Category: Background

What are larger issues and research to be considering as we plan out a better justice system?

Google offers health info in its Knowledge Graph: what about law?

Post author By Margaret
Post date February 11, 2015
No Comments on Google offers health info in its Knowledge Graph: what about law?

The Official Google Blog has a post “A remedy for your health-related questions: health info in the Knowledge Graph”. It announces that Google is going to treat certain health-information searches differently from the average search.

If a user searches a query that likely relates to some common health conditions, Google will surface reliable knowledge — set apart from typical search results — to direct the user straight to trustworthy, straightforward answers. Google will tell you what health problem it might be — and what the symptoms and treatments are, and how critical & contagious the disease might be.

This is exciting in itself — but it also could be a great model for legal knowledge searches. I wrote earlier about the potential for Google to be a more usable legal help portal. This model, with trustworthy & clear information surfaced in response to a common query, would work to help people with legal problems.

Here is more from Google on this new health info initiative:

Think of the last time you searched on Google for health information. Maybe you heard a news story about gluten-free diets and pulled up the Google app to ask, “What is celiac disease?” Maybe a co-worker shook your hand and later found out she had pink eye, so you looked up “pink eye” to see whether it’s contagious. Or maybe you were worried about a loved one—like I was, recently, when my infant son Veer fell off a bed in a hotel in rural Vermont, and I was concerned that he might have a concussion. I wasn’t able to search and quickly find the information I urgently needed (and I work at Google!).

Thankfully my son was OK, but the point is this stuff really matters: one in 20 Google searches are for health-related information. And you should find the health information you need more quickly and easily.

So starting in the next few days, when you ask Google about common health conditions, you’ll start getting relevant medical facts right up front from the Knowledge Graph. We’ll show you typical symptoms and treatments, as well as details on how common the condition is—whether it’s critical, if it’s contagious, what ages it affects, and more. For some conditions you’ll also see high-quality illustrations from licensed medical illustrators. Once you get this basic info from Google, you should find it easier to do more research on other sites around the web, or know what questions to ask your doctor.

We worked with a team of medical doctors (led by our own Dr. Kapil Parakh, M.D., MPH, Ph.D.) to carefully compile, curate, and review this information. All of the gathered facts represent real-life clinical knowledge from these doctors and high-quality medical sources across the web, and the information has been checked by medical doctors at Google and the Mayo Clinic for accuracy.

That doesn’t mean these search results are intended as medical advice. We know that cases can vary in severity from person to person, and that there are bound to be exceptions. What we present is intended for informational purposes only—and you should always consult a healthcare professional if you have a medical concern.

But we hope this can empower you in your health decisions by helping you learn more about common conditions. We’re rolling it out over the next few days, in the U.S. in English to start. In the long run, not only do we plan to cover many more medical conditions, but we also want to extend this to other parts of the world. So the next time you need info on frostbite symptoms, or treatments for tennis elbow, or the basics on measles, the Google app will be a better place to start.

Posted by Prem Ramaswami, Product Manager

Tags Google search portal, internet legal help portal, Knowledge Graph, Legal Information online, online legal help

Background

Plain Language & Legal Design

Post author By Margaret
Post date February 9, 2015
No Comments on Plain Language & Legal Design

I have been reading through articles documenting how ‘Plain Language’ came to be a standard by which legal communications are judged — and which courts, firms, and companies are willing to invest money and time in. From my limited research, I’ve been able to trace the rise of ‘Plain Language’ as a standard from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, when it became much discussed in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia-New Zealand. Government commissions began to investigate what Plain Language would look like in practice, how much it would offer to the end user of legal documents, and if it was worth investing in.

The conclusion seems to have been a resounding ‘yes’, as Plain Language became a dominant metric against which legal writing, explanations, outreach, and work product is judged. President Clinton mandated that federal agencies author their work using Plain Language techniques. Courts, self-help centers & legal aid groups hire plain language companies to ensure the text they release out to the public meets the Plain Language standard. And firms and corporations put an emphasis on how they offer clarity to their users, with a commitment to Plain Language communications.

Plain language is more than just what words you use to communicate — it is the way in which you compose your sentences, and the tone and voice your communication. It is about making your text more user-friendly by adopting a consciousness of who your target audience is, thinking of how they would best understand what you’re trying to get across, and ensuring that you speak and write in the most direct way to get your point across to this audience in the most succinct yet clear way.

This emphasis on usability is where there is a strong link between the Plain Language standard, and the legal design work that I have been so focused on as late. What I see is that to make a communication user-friendly & usable, we must think of more than just the language we use. It is more than vocabulary choice, sentence structure, tone, and voice.

Designing for usability of legal communications means thinking of all of the other factors that affect (and potentially enhance) an audience’s comprehension of a communication. Beyond just Plain Language, we must also focus on:

Composition of the text on the page: how is it laid out? how many characters go across the line? how is it structured, indented, boxed, and otherwise made visually comprehensible?
Interactivity: is the communication staged? can a user get a quickly glanceable version, and then dig selectively into the text for more detailed explanations? Can we use digital tools to make the communication more engaging, customizable, and lively?
Visuals: are graphics, illustrations, and symbols used to enhance the user’s understanding? is there a way to shorten the amount of text we present, or to better show priorities and warnings within the text through the use of graphics? Is there a way to ground the text in more context & situational understanding by showing illustrations or photographs?
Service flows; what is the role of this communication in a larger service experience of the end user?

Legal Design work could be as powerful as the Plain Language standard has been. My goal is to get more legal organizations invested in making their communications as understandable & engaging as they can. This is both for the sake of the lay person consumer, but also for other lawyers and professionals. Better designed information can enhance the experience of even the most educated person, who is not intimidated by legalese — they don’t necessarily want to read through badly designed legal communications either.

Reading through the descriptions of how Plain Language has gone from movement to standard, I’m inspired to think how we can set more standards, guidelines, and best practices for how legal professionals communicate. I want to see legal orgs invested not just in Plain Language, but in Wholly Better Designed work product — that is Visually Composed, Interactive, Illustrated, and Service-oriented. We need more than just improved language to really make legal communications connect with lay people.

Tags accessibility of legal information, legal communication design, Legal Design, Plain Language

Background

Why is it so hard to implement social good tech?

Post author By Margaret
Post date February 6, 2015
No Comments on Why is it so hard to implement social good tech?

I came across this video essay by Laura Walker Hudson, the CEO of Social Impact Lab, which houses the open source messaging system Frontline SMS. She speaks of her experience trying to implement scalable implementations of tech-for-good. She profiles why it’s so hard to get projects off the ground — from the complicated tech questions, to getting the human-centered design right, to finding sustainable project partnerships.

Her focus is on implementing tech-based interventions in the developing world, in the context of ICT4D (info/communications tech for development). But the lessons & struggles she’s talking about apply to improving legal services in the US, Canada, Europe and elsewhere.

This is essential watching for anyone working on a project to get good tech pilots off the ground — to help them prepare for working with partners in a healthy way, thinking about long-term sustainability, and navigating decisions about privacy, data, payment models, and engagement of users.

It’s easy to hope that implementing a well-designed, excellent technical solution will go smoothly — but it’s necessary to prepare for the human factors of how to get organizations to change their workflows & mindsets — as well as how to get users onto the platform you’re building.

Watch it to hear some of the common problems, as well as some takeaways to better plan for implementations.

Some of the takeaways:

Prep for the many tech choices you’ll have to make — do your research, lay out options, and don’t commit to one before you know that the people who are offering this tech have a sustainable business model & will be maintaining this tech
Have an organizational change plan, figure out how your tech will fit in the org’s & stakeholders’ ecosystem.
Know your end users’ context — their literacy, tech access, power access, familiarity with tech — and choose a solution that fits these constraints
Have a varied toolkit, and select the right approach for your end users and local context
Take care about training. Do not invest in a tech system that will involve lots of heavy training unless you can sustain this. Try to get local ownership so they are bought into it, and trained in the system, so they can do local trainings without you having to do this
Provide incentives for local ownership, training, and implementations. Hand off to your project partners as much as you can.

Tags Design implementation, frontline SMS, ICT4d, Laura Walker Hudson, scaling pilots, TechChange

Background

Wise Design (or why are human systems so screwed up?)

Post author By Margaret
Post date February 2, 2015
No Comments on Wise Design (or why are human systems so screwed up?)

This post is not just for lawyers — it is for people who work in hospitals, banks, insurance companies, government agencies, loan companies, accounting firms — people who work in complex systems that are supposed to be serving lay people.

I propose a new field of Wise Design — to build out tools, principles, and patterns to help normal people make more strategic, smart decisions for themselves while trying to make their way through overwhelming systems.

Where I’m coming from

As I’ve been working on legal design, I’ve been hunting down analogous fields — what other areas outside law can legal professionals draw from to rethink how they provide services? Like a good design-thinker, I’m hungry for cross-pollination.

And what I’ve come to realize is that the same challenge I’m tackling in the legal sector — trying to make it easier for a lay person to understand & to navigate the legal system — runs parallel to so many other complicated systems that humans have set up.

What I’m realizing is that the challenge (if not the crisis) around how unusable the legal system is coincides with other human system design challenges. The systems that adults are expected to be able to navigate — insurance, mortgages, health care, taxes, student loans, personal savings, estate planning, visas and immigration, credit card offers and payments — have not been designed for humans.

Most adults — even those well-educated & well-meaning — struggle to figure out how to make their way through these systems. You turn 18 and are expected to be able to deal with these systems — follow their rules, use them to your best interest, walk the straight path through them. But the learning curve is steep, we aren’t trained for them, and usually it’s only after making mistakes and missing opportunities do people figure out how to navigate these systems (if they ever do).

We need cross-industry Wise Design

All the work, patterns, insights, principles I’ve been gathering up to guide legal design efforts — it can all be extended, shared & remixed with design for these other human systems. We who are working to make law more accessible need to be partnering with people in these other fields — financial planning, health care empowerment, patient engagement, consumer protection.

We are all fighting parallel battles — how to make life more livable for normal people. How to help them make better decisions for themselves, to protect their interests in complex systems. How to make these relatively dreary (or, in worse cases, horribly frustrating) parts of our lives — taxes, insurance, loans, litigation, accounting, medical care, banking — less frustrating, confusing, and punitive.

Human-centered design has great potential here, to transform both the front-end of these systems (how we people interact with them) and the back-end of them too (how the systems are actually structured, the rules and procedures that comprise them). What I’d love to see is cross-discipline collaborations, to build better front-end tools and back-end systems and then share best practices among these different fields.

I’m hoping to link the work of legal design, all focused on making legal systems more usable & user-friendly, into a larger movement of Wise Design.

Innovations that Intuit comes up with to make filing taxes easier should be borrowed and used to make it easier to choose the right health insurance. Great insights and experience designs that hospitals create to guide patients through a treatment plan should be remixed into navigation tools for a litigant going through a family law case.

There needs to be a Wise Design coalition — sharing code, design, and momentum. We in the legal sector need to scout out and partner with our counterparts in other industries — to figure out together how to make human systems more user-centered and how to empower people to make more strategic, rewarding decisions.

And my other hope with a Wise Design movement is to attract all those wonderfully creative designers & developers who are currently working on interesting consumer-based challenges (how do we get people to buy things, love products so much they will use them and spend money on them?) and persuade them to work on these larger systems challenges. We need more creativity & experimentation on how to help people deal with complex information and make smart decisions.

This post has been brewing for a while — I’m interested in your thoughts, especially on how we in the legal world can build better partnerships from other sectors & recruit more creatives and entrepreneurs to work on these challenges.

Tags crisis of system design, human systems challenges, Legal Design, wise design

Background

What would you spend $10 million on for Access to Justice?

Post author By Margaret
Post date January 30, 2015
No Comments on What would you spend $10 million on for Access to Justice?

I made another visual based on a short questionnaire I ran back in November-December last year, on people’s thoughts on Access to Justice. Earlier visuals of the questionnaire responses are here (Is there a coherent Access to Justice Movement?) and here (What’s going wrong with the Access to Justice Movement?)

I asked respondents where they would spend a hypothetical $10 million on Access, to see what kind of ideas & priorities would emerge. Here are the responses.

You can see some clear priorities emerging:

Experimentation in new legal services
Scaling up tech-based legal platforms to cover more jurisdictions, reach more users
Providing more one-to-one assistance to people going through legal processes
Public legal education
Establishing a ‘Brand’ for legal services

If you have other projects that you would fund with $10 million, leave your thoughts in the comments. There must be other agenda points, add them to this first collection of funding priorities.

Tags access to justice, agenda for improving access, Branding legal services, Legal Infographic, public legal education

Background

Law’s PDF Problem (a short manifesto)

Post author By Margaret
Post date January 22, 2015
No Comments on Law’s PDF Problem (a short manifesto)

As I’ve ventured into the world of public legal education — helping lay people figure out and navigate their legal problems — I keep hitting my head against one thorny wall over & again.

Materials are buried in PDFs.

Excellent cartoon stories telling immigrants how to deal with the government are only available in PDFs. Know your rights explainers are presented in unsearchable PDFs. Walk-throughs of a legal process are presented in static, hundred-page long PDFs.

People do not like PDFs. They serve a very limited purpose — they keep the information frozen in the exact design that the author created, and let the author save some time up-front by merely having to upload the PDF to the web. But it puts the onus & the pain on the user.

The user has to make sure their browser can properly open & display the PDF. The user has to try to find their way through the PDF, hoping that the text is searchable, and then deal with the pain of searching through to find the information she is actually looking for. The user can’t easily clip out information to save for later, because the text will be wonky & full of bizarre characters if it’s copy-able at all.

And if the user is on mobile — which, users increasingly are — then PDFs are the worst. PDFs are not responsive, making them so difficult to look at on a mobile screen they are virtually useless.

PDFs are not user-friendly, and public-facing legal organizations should stop using them immediately. Sure, keep a PDF version up online for the *very* limited use case of a person wanting to print off a copy of the information and distribute it in its original author formatting.

But the vast majority of use cases for online legal information are people trying to get a specific clip of information that they can find easily, intake easily, and then save for future reference easily. PDFs don’t allow for any of this.

Please, legal authors & publishers of great content, unbury your content — let it free — make it usable for your target audiences. Take the text and images out of the pdf, and lay it out in a webpage with HTML.

It is not hard. It is worth the investment. It is a very quick & low-cost solution to the horrible PDF problem of public legal education. And you the legal organization will get higher Google search result placement if you liberate your text out of its frozen, buried PDF pile and onto lively, usable, searchable web pages.

To incentivize some change on this topic, I am thinking of naming names to shame groups that are serial PDF-buriers. Or giving some kind of reward badge to those organizations that actually present their information in easy-to-use formats — who take an Anti-PDF approach to sharing useful legal information. Something to get a movement away from this anti-user reliance on PDFs to communicate information.

Any thoughts on how to get change here — or other thoughts on how to better get legal information out of experts’ heads/computers/PDFs and out available to lay people?

Tags access to justice, Legal Information online, legal knowledge management, PDFs online, public legal education, resource sharing

Background

What’s going wrong with the Access to Justice movement?

Post author By Margaret
Post date January 19, 2015
No Comments on What’s going wrong with the Access to Justice movement?

At the end of November 2014, I published a short survey on this site, asking respondents to weigh in on the ‘Access to Justice movement’ (if we can speak of one at all, as if it were a cohesive thing). I’ve published some of their responses in an earlier post, and here is another visual of responses — this time on the topic of what’s going wrong with Access to Justice work.

Respondents are discussing mostly the US & Canadian contexts. I’ve pulled out some of the themes that emerged from the quotes.

To repeat these themes here, as pain points for future design & development work to focus on:

Regulation chills experimentation & new efforts.
A lack of scaling of good solutions — and a lack of central leadership to push & spread good ideas, practices, tech.
Mis-framing of what the targets for work should be — aiming either too blue-sky (not viable or feasible) or too small-scale (looking at band-aid solutions rather than true resolutions)
Lack of user-centered projects. The people creating and implementing new ideas for access are not tied into the end-users (the lay people who need more access). The stakeholders who are involved in what new projects are piloted & supported are motivated so much by self-interest that they aren’t delivering the right kind of solutions.
Lack of public engagement. The end-users aren’t involved in the movement (or even very aware of it).

This shortlist can be used in future design workshops & hackathons — a hitlist for us to target as we work to make a proper, robust, impactful Access to Justice movement.

Tags Access to Justice movement, design hitlist, design research, legal services

Background

Can we use TV-law-love to improve real-life legal services?

Post author By Margaret
Post date January 16, 2015
No Comments on Can we use TV-law-love to improve real-life legal services?

I have been writing up my findings from a recent research study I did, on how lay people use the Internet to respond to legal problems that crop up in their lives. I’m doing this as part of a longer design research inquiry, to develop best practices, guiding standards, and new models for online legal help resources.

One section of my research was asking my participants about their relationship with law. My intention was to find what the mental model & frameworks are in play, when they interpret their legal problem into an Internet search query, and as they sift through possible resources and decide which (if any) to trust and use.

In this block of questions, I asked participants to rank their general interest in learning more law, and to explain their response. I’ve been slightly surprised by how high one camp of people’s self-professed interest in learning law have been. One distinct group of respondents expressed an interest akin to:

‘I always thought I would have enjoyed going to law school, but I didn’t go’,

‘I want to understand the rules that apply to me and be prepared for situations that might come up’.

‘Law is really interesting, and I’m curious to know more.’

This is opposed to the other distinct (but much smaller) group of respondents who declare a firm disinterest in anything law. This type of participant declared with certainty,

‘I don’t like law,’

‘I have no interest in law or anything about it,’ or

‘Doesn’t mean much to me.’

What I’m interested in is the potential to tap into the first group’s self-professed curiosity, if not fascination, with the legal system. Even if most of them ranked their opinion of lawyers very low, they ranked their opinion of the legal system much higher. They don’t want to be lawyers, but they want to be smart in this area & have an appetite for learning more. Some people tied their interest in law directly to a wish to be able to solve their own future legal problems, but many professed a general curiosity.

This leads me to hypothesize that there is a Law-as-Entertainment mental model for legal help resources to be tapping into. For the users who are curious about learning more law, they also love consuming legal shows. When I asked the participants where they had learned law from, television was the number two source of legal information that people identified (just behind the Internet). The interested-in-law group is consuming lots of fictional legal narratives on tv (if not also podcasts now…).

So my question becomes: How could we design legal help sites that tap into this one user group’s mixture of love of legal narratives, plus legal curiosity & appetite to be ‘law smart’?

Our current model of self-help, government, and even for-profit legal sites tend to take a ‘Reference Book’ as their model. List out all the resources, let people browse or search their way to the right topic, and then tell them lots of information on this topic through text descriptions. It is like looking into an encyclopedia or dictionary.

Could we remix this very dry experience — or just reframe it with subtle cues, phrasings, imagery, and interactions — to tap into more positive and rich mental models? If people enjoy watching legal procedurals and dramas so much, can we borrow some elements from them to make online legal resources more engaging?

I’m not thinking full-blown dramatic narratives or character development. But can we use more subtle & resource-light ways to make legal info resources more engaging? Some ideas:

Putting more faces, images, and visuals along with the text
Instead of having point by point descriptions of legal procedures, have annotated storyboards
Give sample, fictionalized anecdote versions of the legal info alongside the very functional, practical run-downs of info
Have interactive, game-like paths through the information, revealing it selectively & responsively, rather than all at once
Group info into a kind of narrative arc: that about the background context, about the conflict, and about resolution, mimicking a standard storyline arc, and give the user the motivation to carry through this storyline themselves
Make Goofus/Gallant examples for legal procedure — how a person ideally would follow the procedure, versus a less-than-ideal path (what you could do wrong, how you could fall into common mistakes)

This is an initial brainstorm, possible directions with which to change or supplement the Reference Book model of legal resources. Have you seen any good models in this direction, or do you have any ideas along this line?

Tags internet for legal help, law on tv, legal narratives, legal users

Background

Is the Internet the place for legal help?

Post author By Margaret
Post date January 7, 2015
No Comments on Is the Internet the place for legal help?

I’m working this week on pulling together an academic paper I’ve been writing on best practices & design standards for online legal resource sites, aimed at helping lay people begin to address a legal problem that’s cropped up in their life.

In my literature review, I keep circling back to articles coming out of University College London, which has done a large amount of quantitative & qualitative study of tech-based legal resources. These studies tend to be fairly skeptical of tech’s potential to help people actually resolve their legal issues.

The article Just a phone call away: Is telephone advice enough? from Nigel Balmer, Marisol Smith, Catrina Denvir and Ash Patel, compares the efficiency & quality of the experience of legal help given face to face, versus that provided over the telephone. It finds that telephone-based advice takes significantly longer than face to face.

It also runs down a shortlist of advantages & drawbacks of tech-based legal help. Tech-based legal help tools offer some main advantages to face-to-face services:

immediacy
convenience, enhances ease of access
lower cost to the service providers

Tech-based legal help may offer advantages to those users who have certain constraints:

mobility issues,
rural homes,
time pressures,
caring responsibilities,
without private transport

But it may not serve others:

those with difficulty communicating their needs and situation
those without good English language skills
those who don’t have access to tech in a private setting

Other article from UCL researchers dig into specific demographics’ use of tech-based legal help. These pieces try to deflate the notion that the Internet will change access to justice in a major way, by looking into the limitations of how various groups engage (or do not) internet-based help.

The article Portal or pot hole? Exploring how older people use the ‘information superhighway’ for advice relating to problems with a legal dimension considers how people over 60 search the Internet for help — finding that most of this population in the UK do not use the Internet to find help, except for the ‘young aging’ who are more willing to try tech-based solutions.

On the other end of the age spectrum, the article Surfing the web – Recreation or resource? Exploring how young people in the UK use the Internet as an advice portal for problems with a legal dimension finds that even if young people in the UK have grown up with more technology in their lives, many still do not know how to effectively access legal help online.

The UCL researchers seem to be circling around skepticism about the promise of the Internet to revolutionize access to justice. When they look at UK data sets about lay people’s use of Internet & phone-based resources, they find many shortcomings. Some of them are about users’ general lack of technological literacy & comfort, some of them are about the difficulty for a tech-literate person to navigate the Internet to effectively find relevant & rich help.

To me, this means that we should not stake all our work on exclusively Internet-based resources — but that we should still be investing a much larger amount of research, money & development into making the Internet more usable as a legal resource. This means not only making individual legal help websites better designed — but also making search portals (especially Google) more intelligent in getting people’s search queries diagnosed as legal ones, and then dispatching them to public, non-profit sources of information that fit their jurisdiction & their situation.

Have you read any good research either examining the status quo of how lay people use the Internet for legal help — or about what new concepts, models, and requirements are for innovation in online legal help? Send it along!

Tags Catrina Denvir, drawbacks of tech-based legal services, internet for legal help, Just a Phone call away, Nigel Balmer, phone-based legal advice, Portal or Pothole

Background

Consumer Law product families

Post author By Margaret
Post date December 18, 2014
No Comments on Consumer Law product families

I am working on a paper right now that stakes out a framework for those of us who are working on building access to justice innovations & accessible law tools. After having led & participated in so many innovation sessions about what kind of tools would help lawyer-client relationships, self-help/DIY lay people trying to navigate the legal system, and the average middle class consumer trying to get legal help — I have processed my insights into some frameworks. Here is one of them: a typology of consumer law product families.

I am building a user-centered design approach to Consumer Law. It storyboards out the crucial moments (or touch points) of the user with the legal process. Then these moments become tasks around which to define products & services.

I am considering law as a process — as a series of steps for a person to proceed through. With this approach, law becomes less of an artform, or a black box. We can map the actions, the flow & the touchpoints. Law becomes document-able. And as we document the processes, we can use it create frameworks that guide how we speak about consumer law & how we develop new products & services for it.

Typology of consumer law products: families

Here is the first draft of my typology. I’ve taken an average user flow (noted below) and then tried to group stages together into categories for products to serve the user of a legal system, trying to navigate a legal process. There is another set of product families for the legal professionals serving the user, but that belongs in another framework.

Engagement: inviting the user into the legal world and convincing her to come in
Orientation: explaining the legal system to the user, along with its rules, and her rights
Triage: finding the right path for the user’s particular situation
Intake: establishing a relationship between the user & an advocate
Process Guide: navigating a chosen path step-by-step
Work Product Completion: taking care of specific actions along the path
Strategy-making: helping the user weigh possible paths & decide which is best for her
Coaching: supporting the person through the process with attention to their emotions & personal issues

Do you have any thoughts on this typology of product families? This is my first draft & I’m interested in feedback on it, as I work on more academic publications proposing a useful framework.

The Basic User Flow

I am basing this product family typology on a generalized user flow through a legal problem situation:

Activating the User onto the path, overcoming inertia
Informing the user about the pathway
User assess legal options available to them
User chooses a path to pursue
User pursues the path
User experiences a resolution (positive or negative) and disengages from the legal system

I’ve fleshed these broad steps into a more concrete flow.

Steps the User takes to realize & address a legal problem in her life

Become cognizant of a problem in their life
Figure out that it has a legal dimension
Find out what it is termed.
Find out what possible outcomes are, what pathways there are from now
Decide to get a legal service
Choose the legal service
Prepare for first encounter with the legal service
Work with the legal service for the first time and exchange information
Decide on a plan of action
Begin to create or contribute to a work product
Follow through on the work product
Arrive at a final work product
Ensure the work product leads to the deliverable expected
Conclude engagement with the legal service

Each moment is a family of products — to help the user accomplish this type of task.

Different types of processes — litigation in court, an administrative procedure, creation of a legal life plan, mediation between parties — will involve similar flows of steps. Likely different variations of the products are needed for these varied processes. For example, an Engagement product for Estate Planning process will not be the same as an Engagement Product for a Guardianship process.

Purpose & moving forward

The goal of my typology is not to be completely comprehensive about every single possible product we could build to serve consumer law. Rather, it is to have a framework & language that is consistent when we talk about this new generation of product and services, aimed at improving lay people’s access to the legal system.

A typology of product families gives a focus to where there are valuable functions to be performed — where we should be designing & developing. After developing this initial typology, then we can build on top of it with examples, patterns, insights, etc.

Please let me know what you think in response — as I’m writing more on this track, I’m interested in hearing feedback.

Tags access to justice innovations, consumer law, law as process, law product typology, legal product families