This visual made it up to Twitter last Friday, but here it is for a more permanent home on Open Law Lab. It was a great conference & an inspiring keynote from Richard Susskind — thinking twenty, thirty years into the future.
Category: Background
What are larger issues and research to be considering as we plan out a better justice system?
A drawing by Margaret Hagan of CALI nonprofit tech director John Mayer, about the importance of serving court users with better, innovative technology. He was highlighting CALI’s tool of A2J Author for DIY legal screeners and form-completion.
Through the Program for Legal Tech & Design, I’m co-teaching a 5-session class at Stanford’s d.school this January & February. It will be a hands-on session on how to make law more usable to people — and how to help make people law-smart, and in control of their legal futures.
If you’re interested in attending, or are interested in the topic-matter more generally (how to build consumer-facing law products, how to help people get legal tasks done, or how to support people in estate-planning specifically) — be in touch!
Categories
Notes on Legal Design
I originally posted these up on the d.school blog The Whiteboard, earlier today.
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.
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?
What are the most crucial needs of lay litigants?
How can a legal service orient & prepare lay people?
How can electronic systems help lay people to get legal tasks done?
Categories
Iron Tech Law & Teaching Legal Design
Georgetown Law is holding its 2nd ‘Iron Tech’ Lawyer competition, in which students who took a semester seminar –“Technology, Innovation & Law Practice: An Experiential Seminar” — by Professor Tania Rostain and Law Librarian Roger Skalbeck. The second competition will be held on April 17 in Washington DC.
A video from Georgetown Law, giving an overview of last year’s program:
Coverage of last year’s apps competition by Nightly Business Report:
The apps seem mainly to be developed using a proprietary software system Neota Logic, that’s intended for non-coders to develop web apps — mainly to build ‘legal expert systems’.
From what I can tell based on the coverage, the apps seem to follow a pattern: make the software the ‘associate’ gathering information, and then have it generate a ‘memo’ which can be delivered to a real human lawyer, who takes this memo-report and can proceed with more well-informed lawyering.
The pattern:
- Ask the ‘client’ questions through software interfaces
- Adjust future questions based on previous responses
- At the end of the question-answer experience, deliver a report to the ‘client’ (or directly to a real lawyer) for future use.
This pattern is a similar one to those in use by the A2J Software authoring programs. It may be nice to see them side-by-side — or to actually see how these various projects could be synced together. I would love to see a website (perhaps, I should build it…) that has all of the projects and tools generated out of these various law school programs assembled together. Even if they have been abandoned before being brought to market (or made available on the web), they are of interest as concept designs.
The pattern of these apps clearly has some promise, having been built using the offline pattern of how an intake process would work at a legal clinic or sit down with a lawyer. I would love to see some more playfulness or radical rethinkings of what else could be done, to make the experience less clinical and more human. How can warmth, trust, and confidence be built into these systems — and how can they encourage deeper reflection and provoke better answers from the clients? It seems
A quote from the Neota blog on the class & competition:
Tanina’s courses give students experiential learning by making applications designed to be deployed to an active user community. Tanina and Roger can be regarded as the pioneers of The Maker Movement in law. Her students are learning the skills to make applications to deliver straightforward advice and/or to triage and more efficiently route tougher problems to those legal aid resources best able to deal with the issues identified during a logic driven online interview. Georgetown is creating a road map for the practice of law in the 21st century.
I am enjoying the comparisons to the Maker Movement & a Law-By-Design movement. At the Reinvent Law Silicon Valley conference earlier this month, there were a few mentions of the Law World taking inspiration from the 3D printer revolution and Makers around us — how can we build this DIY, tinkering, and hacking culture into Law? I can see this class & competition as a nice step forward.
What would be particularly valuable to gather, from this class are lessons learned. I understand law schools’ interests in trumpeting their programs as being innovative & progressive. But what is needed is a better understanding of where these type of classes fail, break down, don’t come together like they should.
Similar lessons learned could be drawn from some other law/design/tech classes I’ve been a part of — like the Law Without Walls program (based out of Univ. of Miami, but coming from law schools all over), or from the Ideas for a Better Internet classes (based out of Harvard & Stanford over the past 2 years).
These classes all generate a lot of interest and lots of creativity, but when the programs end — the ideas and all of the pain points of trying to get law students working to build better legal services all disappear into notebooks, hard drives, and trash cans. I want to hear from students and instructors about what really didn’t work, why many of the projects aren’t viable, what they would do differently next time, and what it would take to have these classes building viable, inspiring and creative approaches.
My last point: when building new tech to deliver access to justice, we don’t have to be constrained to replicating ‘offline’ processes ‘online’. The new tech gives us as legal-designers chance to explore this space as if it were new, and come up with radical new ways to deliver the outcomes that the process are about. Classes in the vein of the Iron Tech Lawyer should be teaching students not just how to structure an expert system — but also how to do the user research, brainstorming, and prototyping that will lead to creative leaps that can build amazing new legal products.
Categories
InfoCamp Redesign Law
I went to InfoCamp today at Berkeley with the intention of soaking up best practices and inventive ideas from User Experience Designers and Information Junkies at the School of Information. I did do that — but ended up putting together an impromptu 50 minute presentation /slash/ participatory design session /slash/ user research focus group all on Redesigning the Law. Endria, also a Stanford Law 3rd year, was my co-leader & instigator, along with San Ng, who is a fellow at the I-School and works in international development/law/technology on innovating justice.
We put together a short game plan for how to get an audience full of designers, information scientists, programmers, entrepreneurs, etc. interested in the Wicked Problems of Law — and convince them that they should come work with us on tackling Legal Problems & building Legal Solutions.
Our opening gambit was to ask people:
- How has law touched your life?
- Have you ever had to hire a lawyer?
- Have you ever used a legal document?
- Have you ever had to go to court?
- Have you ever looked up legal information online?
We were trying to learn ourselves, what are non-lawyers’ mental models of law — as well as their sentiments towards law, lawyers, and courts. Answer: a handful of people have had “legal experiences”, several of which have been Confusing, Opaque, Difficult to Navigate, Without Clear Guidance, Overwhelming. Some had business and corporate work done, or immigration assistance from their employers’ lawyers — and had fairly good experiences with lawyers (found by companies) who helped them out.
But when Endria asked what the first 3 words that came to their minds were, when the word Law came up, they were universally negative: Bureaucratic, Confusing, Opaque, Difficult, Boring, Expensive…
We moved from there to talk about the “Design Fails of Law”. We showed a House Bill about legalizing marijuana, and we showed a criminal Rap sheet on the overhead. The reactions: confusing, unclear what the topic is, full of information I don’t care about, not prioritized, where is the table of contents, how can I know what the topic is? Here are some of the information that the Bill was missing, that the users wanted:
So we had a 3 minute design challenge. We passed out pieces of blank white paper, and gave the room full of participants the chance to redesign the front page of the House Bill to make it more clear. Here are some of the results:
We also got some takeaways about how we might redesign all kinds of public-facing legal documents — as well as other user research insights of interest:
- Documents should, on their face, provide glance-able, quickly navigable table of contents that will take you exactly where you need to go inside the pile of text
- If law-makers and lawyers won’t create usable documents, we need to train intermediaries to build usable interfaces on top of this legal output
- A bill or a law should have a front page that is Visual & Clean, featuring the information that users most want to know: what topics are talked about in this document (perhaps presented as tags), in particular: what changes does this bring from what was before, who is affected and who is not, what is the history/background/sponsor group for this.
- Legal knowledge might be better passed through channels that resemble peer and family networks, because users don’t trust lawyers or legal officials (bad reputations, as untrustworthy, unfriendly, and not-on-the-user’s-side).
- Law sounds BAD, Justice sounds GOOD.
- The Bay Area may be treated just like ‘developing countries’ would be: we should build micro-justice resources that help people here find legal resources and help, just like some international development bodies are doing in Kenya and Thailand.
- Users want lawyer reviews — they really want peer recommendations and data from courts & practices to be able to figure out what lawyer to use — this is a huge need.
- Legal redesigners should look to the medical field to see how the nurse-practitioner vs. doctor movement might help law to move forward in bringing non-lawyers (or, significantly less expensive and more user-friendly lawyers) into the delivery of legal counsel and support.
- Legal redesigners should find incentives to get people into the door for Preventative Legal Services — sign up for legal check-ins now, get discounts on legal services in the future? Force airport-goers, bus-riders, other random people to think about their legal futures? Build law games that sneak legal reflection & knowledge into people’s every day lives.
- Law & governance redesigners need not just build better presentations of law, but figure out how to get people to care about law & government, to find their sites, to make the argument that Law Matters and You Should Participate in Your Government — Onboarding is more of a challenge than building beautiful interfaces.
- Stanford d.school & Law School need to collaborate with Berkeley’s I.School & Law School to build a legal redesign program — that can convince developers, engineers, information scientists, designers, and more to come work with us on building incremental solutions to all these challenges.
And with all those insights, time to move forward to start playing with them and figuring out how to make some awesome stuff that takes on these challenges and addresses these needs!
Categories
Access to justice, the problem
A drawing I had made during the Law Without Walls conference, based on a great passing comment…
A blog post from Richard Zorza’s rich blog on Access to Justice discusses an issue I am currently working on — whether the Internet is a usable and effective resource for non-lawyers to get legal information and support.
Some findings of particular interest:
- Non-lawyers use search pages to find legal information to diagnose their situation.
- They rely on the top search results as their primary resources, regardless of whether they are from the user’s jurisdiction, and without taking measures to check their quality.
- The users sped through pages. Text and interfaces were scanned through quickly, and they flipped through sites quickly, back and forth. There was little slow, deliberate, consideration.
- The users found some information to help address their legal issues, but they were not confident that their new knowledge was sufficient to truly help them.
- After consulting Internet sources, the users were more likely to try non-legal processes to resolve their problems, and they did not register the urgency of taking legal means to protect themselves.
Research on Young People’s Use of Internet to Get Legal Information
I am happy to report on, and post, a presentation by, Catina Denvir at the University of London, on preliminary results on research on young people’s use of the Internet in the UK. I think these prelimnary results are important and helpful in our ongoing planning and design.
The researcher, after observing that there were high levels of access but low levels of use in this area, decided to conduct an experiment to test actual impact from this use of the Internet. Users were given hypotheticals and then tracked and surveyed in employment and housing law. These are some of the results.
Changes were Subject Specific (example housing):
“Landlord
• Before -‐ Knowledge poor in regards to eviction without a court order and whether the landlord’s employees can remove you from the property• Uncertainty as to what constituted a breach of the lease
• After -‐ improvement across the board, but uncertainty about who can evict a tenant”
Lots of Searching and Churning Through Pages
Average time on a page less than a minute
Jurisdictional Errors
Did not limit searching to UK — It would be interesting to know about the extent to which people in the UK now assume US law rules (or dear, in some areas of poverty law.) We obviously have the same problem in the US in terms of distinguishing between states.
Lots of back and forth between sites
Little discrimination as to which sites reliable
Order of Search Results was Very Important
Used top page and top result regardless of reliability. (So we need to do a better job of getting our stuff at the top, and educating public.)
After use of Internet, Greater Emphasis on Informal Mechanisms to Resolve Matter
Failure to understand legal processes
Failure to appreciate urgency
May Increase Knowledge, but not Confidence in Ability to Deal with Problem
This is consistent with other research in which I have been involved.
Obviously, this all opens up huge areas of additional inquiry. Some of the most obvious:
- How can we do better with search results (like expanding the LSC Google partnership so that it gets more broadly to trusted ATJ sites?
- How can we use community eduction so people know to trust ATJ sites (how about a national certification system and courts and legal aid jointly promoting the reliability of those sites?
- What would people need to have better confidence in their ability to navigate the system — would better descriptions do it, or does the system itself need to be easier? Some of this could be tested.
Further information about the research is available from Catrina Denvir, catrina.denvir.10(at)ucl.ac.uk, at University College London.