Category: Current Projects

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Current Projects

Law Kiosk in action

Back in 2004, the Legal Services Corporation sponsored a law kiosk for an “online legal service center” on Navajo territory in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico.  Read an article from back when it was debuted.  It meant to deliver access to justice, specifically for consumer and tax law.

“DNA Peoples Legal Services installed computer kiosks throughout the 25,000 miles of Navajo and Hopi Nations located in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico through a Technology Initiative Grant from Legal Services Corporation. These web-based kiosks connect to the Internet via satellite and DSL allowing users to access legal information through either spoken instructions delivered in English, Hopi or Navajo or written instructions in English. To further increase accessibility, DNA created custom graphic icons to help clients navigate the website. These touch-screen kiosks, installed in each of its nine offices located on or near Hopi and Navajo reservations, provide information through DNA’s internal web server on issues such as Consumer Law, Tax Law, Trash and Recycling, and information on free income-tax seminars. These kiosks allow DNA People’s Legal Services to better serve these Southwestern Native American communities, which spans across an immense geographical area. 

DNA Legal Services was supplied by a kiosk company, NBG Solutions.  A 2002 article from Portland’s Business Journal gave more explanation to the project.

DNA is a nonprofit agency providing free civic legal services to low-income people in its service areas—which happen to cover Navajo and Hopi reservations.

DNA was awarded a technology grant by the Legal Service Corp. to find an innovative way to deliver legal services to clients spread over a vast area— more than 25,000 square miles—with a very small staff.

DNA’s task is challenging: to provide help with legal chores such as name changes, simple divorces and guardianships.

The help is sorely needed. Much of the population in DNA’s service area is under-educated, and poor enough to lack such basic amenities as a phone in the home, let alone a computer.

Language is also an issue for DNA’s clients. “Most of our clients don’t speak or read English,” said Chris O’Shea Heydinger, director of development and information technology for DNA.

“They certainly don’t read in their native languages,” an accomplishment that is limited only to university graduates who pursue the study of Native American languages as an academic subject. Neither Navajo nor Hopi was codified as a written language until the mid-20th century.

A technological solution of some sort was required, rather than simply offering stacks of self-help brochures at DNA offices, precisely because written materials would be no help at all to most clients.

DNA’s answer, built by NBG Solutions, is a kiosk equipped with a touch-screen web browser that can be navigated using custom-designed icons supplied by DNA—for example, a traditional hogan (Navajo house) denoting the home page, and an arrowhead denoting “back” or “forward.”

With the kiosks already delivered and waiting, DNA is in the last stages of designing its web site to deliver spoken information in Navajo or Hopi, depending on where the kiosk is located.

Clients will be able to navigate the graphics-intensive web site to the services they need, and will be able to listen to instructions in their native language, then print out forms as they need them.

The web site, “a labor of love,” according to Heydinger, will go live in April.

The kiosks will be connected to the internet via satellite, because the reservations are so far from the internet backbone.

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Current Projects Ideabook

New Generation of Tech for Access to Justice

A great article from Slate on Tech being used for Legal Aid & Access to Justice, with lots of specific examples of how SMS and other basic tech can give reminders, process updates, basic advice, and more lawyering to people who can’t afford lawyers.
The concepts:
  • Automated Call Back Systems from legal services to people who have reached out
  • SMS reminders from courts to litigants about what expectations are
  • Using data for legal services to better track their work & targets
  • Virtual office kits to provide legal services on the go, or outside of legal offices
  • An app that gives checklists to lawyers to ensure they’re catching all the issues

“Don’t Forget Your Court Date”

How text messages and other technology can give legal support to the poor.

By |Posted Friday, Dec. 7, 2012, at 9:15 AM ET

Cellphone

It has been three years since the Great Recession ended, but the nation’s courthouses are still swamped with eviction cases, foreclosures, and debt collection suits. If overdue bills and late rent were crimes, all low-income tenants and debtors could get a public defender for free. Because those cases are civil suits, though, the state doesn’t provide an attorney. Which means that in civil court, most people don’t have a lawyer in their corner—even though their homes and financial stability are on the line.

What many do have in their back pockets, however, is a smartphone. And soon, they might be able to find some legal help there, too.

Like everyone else, lawyers for the poor are trying to do more with less, as government grants and private funding have dried up. Increasingly, that means turning to tech, using new tools to deliver information to clients, support volunteer lawyers, and improve their own systems. They’re using text messaging, automated call-backs, Web chats, and computer-assisted mapping.

A crush of new clients is pushing the growing reliance on technology, as the old systems just can’t keep up. For years, people seeking help have called their local legal services offices, only to wait on hold for 20 minutes or more. If someone has a pay-by-the-minute cellphone, as many low-income people do, that gets expensive fast. Many callers just give up, says Elizabeth Frisch, the co-executive director of Legal Aid of Southeastern Pennsylvania. So Frisch and her team are piloting an automated call-back system, using voice over IP, to reduce hold time and save those precious minutes.

Text messages can also improve efficiency. If courts sent SMS reminders to litigants, that would help move along cases that get postponed over and over when one party doesn’t show up, says Glenn Rawdon. Rawdon runs the technology grants program at the Legal Services Corp., the federal program that funds legal aid groups. A text could also help people remember to bring documents to meetings with their overworked lawyers. “It’s very time-consuming if they come to the appointment and say, ‘Oh yeah, I forgot to bring the papers,’ ” Rawdon says. And SMS can be used to deliver basic legal information, like what to look for when signing a lease, or the laws surrounding a wage claim. Legal aid groups in Georgia, New York, Washington, Illinois, and Pennsylvania are all piloting text-based campaigns this year.

For simple questions, technology can help deliver information to clients. For more complicated problems, only a lawyer will do. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough lawyers to go around. That’s particularly true outside of cities.

For example, 70 percent of Georgia’s lawyers are in the Atlanta metro area, although just under 30 percent of the state’s population lives there, according to the State Bar of Georgia. Six counties have no lawyers at all.

“It’s really expensive to deliver legal services in a rural area. Lawyers have to travel,” says Michael Monahan of Georgia Legal Services. Some lawyers at his organization cover six or seven counties, he says, working in the field three or four days a week.

So five years ago, Georgia Legal Services created virtual office kits, with laptops, portable printers, and scanners. They also got an assist from Sprint, which provided free air cards for mobile Internet access and an “extremely low data rate” for unlimited usage.

In Ohio, which also has big rural areas and a shortage of lawyers to serve them, Web chat can help volunteers reach more clients.

The system “allows us to address an imbalance between where the attorneys are and where our clients are,” says Kevin Mulder, executive director of Legal Aid of Western Ohio.

But logistics aren’t the only hurdle for volunteers. They can be “a little uncomfortable taking cases that are outside their practice area,” says David Lund, who runs the Legal Aid Service of Northeastern Minnesota.

If you’re used to dealing with real estate contracts, for instance, a Medicaid case can be intimidating. So he’s developing a set of checklists for specific issues, optimized for tablets, that lawyers can use when they’re volunteering.

They’ll use it at the start of a case, as they’re laying out a client’s options, and at potential settlements, to make sure that they haven’t missed anything crucial. In eviction cases, for example, a landlord can get a judgment of possession. This allows the tenant to leave without paying back rent, but it’s still a judgment against him, which means it can jeopardize eligibility for future subsidized housing, like Section 8. An experienced landlord-tenant lawyer would know that. An occasional volunteer would not. Which is where the checklist comes in.

Some things are best left to full-time legal aid lawyers. But since there are so few, groups are using data analysis and mapping to better focus their scarce resources. Prairie State Legal Services in Rockford, Ill., is using its “incredible mass of data” to develop a mapping project, plotting addresses and legal needs. Director Michael O’Connor says this will help them answer questions like, “Are there clusters in certain communities where lots of people are facing issues with access to public benefits, or substandard housing?” Armed with that information, his staff can do targeted outreach campaigns or ramp up for litigation.

No one thinks technology is a cure-all. Even the best app or website can’t stand next to you in front of a judge, responding to the opposing counsel.

And despite these promising tools, unmet need is enormous. Many clients want more support than they can get from an app or a chat, but limited funds make that unlikely. “For a large percentage of those folks, [help via technology] will be it. That will be the most that we will be able to offer,” says Deb Jennings, who manages a phone helpline at Advocates for Basic Legal Equality in Toledo, Ohio. And the use of new tech tools is in the early stages—many projects are somewhere between concept and beta.

The tools that are in use show great promise. Groups across the country have developed self-help websites, and they’ve been hugely popular. In 2012 so far, more than 3 million people downloaded resources from LawHelp.org, a nonprofit site that offers legal information and legal aid referrals. Through an affiliated site, people can answer simple questions and produce documents ready to file in court. More than 300,000 people have created documents this year, for things like wills, leases, and custody agreements.

In an ideal world, everyone who needs one would have a lawyer. But few people know better than lawyers for the poor just how far from ideal this world is.

Relying on technology “is a bit waving the white flag and saying we acknowledge we’re not going to help everybody, so here’s a second best solution,” O’Connor says. “And it is second best, but it is at least providing help to some people who otherwise wouldn’t get anything.”

This article arises from Future Tense, a collaboration among Arizona State University, the New America Foundation, and Slate. Future Tense explores the ways emerging technologies affect society, policy, and culture. To read more, visit the Future Tense blog and the Future Tense home page. You can also follow us on Twitter.

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Current Projects Training and Info

Open Law app in Canada

CanLii is an app out of Toronto that allows for easier searching of Canadian law. It’s an effort to make the legislation more accessible, and hoping that trickles down to more numbers of people in Canada being in control of their legal pathways.

image

New mobile app gives free access to legal resources, legislation and jurisprudence:

http://business.financialpost.com/2012/07/27/new-free-mobile-app-gives-greater-access-to-justice-to-all-canadians/

by Mitch Kowalski

While RIM flounders, other Canadians in the legal tech field continue to make giant strides.

The newly released app, WiseLii, Canada’s Mobile Legal Research Tool is now available free of charge from iTunes.

This new app was developed with the permission of CanLii (although not affiliated with CanLii) and gives increased mobile access to legal information, legislation and case law for all Canadians.

According to the app’s creator, Toronto lawyer Garry Wise, “This project is an access to justice initiative, bringing legal information, legislation and jurisprudence to all Canadians, free of charge, on the iPhone mobile platform.”

Garry, who is a fervent legal blogger, speaker and one of Canada’s top social media influencers, has been working on this passion project for more than a year.

“I began hearing about law firms building apps,” he said. “I was intrigued but wanted to do something that went beyond the typical “mobile business card” that I was seeing. Increasingly, I found myself reaching for my iPhone at pretrials and mediations, looking up cases, legislation and blogs that were relevant to issues that came up, but the results were hard to read on mobile and the process was not so nimble. A legal research app seemed like an obvious direction. One of our former articling students, Chris Bird was instrumental in developing the idea. As it evolved, the app’s usefulness to the general public as an access to justice tool became increasingly clear – free information democratized justice. That’s the beauty of CanLii.”

Wise pauses for a moment. Then a sly smile appears. “But truth be told, we built it because I wanted to use it myself. “

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Current Projects Training and Info

Call-in shows, SMS text-ins, and other ways to get right, fact-checked info

access-innovation-ideas-tech-rumor

A major problem in governance is the spread of misinformation and rumors. Sometimes these result from concerted campaigns by political actors, to manipulate politicians with rumors meant to make them suspicious or fearful about something.  Other times rumors are not driven by anyone, but snowball on their own.  Either way, flare-ups of rumors can wreak havoc on governance, personal security, community relations, and rule of law.

Misinformation can also be a problem regarding the law. With a proliferation of online forums and social media, people may get legal information from their peers that is incorrect. Can we use mobile tech to combat common misinformation and rumors, and spread quality and correct information?

Technology can be a carrier of rumors — see the unrest in the last Kenyan elections, when rumors sent by text fed into ethnic attacks, riots, and deaths.  But there are some tech design projects which are trying to quell, staunch, and kill rumor campaigns to improve local governance and relations.  A recent report by the USIP highlighted several of these in Afghanistan.

Call-In Program: Present the Rumor to Experts & Check if Its True

“Afghanistan has evolved rapidly as a test bed for mobile-based programs at the district level that have the potential to improve both communication with government officials and transparency. This is exemplified by the work done by the UK-managed Helmand Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT), which has launched two mobile-based programs that deserve careful consideration for broader rollout in other districts: a specialized call-in radio program and a crime-reporting hotline. The team has demonstrated initial success in holding local government officials accountable for their response to emergencies and crime while engaging civil society anew, and the programs make for worthwhile case studies. Radio call-in shows are not new to Afghanistan. What distinguishes this weekly program in Helmand is the expanding audience it has, thanks to its regular use of provincial official as hosts who take questions from citizens about civil administration. The show is hosted on local station Bost and is funded by the UK government, which purchases commercial airtime for the show.

“Radio is the most popular and easy-to-use communication medium in Afghanistan, but call-in programs have had varying degrees of success. This show, however, has proved to be very popular by allowing provincial officials, who are constrained in their ability to travel because of security concerns and poor transport, to speak about the state of affairs in their sectors and address the concerns of constituents. Nick Lockwood of the Helmand PRT underscored the potential of this forum when he described a program that had led a senior police chief to make a number of changes to his unit in response to listeners’ complaints about corruption among his officers. Subsequent programs hosted by other district police chiefs benefited by attracting ever bigger audiences.

In an information-starved environment like Afghanistan, where such call-in programs meet with notable success, officials should also consider using an IVR-based news system to combat the rumors that can be so dangerous. In fact, the Institute for War & Peace Reporting launched its IVR-based news service around the September 2010 elections in Afghanistan. Its Cell Phone Voter Project provided users with a toll-free number to access news stories about the elections via their phones in Dari, Pashto, and English.”

Fact Check by SMS

“MobileActive.org’s Katrin Verclas, a pioneer in mobile phone deployments, pointed to Zimbabwe, where MobileActive.org had helped to implement an information system with features that could be adapted for similar purposes. On hearing of an event or news story, users can send an SMS to the system, which then replies with a phone call that provides accurate information about the event or news. Users can listen to messages in three different languages. In the first week of its implementation in Zimbabwe, this program received over three thousand phone calls and is helping to create a more politically engaged public.”

Mobile Citizenship

“Verclas further noted that mobile telephony is likely to be used more frequently in this way to raise awareness of critical issues of citizen concern, share documented stories of localcrime and corruption, record user responses to questions and prompts, and poll citizens about local issues. Lockwood of the Helmand PRT confirmed this observation in the Afghan context, indicating plans to explore ways of promoting the agenda, activities, and meetings of the District Community Councils (DCCs) as a way of creating a sense of ownership of the DCCs among their constituent populations and instilling a demand for services. USAID also has plans to create a service called Mobile Khabar (khabar means “news” in Dari and Pashto) to use mobile phones as a delivery system for news and information.”

Categories
Current Projects Dispute Resolution

Dispute Resolution training, from refugee camps

Dispute resolution mechanisms inside refugee communities can be a model for other resolution systems in non-refugee contexts.

For example, consider the ideas identified in this write-up of design interventions in a Serbian camp in the 1990s, by Divna Persic-Todorovic. In particular, consider in-person and game-based trainings in dispute resolution.noun_therapy_97465

“This article is about the work on interpersonal conflict resolution in refugee camps in Serbia by the MOST group for non-violent conflict resolution. Difficult living conditions in refugee camps (lack of facilities; the necessity to share them) created many interpersonal disagreements. The situation was worsened by the sense of hopelessness that people brought from the places which they had to flee. They shared horrible stories of the war and of failed attempts to make their lives better. This circular motion of pain produced more sorrow.

“To break these dynamics, MOST organized activities in summer camps for refugees to teach people problem solving skills and active listening, promoting more understanding between them. They used such techniques as “Communication Games”, the “Secret Friend” game and workshops with an emphasis on conflict analysis. The “Secret Friend” game created an atmosphere of joy. People were coming up with creative ideas for how to make another person happily surprised. In analyzing their relationships, people were exercising active listening techniques and learned to recognize each others’ needs. Going from there, they tried to create solutions. The author concludes that the work done by MOST produced encouraging results in improving refugee’s relations and their view of life.”

Persic-Todorovic, Divna. Conflict Resolution, Working with Refugees. Conflict Resolution Notes. V. 12, No. 4. April, 1995. Pp. 44-45.

Categories
Current Projects Professionals' Networks + Traiing

Using Tech to Improve Lineups

An article from Ben Paynter at Good Magazine about Gary Well’s work in the Austin Police Department to use a computer program to improve crime witnesses’ identification of suspects.

an excerpt

“It’s an experimental protocol designed by Gary Wells, the guru of eyewitness reliability—or rather, unreliability. The director of social sciences at the American Judicature Society’s Center for Forensic Science and Public Policy, Wells has been working on lineups since the 1970s, but in the past 20 years exonerations of hundreds of prisoners based on DNA evidence—after many had been convicted in part based on good-faith eyewitness testimony—have made his task all the more urgent. Wells doesn’t want to merely understand witness identification. He wants to fix it.”

“Attorney General Janet Reno asked Wells to head a task force on new lineup guidelines for states, and he proposed new practices drawn from his research. All lineups should be blind, he said—the cops administering them shouldn’t know who the suspects or fillers are. There should only be one suspect per lineup. Witnesses should be clearly advised that a suspect might not be in the lineup. And statements of confidence should be recorded verbatim at the time of the pick, because witnesses with any uncertainty have been known to talk themselves into their choices as time passes.”

“In 2006, Wells designed a new study protocol. The tests wouldn’t just be blind but “computer blind”—the computer itself could offer prerecorded instructions to ensure lineups were done uniformly. After officers created a lineup, the photos would also be digitally shuffled so they couldn’t pass along the location of their suspect to anyone running the lineup. That eliminates the chance of lineup administrators giving off any cues—subtle nods, coughs, or the suggestion to pay closer attention to any one photo—that might be used, unconsciously, of course, to tip witnesses off to prime suspects. The computer would even randomly decide whether to run a sequential lineup or a simultaneous one.”

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Current Projects

Virtual Live Charity Interventions

Sarkissian Mason, a digital innovation agency, worked with the non-profit Pathways to Housing, to make a Virtual Homeless interactive experience for people walking down the street in New York, to encourage donations + engagement.

From the agency’s site:

As originators of the Housing First model, the non-profit engaged SM to help spread awareness in NYC of their initiative to transform individual lives by ending homelessness and supporting recovery for those with psychiatric disabilities. We created a human-sized video projection with which passersby could interact by texting “home” to make a door appear in the wall and rouse the sleeping figure to enter his new home. A subsequent text made a small donation to the cause.

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Current Projects Work Product Tool

A2J Author for Non-Lawyers

Chicago-Kent Law School, out of its Center for Access to Justice & Technology, has started publishing A2J — Access to Justice apps.

A2J Author is a platform that lets non-tech specialists in the government, courts, and legal world to build websites & apps to let non-lawyers get more access — more easily — to the bureaucracy of the courts.

One instantiation is the A2J Guided Interview, which walks people who are representing themselves in court through the process.  It takes them through a flowchart of decisions and tells them what papers they’ll need to assemble for court documents.

You can try it out if you want to pretend you are filing an “Application to Sue or Defend as an Indigent in Cook County, Illinois”.  At the link, an online program to help you create the form to file this for free.

Categories
Current Projects Professionals' Networks + Traiing

Mobile Ethics App for Lawyers

The New York State Bar Association has released a mobile app for lawyers, judges, and other legal practitioners — for quicker advice on whether their action is ‘Ethical Under the Law.’

The app mainly provides a Search Function, to let the professional find a legal opinion on the matter at hand, to determine whether it has been judged ethical or not.

The user can search by keyword, or by the name of the opinion if they hand it — and the app will search through NY’s full case output on ethics. The app shows the matches with brief digests of the opinions, and the user can click through for full text.

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Current Projects System Evaluation

311 Local Governance Apps

Many cities are using “311 Apps” on mobile devices or on Facebook to let citizens report basic city problems — potholes, graffiti, etc — to their local representatives. They can supply the details, photos, and requests directly to the city official that should be responding to them.

It also allows citizens a better way to track the progress of their request & keep statistics on the officials’ responses. People can also map where requests are to have a better sense of what areas are better served than others.

The city of San Francisco debuted a 311-Facebook app in February 2011.

New York City has its own NYC 311 mobile app.

Baltimore debuted their Mobile 311 app in August 2011.

Pittsburgh unveiled its iBurgh App in mid 2009.