel Controlled
Nine: Use Automated E-Mail to Build Connections Between People and Data
Ten: Recognize that an Integrated Computer System Has the Capacity to Make Fundamental Changes in the Way a Courthouse Works

Categories
Current Projects Procedural Guide

Pocket DACA

Here is another current initiative for Access to Justice through design/tech: Pocket DACA.

Open Law Lab - Pocket DACA 1

Pocket DACA is an app, released this summer for free for Android & IOS, to help people who came to the US as a child, who might be eligible for DACA.  It was produced by Pro Bono Net & Immigration Advocates Network.

The app is full of resources — primarily of which is a screening tool — that will let people understand if they can apply for DACA.

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It also has other features, like finding legal services nearby, based on the phones geolocation, & discovering other resources for immigrant youth.

Open Law Lab - Pocket DACA 3

The app is generally a redesign of a legal services website for a mobile experience — added in with an interactive ‘expert system’ that will help a user figure out if they can get on this legal pathway (DACA) or not.

Here’s a video review & summary of the app.


And some more screens:
Open Law Lab - Pocket DACA 5 Open Law Lab - Pocket DACA 4

Categories
Ideabook Work Product Tool

Access to Justice Tech: Concepts

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice tech

I’ve been searching around for the current landscape of actual initiatives & concept designs for tech tools to provide more access to justice.

I went back to a presentation, Assisted Legal Decisionmaking, by law professor Josh Blackman at Stanford last year. He showed some screenshots of legal products he’s been thinking of.

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice app 2

The concept app would allow the user to input their question. The app would respond with follow-up questions to nail the issue down more concretely. And then it would direct the user to the right resources. It follows the Expert System model, with guided interviews, that the A2J author and other access tech has relied upon.

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice app

Categories
Advocates Current Projects

Legal Barbershop

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Another offline idea for Access to Justice (thanks to Briane for the mention!) — this time being piloted by attorney Donald Howard in New Britain, Connecticut. The Connecticut Tribune reports on how he has opened a barbershop inside of his legal office, as a hybrid-business to serve more people’s legal needs.  He cuts their hair & has his ears open for legal problems, which he can then follow up with.  It seems to be recently opened — I want to hear the experiences that are coming out of it.

It seems to take the idea of Legal Force (combo bookstore/legal concierge) and tweak it to a context (the barbershop) where people are already talking about their day-to-day lives and problems.  I see potential here — that people can be given legal diagnoses & resources before they realize they have a “Lawyer A-ha Moment” and reach out to a lawyer themselves.

From the Facebook page, it’s not clear how much law is going on at Legal Cuts, versus just haircuts — but the model seems to be a great inspiration for more, new models of legal services.

Barbershop-Law Office Combo On Cusp Of ‘Hybrid Business’ Trend

By DOUGLAS S. MALAN

Donald Howard

Donald Howard

Donald E. Howard II sees his new business venture as a natural combination: Everybody needs to get their hair cut and lots of people like to talk about their troubles at the barbershop.

So the New Britain attorney decided to open Legal Cuts, a legal-themed barbershop on West Main Street that also happens to be home to Howard’s law office, which is in the back of the building. He’s been open since early April and caters to people with all types of legal issues.

“I thought it was the perfect marriage,” said Howard. “People could feel comfortable in this environment and feel they can trust the lawyer. I want to make sure legal services are available to these people” who may be intimidated by walking into a traditional law office.

Howard’s new venture earned a mention on the ABA Journal website, as well as in an article on Findlaw.com that discussed a trend toward “hybrid businesses” launched by lawyers. The article’s author, attorney William Peacock, gave a thumbs-up to the concept.

“It really is intimidating for a client to go into a stuffy attorney’s office, while some pompous guy sits behind a massive desk in a $5,000 suit, and tells you that he wants a $3,000 retainer for your relatively simple case,” Peacock wrote. “If you can break that barrier, make yourself approachable, and calm the nerves of the client, developing that client-attorney relationship of trust will be much easier.”

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With his business still getting off the ground, Howard spends his days in Rockville Superior Court as a clerk and then checks in on his barbershop/law office three or four times a week. People who inquire about legal services when he’s not around are encouraged to leave their information and Howard returns their call. A whiteboard listing his flat-fee legal services for representation in DUIs, pardons and uncontested divorces are readily available at Legal Cuts along with his business cards.

“I’m still a struggling new attorney and in this economy, you have to step outside the box — and burn the box,” he said. “I believe the barbershop is the epicenter of the community. People can come in here and play checkers or chess and get to know their surroundings.”

Howard said he got the idea for Legal Cuts from a television show after seeing a California lawyer who offers legal services in a coffeehouse that is aptly named the Legal Grind. Howard decided on a barbershop because he took courses to become a licensed barber in Chicago and then cut hair during his undergraduate and graduate school days at Mississippi State University.

Moving around the country with his wife, who is in the Air National Guard, Howard earned a law degree from the University of Wyoming and served as a barber’s apprentice in Wyoming and Georgia before moving to Connecticut. Last February, he passed the Connecticut bar exam and started clerking in the state courthouse.

“I’ve handled some small claims, personal injury and criminal matters so far,” Howard said. While clerking, he’s trying to figure out what areas of the law interest him most. He’s leaning toward a career as a criminal defense and personal injury lawyer.

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