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Advocates Current Projects

Frontline Justice launch

A new initiative, Frontline Justice, has just been launched to build a new set of justice workers who can serve people with legal needs & close the justice gap.

This new group is planning to grow a workforce of justice workers, reform policies and regulations around who can provide legal help, and engage communities in how people are served.

The group is seeking a CEO currently, and has an impressive founding team and leadership council.

Categories
Reading

Court focus on user-centered experience & inclusive design

The National Center for State Courts has a working group of justice leaders who have released a December 2022 report “Just Horizons” — pointing to systemic vulnerabilities in the court system and opportunities for building a better future, where the institutions are strong, the public is served, and there is a healthy justice ecosystem.

There are 6 areas of Vulnerabilities & Opportunities laid out, where justice institutions can invest to strengthen their performance, impact, and infrastructure. These include a focus on the future, using data, private entity management, emergency preparedness, future-ready workforce, and user-centered design.

https://www.ncsc.org/consulting-and-research/areas-of-expertise/leadership-and-governance/thought-leadership-and-strategic-planning/just-horizons

These areas all resonate with our work at the Legal Design Lab:

  • A focus on the intentional design of civic systems: government institutions like courts should be looking to the future to see what kinds of services, relationships, infrastructure, and outcomes they want to be having. They should work with diverse stakeholders to set this future agenda, and scope out projects to reach this better future.
  • Prioritizing the users of the government institutions, rather than just the institutions themselves: many times, when we talk about what government institutions like courts should be doing, the focus is on internal metrics — efficiency, cases closed, calendaring, staffing, and budget. These are important factors, but they must be balanced out with metrics that reflect the interests of the people the institutions are meant to help and serve.
  • Participation of diverse stakeholders in providing feedback about the status quo, finding and scoping new solutions, and evaluating new revisions to ensure they are serving the audiences as intended.
https://www.ncsc.org/consulting-and-research/areas-of-expertise/leadership-and-governance/thought-leadership-and-strategic-planning/just-horizons/vcards/vulnerability-2

Categories
Current Projects

Court text messages scripts

As more courts use text messages to improve litigants’ access to justice, many wonder exactly how to set up texting.

What are the words, schedule, and flow of text messages for a court to use?

From our experience with working with criminal, traffic, housing, and other civil courts in doing text message projects, we have some options for courts to use.

There are 3 models:

  1. Straightforward reminders
  2. Reminders including services/self-help
  3. Interactive flow with services and accommodation help

We go through each texting model and share a sample script that courts have used in the past.

Texting Model 1: multiple-day countdown to the hearing.

The goal of this reminder text message flow is to increase participation rates, and reduce default rates for a hearing. It is a straightforward reminder script, focused on dates, times, and locations. There is also a mention of the consequences of default.

A straightforward 10-5-1-day reminder flow for court hearings

Texting Model 2: Reminder Plus Services

A second model for court reminders adds more services into the messages.

It can have a 10-5-1 day reminder schedule, but the messages also add in links and referrals to self-help services.

These could be links to workshops, self-help centers, hotlines, right to counsel, navigators, or other expert assistance services.

A reminder message with links to services

Texting Model 3: Interactive Service and Accommodations

In this model, the focus is less on reminders and more on connections to services.

The text message flow would start if the litigant texts a keyword into a court phone number, signaling that they want to find services or accommodation. The court summons might have this phone number and keyword on it, for litigants to follow.

The message flow is interactive, allowing the litigant to choose what kind of information or connections they would like.

The court sets up the interactive menu of options and provides phone numbers, hours, and other details about how to get legal aid, assistance, self-help, court directions, and disability or language accommodations.

An example text message interactive flow

Categories
System Evaluation

Measuring impact of legal help websites

At the LSC ITC conference 2023, the legal help website People’s Law School in British Columbia, Canada shared their strategy to measure what works on their website.


They were motivated by knowing ‘What works?” They want to know if the website is making a difference or not. Did they help people who were seeking guidance and assistance with their problems?

They did this by asking discrete, one-off questions throughout their website.

  • Is this helpful?
  • Will this help you resolve your issue?
  • Would you recommend this to others?

These questions usually had five star rating scales. In addition, there were free text boxes. The data was then saved into a database and presented as a data dashboard.

The website administrators could then see rates around empowerment, satisfaction, net promoter score, and suggestion and comments.

The data dashboard would be a driver of regular iterations and improvements.

Categories
Background

How the justice system can learn from unemployment insurance

The federal government is newly focused on Customer Experience (CX). That has meant that their teams are creating better websites, tools, and forms that can help people get their business with agencies done more easily.

The Department of Labor has a team working on modernizing Unemployment Insurance. See their examples & guidance about how to use better design and tech to improve people’s experience with the government.

These strategies and examples can be used by courts, legal aid groups, and other justice system actors to improve their processes, as well. These practices include:

  • Plain Language
  • Mobile-Friendliness
  • Automated Quality Testing Tools
  • Keeping the Backend and improving the frontend
  • Redesigning Notices and Application Forms

The website has specific guidance on improving the usability of each of these initiatives.

For example, here are quality feedback tools to run:

https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/ui-modernization/use-automated-tools
Categories
Current Projects

Why doesn’t every new justice reform policy come with a community navigator program?

Margaret Hagan, Dec 1, 2022

Reflecting back on all of our legal design work over the past 10 years, I’ve spotted a common pattern happening:

  1. Momentum builds around a justice reform policy that intends to address a fundamental problem in people’s ability to access the justice system. This could be around giving people facing traffic tickets the ability to apply for a financial waiver, so it doesn’t set off a financial crisis for them. Or it could be a new program to get tenants & landlords emergency rental assistance, to stop an eviction. Or it could be a policy to allow for people to expunge criminal records for marijuana-related offenses.
  2. Hard, detailed legal work goes into creating & passing this new policy. State, local, or federal bodies make this proposal into an official ‘thing’. The policy is announced! Change is happening! There are press releases, announcements, and maybe a website to tell the public about this new policy that should help them.
  3. Groups are put in charge of making this policy into programs, that the public can find and use. This is usually where our Legal Design Lab has been invited in to help. How do we make the public aware that this policy exists and can help them? How do we translate the policy from a legal text into real-life programs, processes, and impact?
  4. Programs struggle to get effective public outreach, uptake & usage. It turns out to be quite hard to reach people who might benefit from a new traffic ticket, eviction, or expungement policy. It’s also hard to design a new process that’s user-friendly, low-burden, and engaging enough for a person to stick with it until the end. In some cases, programs also need to adjust when there’s fraud activity, too. We often work with these nascent, struggling programs to redesign how they’re doing outreach, services, and evaluations.

Having observed many of these policy → program journeys — and how hard it is to get public awareness, uptake, and engagement with new policies — there is one solution that should be baked into the earlier phases, as groups are proposing policies:

Community Justice Navigators are an essential part to making justice reforms impactful.

If every new ‘justice reform’ policy came with a mandate & funding for community justice navigators, this could be a big step towards making the policy have the impact it is intended to.

Community justice navigators can be in the neighborhoods and community groups, to alert the public about this new policy & programming. They can help people understand what the opportunity is, and why it’s trustworthy and valuable. Navigators can:

  • Awareness: Get more people to know about the policy & programs: They can hold ‘official’ public outreach events, and also do informal, peer-to-peer outreach. Ideally, community justice navigators will have ties to local groups, and can have a much stronger reach to build awareness.
  • Spot-and-Refer: Help people know what’s available to them. Navigators can talk to people who are trying to figure out what their life problem is in legal terms — and what services might help them. They can help legal (or financial, or social) issue-spot, and refer people to expert groups or programs that can help them.
  • Procedural Coach: Be there with a person throughout their justice journey. Navigators can play a companion role, helping a person stay engaged, attending hearings, dealing with legal notices, addressing hiccups, and keeping a person motivated and supported. A justice journey can be draining and intimidating — and a navigator can play a support role that lawyers and others often can’t.
  • Task Assistance: Help the person get their forms and papers right. People often struggle with filling in forms, gathering evidence, or prepping for their day in court. A navigator can help them do these tasks, to know what’s expected & how to get it done.
  • In-Court Navigation: Guide the person at hearings, meetings, and trials. When a person comes to a court or government agency on their own, they may not know how to behave, what to say, how to get their story across, or how to interact with officials. A navigator can help a person know what to do & support them through the stress of a court day.

A Community Justice Navigator doesn’t have to play all of these roles — but even playing a few of them can help increase access to justice. A navigator can increase a person’s legal capability — improving their knowledge, strategy, and confidence.

A Navigator can also help policy-makers and service providers, by getting their new rules and programs crucial public exposure, doing the ‘customer service’ work of helping people navigate this new system, and encouraging the person to participate in a timely, well-prepared way.

Any new justice reform policy or program is likely going to struggle with public awareness, uptake, and navigation. So why doesn’t every new policy effort come baked in with a Community Justice Navigator program?

For all the effort that goes into getting new legislation or programs launched, the real goal is to impact people’s lives for the better. We want people to know about this new policy, be able to use it, and have improved life outcomes because of it. To make an impact, we need to invest in & train more Community Justice Navigators, to reach the public & help them use new programs that are meant to help them.


Read more about Justice Navigator programs for examples:

Categories
Uncategorized

Benchmark principles for A2J Tech

The State Courts in Washington established a set of guiding technology principles for the development and release of new technologies in the justice system. They are benchmarks that teams can use to evaluate their new idea, pilot, or even existing program with.

  1. Equitable access to the system, with technology enhancing (and not diminishing) opportunities to participate in the justice system. This tech-enabled participation should be usable, accountable, efficient, and transparent.
  2. Openness, Privacy and Safety. Tech should protect confidential information, and regulate access to it. It should ensure that information is controlled, and not introduced into the public domain without appropriate controls.
  3. Accountability and fairness: so that groups are monitoring how the technology is performing, and that it is not exacerbating harms or inequities.
  4. Maximizing public awareness and use: so that people know it exists, can discover and use it, and this is equitable among demographic groups.
  5. Usability: so that people can easily navigate it, go through its steps, and complete the user journey with support, low-cost and low-burden.
  6. Accessibility: so that people with different skills and physical facilities are able to use the tool equally
  7. Plain Language: so that it’s understandable to people who are not legal professionals, or who have limited reading skills.
  8. Cultural Responsiveness: so that it treats people, even with different value systems and cultural norms, with dignity and respect — and doesn’t inadvertently harm or exclude them.
  9. Enhancing Human Interaction: so that the system is still humane, responsive, and empathetic — and the ‘human touch’ is not lost even with more technology involvement
  10. Language Access: so that people with limited English Proficiency are still able to access and use it.

See the full list of principles here https://www.courts.wa.gov/court_rules/?fa=court_rules.list&group=am&set=ATJ
Categories
Current Projects

How do you design a user-friendly court form?

Margaret Hagan, Jun 29, 2022

(Even if we should be moving away from forms altogether…)

I am thinking a lot about forms these days! At the Stanford Filing Fairness Project, our team is working on a near future in which PDF forms no longer are key to people’s access to the court system. In that vision, it’s all about moving from populating PDFs to gathering data fields and sending them straight from a user-friendly website to the court’s case management system. No PDF forms needed!

But we still live in a justice system full of PDF forms. Even when software exists to help people fill in forms, through logic trees and document assembly programs, still it’s all going through PDFs.

So… if we still have to live in a world of PDF forms, let’s make sure that this world is as accessible & empowering to as many people as possible. We still need to care about the design of PDF forms.

The Basics of Good Court Form Design

This morning I had the privilege to kick off the National Center for State Courts summertime webinar series: Forms Camp. Over 750 attendees showed up to learn how to design better court forms. Usually, I think of court form design as a super-specialized, design geek kind of topic. But it turns out that a lot of people are unhappy with their current form design, and want to make them better.

So what should you to design better forms? I had 3 main areas for work:

  1. Shift your form team’s point of view, from the institution-centered perspective to a people-centered perspective.
  2. Follow key visual design principles — as well as good court form design principles that I proposed, based on the Legal Design Lab’s work.
  3. Get started on a design process — in which multi-stakeholder groups, including community members, visual designers, lawyers, court staff, and others are reviewing current forms, sketching out new drafts, testing these prototypes, and finalizing the most successful ones.

1. Shifting from Institution-Centered Forms to People-Centered Forms

To really design a better court form, we need to shift from an institutional perspective to a user’s perspective. In particular, we really need to think of the end-user, the litigant who has a PDF or a digital pdf in front of them, is trying to deal with some kind of civil justice problem, and now has to use this form document to get their stories and choices into the court.

This user point of view is different than the institutional one — which is usually a ‘forms committee’ point of view. There the POV is about trying to put as many of the legal requirements in a PDF document, covering all possible use cases, and getting this document passed through a series of judicial committees and approval structures as quickly as possible.

Once we start looking at the court form from the user’s POV, we can see how important the humble form is to big lofty issues of access to justice, procedural fairness, and social policy. We also can set some better metrics & indicators by which to measure whether a form is successful or not.

Moving to People-Centered Measures of Forms

At the highest level, a successful form will increase a person’s access to justice. It will increase the litigant’s procedural justice & substantive justice.

It will make a person feel that the court process is transparent, fair, and trustworthy. (That’s procedural justice).

It will let them share their info, perspective, & experiences so that the judge can make a fair decision, applying the law to the situation in a just way. (That’s the substantive justice).

So how do we get to a form that increases access to justice?

At the intermediate level, a successful form will be useful, usable, and engaging to litigants. A litigant should be able to find & use iteasily. They would find it useful,to get their key info across & prepare for court. And it would engagethem, so they want to spend time & resources filling it in. These are all core principles of user-centered design in all realms — applied here to the specific court form scenario.

If we are going to define a court form’s key performance indicators (or, KPIs for acronym fans), we should make a user-centered KPI list. We put litigants first — since the justice system is meant to serve the public. We also include court staff and leadership as secondary users as well, since we know that they are users of forms, too. To make a good form, we need to track indicators for both litigants & staff.

Key Form Success Indicators

Here is how courts can track a form’s performance & aim for improvements:

People-Centered Indicators

  • Increased Engagement of possible litigants — so more people are actually finding the form, filling it out, and submitting it successfully
  • Higher sense of confidence & strategic ability in how they fill it out — that they feel they can ‘get it right’
  • Lower Administrative Burden with less cost, time, and resources needed to fill it out
  • Increased Procedural Justice, with people feeling that the court is respectful & fair
  • Improved Substantive Justice, with people able to achieve resolution with the conflict, and the law correctly applied to their scenario.

Staff-Centered Indicators

  • Reduce the number of calls and visits to court staff
  • Reduce the amount of mistakes clerks must deal with
  • Get correct & comprehensive info, in a clear & accessible presentation, to clerks and judges

Setting up these metrics and indicators is key to getting the first part of form design right. We need to know what we’re aiming to achieve. Once we have user-centered metrics and indicators in place, we make sure all our design and legal work are oriented in the right direction.

2. Follow Visual & Court Form Design Principles

So, then how do we make it more likely that litigants will engage with these forms, use them easily & correctly, and find value in filling them out? That’s where design principles come in.

I presented two sets of guiding principles for court form designers to follow. The first principles are general graphic or visual design principles, that have been honed over the years in various (non-legal) fields. The second principles are court-form-specific principles that I distilled from the past decade of working on legal design at Stanford.

General Visual Design Rules

How do you lay out a paper-based (or digital PDF) form in the most user-friendly way? Here is a short run down of useful visual design principles:

  1. Support the User Journey: by making it easy for a person to navigate the document, and guiding them through a ‘story’.
  2. Have a Clear, Strategic Hierarchy: prioritize the info & tasks, with clear navigation. Define a clear strategy that has a hierarchy — not all info is the same.
  3. Provide a Standard, Clear Layout: all content should be aligned, with a single, coherent visual language. Use a grid and possibly column design, to create distinct zones for the person to explore.
  4. Give Generous White Space: let the eye breathe, make people calm, and give space to the most important info.
  5. Deploy Selective Pops: use limited amounts of special fonts or colors to draw attention to high-priority info.

Key design principles that court form designers can use

If you want to get more into very detailed communication design choices (like font, color, and accessibility) there are more resources on general visual design rules here:

Court Form Design: the key components of a form

These general principles are great, but they can be hard to translate to the specific world of court forms. We need to dive into the specifics of the court form’s components — and people’s experiences of a form.

Court forms usually contain this shortlist of components. These are the ‘materials’ we can use in our design. We can also track — does the form have all these key things, does it get the hierarchy right, and does it treat them consistently?

  • Credentials that signal the form is official for a jurisdiction
  • Title and purpose, what the form is & what it’s about
  • Instruction info for the user, so they know what to do overall, and then in each section
  • Questions and tasks, asking the user for key information and posing choices to them
  • Entry fields for the user to put information into
  • Insider fields for the court staff to mark notes, enter info
  • Links to more help and associated documents
  • Next Steps & Deadlines of how to get this form into the court correctly, and what to expect after

Court Form Design: How litigants experience a form

People don’t magically see a form, get excited, and spend the next two hours completing it before they walk it over to the court clerk’s office. Their experience is usually much more complicated and stressful.

We need to see the court form not as a static document, but as an experience. Understanding people’s experience of a form helps us figure out specific principles that can help increase engagement, usability, and usefulness.

From our user testing and observation sessions at the Legal Design Lab, we’ve found trends in how litigants use forms — especially when they are self-represented.

  • They scan them over quickly. What should I expect? How long is this going to take? Can I even do this? Am I up for this challenge?
  • They do work in bursts. They may have 1 burst when they first engage. But they’ll likely pause & disengage after they get tired. Hopefully, they’ll re-engage with later bursts!
  • They might get distracted or discouraged when they can’t understand or feel overwhelmed. Can you help make sure this doesn’t lead to disengagement? Instead, support them there.
  • They want to be ‘normal’ and strategic. The form should amplify their sense of legal capability — not make them feel lonely or dumb.

This is where we come back to the big goal of access to justice. Court forms could be an essential gateway to participating in the justice system. But they are hard! They ask for complex, high-stakes information. And people are often in a high-stress situation, afraid of getting things wrong, and with a lot of other things to do in their life. So if a court form is badly designed, it can disengage users, and shut down their access to justice.

Key Court Form Design Principles

So with that background, I propose a handful of key principles for good court form design.

  1. Have a clear navigation scheme & glance-able structure. Can a person ‘get’ the key zones of info & tasks within a 1-minute glance-over?
  2. Be calm & readable. Don’t overcrowd with info and tasks. Does it make the person feel more capable or less? Does it have distinct zones of work?
  3. Support stressed-out users. Does it have off-ramps to info, examples, & assistance — especially near the hardest tasks?
  4. Be easy to fill in. Have consistent, ample space to fill info in. Make it clear through spacing, boxes, and lines about what is ‘right’ and ‘normal’ to put in.
  5. Don’t prioritize ‘insider’ tasks & info over the users’ tasks. Are user tasks in high-priority places? Are insider tasks put in discrete, low-importance places?

3. Running a Design Process on Your Court Forms

Great! Now we have user-centered metrics to aim for, we’re aiming at more engagement, usability, and usefulness, and we know some principles about how to do this. Let’s think even more concretely. How do we get courts, judicial councils, and forms committees to start improving the design of their court forms? How do we get more people-centered shifts, and more use of key design principles?

Kick off a Redesign by doing a User-Centered Design Review

If you’re inside the court, you can start a design process. I often like to do it in a series of workshops — beginning with design review sessions, involving many different stakeholders and especially court users.

You can lay out existing court forms on a board or a digital whiteboard, and then start going through what works or doesn’t. You can mark it up with post-its, or pen, or even cut it up and reorganize it.

We did this using a Miro board at today’s Form Camp session. We start a design review by beginning with a specific user’s POV. Today, we began with this user scenario:

A tenant in California has just been sued for eviction.

They’ve searched online & found a pdf of this form at the California courts’ webpage. https://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/ud105.pdf

How can we make it usable, useful, and engaging to this litigant?

So we situated our forms discussion in the user’s journey. They’ve come from a Google search, then to a court website, then to a digital pdf. Let’s imagine we are this tenant — and look at the pdf to see what we could improve.

Laying out the user’s journey on a whiteboard, for a forms design review

I screenshot the 5 pages of the California unlawful detainer answer response. This is the document that a tenant would have to fill out, in order to defend themselves against an eviction lawsuit. I laid out the 5 pages on the digital whiteboard, and then asked my team to answer a series of questions about how well the form lived up to the key design principles. I took notes with post-its as they gave feedback.

Doing the design review, with post-its capturing stakeholders’ comments about what could be improved

I prepared a series of specific questions, to get the stakeholders to critique the current design based on the court form and visual design principles.

User Journey Review of a court form

If a person sat down with this form, could they navigate it?

  • At the start, does the document establish a clear, trustworthy relationship between the court & the user?
  • Do the tasks follow a logical, clear order? Are they grouped into clear ‘zones’ that make sense to a user? Are the zones labeled with clear Section Headings? Are there instructions/guidance about sections?
  • Are there ‘Offramp’ links for info & more help in the right place — in a context where the person might be looking for them?
  • At the end of the form, does it make the person confident about the next steps to take?

Area 1: Hierarchy Review of a court form

Do you have a clear hierarchy of information & tasks?

Your strategic ranking: Have you reviewed everything you want to convey & get from the user? What is most important? What is the middle? What is the least important for the user?

Giving the right treatment: For the most important things, have you put them:

  • In the prime locations
  • With bigger fonts
  • With ‘pop’ of color, font, or bold

Strong headings: Have you put strong, clear headings for the distinct ‘zones’?

Area 2: Standardized Layout Review of your court form

Do you have standard ways you’re laying out groups of info?

Are things consistently in the same place on the page, in the same font/sizing/alignment:

  • Instructions
  • Questions
  • Entry boxes
  • Offramps to More info & links
  • Court/clerk ‘insider task boxes’

Are they grouped in clear & distinct zones for a user to navigate?

  • Different tasks/topics are clearly delineated from each other
  • So a person can ‘take a break’ in-between zones

Area 3: Legibility & Capability-building review

Are the zones, text, and layout all accessible & enhancing legal capability — instead of overwhelming the person?

  • Is there plain language or legal jargon, code references, etc?
  • Is the text presented in a large enough font, with enough line spacing, for it to be easy to read?
  • Does the text go all the way across the page (too long)?
  • Are the different zones of tasks cluttered together on page? Or is there breathing, white space at margins and between zones?

These different sets of questions can make sure the stakeholders are doing a critique based on the user’s POV and design principles derived from past best practices. If you don’t use these questions, it’s easy to start shifting back to an institutional-centered POV.

After design review workshops, the team can then move onto other kinds of workshops to generate prototypes, test them, and decide on final versions of forms.

What kinds of form design workshops can you run in your court?

Better Court Form Design will be a continual process

It would be great if I could publish a template for all court forms to follow. It might have hard rules about maximum page length, the ideal font size, and the perfect grid layout. Perhaps these patterns will emerge in the coming years, as we do more testing of form designs with a wide range of users.

But for now, the best way to make user-friendly court forms is to have a continual process of reviewing current forms with community members, drawing on established design principles, testing any new prototype with litigants and court staff, and using our people-centered indicators as the metrics to determine if a court form should be released to the public.

In any court form design, there will be lots of trade-offs. How many details, claims, defenses, and rights can we let a person know about — before we exhaust them to the point of disengagement? How much generous white space can we give a person, until the form becomes so lengthy that it turns them off?

That’s why a multi-stakeholder process, still rooted in the litigant’s (and staff members’) points of view is necessary to decide what works best in making these trade-offs. Ideally, more courts will be engaging in this design work, gathering even more principles and best practices, and leading towards more standardization of the best form designs.

That said — perhaps this whole conversation will be moot soon, if we move towards more interactive form-filling websites, with no more PDFs at all. We’ll then move on to the best design of software interfaces. There will be slightly different principles in play — but our metrics and goals should still be the same.

We want more people to be able to protect their rights in court and do so with a sense of confidence, capability, and dignity. Good court forms are fundamental to good access to justice. As more courts embrace user-centered design, we can start moving to this better future.

Categories
Class Blog Uncategorized

Human-Centered Computable Contracts

Margaret Hagan, Dec 16, 2021

In Winter Quarter, our Lab Team is working with the Stanford Law CodeX team, to co-teach a new class at Stanford Law School. It is a hands-on, project-based class, about how to make insurance contracts more accessible, intelligent, and human centered. It builds on our past classes on user-friendly privacy policies, and contract design labs.

The class is 808L Human Centered Computable Contracts (https://law.stanford.edu/courses/policy-practicum-human-centered-computable-contracts/).

How do we make insurance contracts that consumers can understand — and than harness all the potential of tech & choice engines?

We will be working with regulators of the insurance industry & consumer protection advocates. The focus is ‘How can we develop more user-accessible models of insurance contracts, so that more people can be strategic & capable in this complex system?’

Students will be:

  • Interviewing consumers about how they typically interact with insurance contracts (like in healthcare, housing, and otherwise). Also understand what consequences have happened for people, depending on how they’ve shopped for and used insurance.
  • Map out key user breakdowns, incentives and interests, and behavioral heuristics that could support people’s strategic decision making
  • Research what new tech models are possible, to make complex choices & documents more user-friendly
  • Test prototypes for computable insurance contracts, to see if people can use them — what works & doesn’t
  • Propose key principles, interfaces, and metrics for what makes a human-centered insurance contract

The class work will feed into the large initiatives in the law school, including CodeX’s Insurance Initiative. It will also be part of global research on proactive law, computable contracts, and new kinds of disclosure design.

Categories
Current Projects

Can a legal aid group send proactive texts to people who have been sued?

More legal aid and court groups are excited to use text message strategies to reach people facing lawsuits. Texting may help encourage participation, increase uptake of free services, and empower people to avoid defaults & other bad legal outcomes.

But the problem many of them face is how to legally & ethically reach out to members of the public through text. If they don’t already have a relationship with a person, can they initiate a texting relationship with them?

For example, if a legal aid group sees that a person has been sued for eviction in a local county court, can they proactively send them a text message (especially if they have the person’s phone number from the court docket info or from a phone-lookup service)?

The Legal Services Corporation recently published an Advisory Opinion that walks through guidance to this question, to show legal aid groups how they can do this proactive text message outreach on a topic like eviction services — and still be in compliance with the law. They also have a Program Letter that explains how legal aid groups can do proactive texting without violating federal anti-spam laws.

Advisory Opinion on legal aid proactive texting

See this 2020 Advisory opinion on proactive text message outreach from the LSC to legal aid groups.

https://www.lsc.gov/about-lsc/laws-regulations-and-guidance/advisory-opinions/advisory-opinion-2020-004

Program Letter on legal aid proactive texting

Also see this 2022 Program Letter from the LSC that walks through explicitly how proactive text message out reach can be done, in compliance with federal laws. Our Lab had written to the LSC to ask this question, because we had many legal aid colleagues who were thinking about adopting a text message reminder strategy & we wanted to make sure that the community knew how to do this in compliance with laws against spam or other violations.

https://lsc-live.app.box.com/s/e8ke8nv61ndibq1q7lx866lisw7y2awt