Author: Margaret

Categories
Current Projects Wayfinding and Space Design

Trends in Courthouse Design : a profile of new space designs

The National Center for State Courts has a 2004 article from Don Hardenbergh, president of Courtworks, on Trends in Courthouse Design :: Courthouse Facilities.

In the article, Hardenbergh profiles the move to use the space of courts to make the judicial system more accessible, navigable, and open to the public. It is because of the increasing focus on service design and customer-oriented services.

This means more spacious waiting rooms.

Better public information and signage.

More support for child care and entertaining environments for them.

Concern and protection for victims and witnesses.

More pleasant treatment of juries.

Easier access to information and services.

Interventions to reduce waiting times and lines.

This means more working spaces and areas for pro se litigants, in particular, as well as more working spaces and counters for people who are trying to carry out tasks.

 

Categories
Current Projects Integration into Community

East Bay Stand Down: coordinated services for at-risk veterans

East Bay Stand Down is a project offered in California in which at-risk and homeless military veterans can access all kinds of service help over four days. It includes medical and dental care, housing, driver’s licenses, court services, hygiene, and more.

Categories
AI + Access to Justice Current Projects Triage and Diagnosis

Houston.ai access AI

Legal Server has a project Houston.AI, a new set of tools that allows for smarter intake of people, finding of their issues, and referring them to the right support.

What?

Houston.AI is a web-based platform designed to help non-profit legal aid agencies more effectively serve those who cannot afford attorneys. Comprised of a series of micro-services leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence and expert systems Houston.AI is designed to perform many of the simple and routine tasks that lawyers do throughout their day to serve clients.

Such services include:

  • Legal Issue Spotting
  • Entity Extraction
  • Document Analysis (using Computer Vision)
  • Tonal Analysis
  • Expert Systems to Analyze potential defenses or potential remedies
  • Attorney Necessity Scaling
  • Predictive Analytics (time and outcomes)
  • Intelligent Routing of Cases to Agencies or Attorneys (based on Open Referral)

Why?

In our war to provide meaningful access to justice, it is unrealistic to think that the current army of lawyers devoted to this cause could possibly address the overwhelming legal needs of the most vulnerable and underserved among us without a huge infusion of government funding, a highly unlikely scenario in today’s climate. As such, we must significantly change our strategy on the frontlines to exploit advances in technology.

Simply put: for many of the necessary but routine tasks that lawyers do every day, humans are too slow and too few compared to autonomous machines.

Achieving success on the (asymmetrical) battlefield requires careful coordination between generals (human lawyers) and a cavalry of autonomous foot soldiers (high-speed artificial intelligence applications, leveraging continuously advancing algorithms). In this sense, machine learning as envisioned by this project, is analogous to West Point, preparing and training Justice Bots to help individuals overcome access issues that so pervade the American judicial system.

In the end, these on-demand intelligent resources will allow lawyers to practice at the top of their license (i.e., in their highest and best roles as counselors and advocates) in a far more efficient and effective way, all the while empowering those in need through increased access and equipping them to make better choices, which is to everyone’s benefit.

Categories
Current Projects Professionals' Networks + Traiing

Pro Bono matching websites

Florida Pro Bono Matters is a website that allows for matching volunteer lawyers with cases.

It allows for legal aid groups to easily post cases from their case management system, to then be easily found, filtered, adn signed up for by lawyers.

Categories
Current Projects Innovations Triage and Diagnosis Work Product Tool

Robot Lawyer expert chat bot

The Robot Lawyer is a chatbot made to let people get legal options and screening — and even fill in documents by chatting through a messenger interface on a website.

Please note, since first posting about this project, it has now become the DoNotPay tool. This post was about the original version of the tool.

In its original form, the Robot Lawyer covered topics like traffic tickets, refugee asylum applications, and homeless benefits.

Categories
Professionals' Networks + Traiing

Online training for pro bono work

The Pro Bono Training Institute in LA offers online training modules to prep lawyer volunteers to do good work as they volunteer to provide legal help.

They developed these modules with OneJustice, with funding from the LSC’s Pro Bono Innovation Fund.

Categories
Current Projects Wayfinding and Space Design

Hospital map app

An Ohio hospital has created an internal navigation system through a mapping app. It lets anyone find their doctor or destination by putting it into the app, and getting step by step directions about where to go.

Mercy Health’s Jewish Hospital has created a customized mapping system to help patients or visitors find their way around the Kenwood facility.

The app is here for download on ios. It’s also available on kiosks in the hospital, where you can print out directions.

Source: Mercy Health’s Jewish Hospital creates smartphone mapping system: Cincinnati Business Courier

Categories
Class Blog Design Research

User journey through Housing Court

In our classes, we map out different users’ journeys through the court. This is one of the Northeastern University student teams’ map, that abstracts different users’ journey through housing court in Boston.

Categories
Wayfinding and Space Design

Wayfinding signs with language access from hospitals

These were sent from a Kaiser Health facility in California as examples that a court could possibly follow.

Categories
Work Product Tool

DocuBot for filling in forms through SMS


DocuBot is a tool to fill in legal documents and other forms through an SMS or other chatbot-like experience. The bot asks questions to fill in the form.

Here is more information from its creator, 1Law.

1LAW is proud to announce the creation of Docubot™, a legal document generating artificial intelligence. In conjunction with some of the best lawyers in the United States, Docubot is drawing on form databases of 1000’s of legal documents. Docubot will assist individuals with legal queries as well as generate documents for them. To help serve Legal Aid, Docubot will allow users to interact via SMS text.

Tech specs:

Written in Go at the server
Powered by Watson – Watson rest API
Swift on the iOS side
Communication via Websocket protocol
Back and forth handled through Websocket

Output –Everything is encrypted

The document is generated using a headless webkit browser that takes an HTML document and outputs a .pdf which is stored in a private S3 bucket and then a short-lived url is generated and sent to a user and each time a user loads the thread they will be given a new url. Document is backed up on the S3 server.

Contact us at: info@www.1law.com for more information.