As the client goes to a 2 hour consultation, the lawyer takes notes straight into the client’s portable data point. It means that the client can then take this with them to all other care team members — and very easily & quickly show them what’s going on, with the lawyer’s notes presented in the standard fields.
We would need to have consistent fields among the service providers. A consistent way to read it.
The litigant would be able to see it, take it with them, share it with others.
It could be used to pre-populate forms and court documents.
What if we provided coordinated legal-medical-mental health-housing-family-education support all in one big pop-up zone? Like a Food Truck park, with lots of different options to browse around and engage with.
Could we have a traveling courthouse, that offers limited legal services to you in more convenient, and people-friendly places? Like in libraries, in community centers, churches, even festivals?
Some of the services it could help you do:
See if you have warrants out against you & deal with them
Deal with your traffic tickets
Learn about what services are open to you if you have housing, employment, family, or immigration problems
Can’t we get low-touch services out of the courthouse & into the community?
During my Spring 2015 class at Stanford d.school/Law School on Intro to Legal Design, we were lucky enough to have Sacha Steinberger visit us and present on her Project Legal Link. I drew up some notes during her presentation, about what she’s working to do — bringing social service providers into the world of legal services.
Here are my sketches:
Even if a social service case worker spots legal issues in their client’s situation, they often don’t know how to effectively reach out to get legal help for the client.
Sacha has identified the social service caseworker as a key ‘legal portal’ — someone who can help get lay people to legal services that they need, and start them on the journey to resolving their problems around housing, debt, relationships, employment, custody, and other common problems that people have and don’t know there is legal recourse for.
So what does Project Legal Link do, to help improve social services’ capacity to serve as an effective legal portal?
The ideal new workflow would be that social service providers would be this portal, and would do the following:
Sacha’s approach is to make it easy for social service providers to know what to do when spotting legal issues and referring for legal help — and empower them to serve their client in fuller ways.
With smarter caseworkers, then the client will get a fuller team of people to help them.
Could we build a single portal to all kinds of legal support, help, counsel? If it’s a simple, memorable number that’s the same across the country — that would be terrific from a branding approach.
During the Legal Design Bootcamp that I was running last week, one of the participating groups came up with a very interesting concept that I wanted to share.
We spent one day going through a design cycle, and they began by choosing a very particular user — a young Guatemalan girl, aged around 16 year old, who ends up in California after having journeyed across land, via Coyote, and is now going through immigration proceedings.
The team explored many different directions about designs to serve this girl — including lowering hurdles inside the legal system that she needs to pass through, having Walmart-style greeters welcome her whenever she comes into the court, drastically simplifying the forms she needs to fill out, and more. They arrived on one idea that had particular promise & began to develop it out.
Their insight: rather than put the burden on her to gather & coordinate all the possible legal services, plus social services, plus logistics to transition to life in the US, what about doing this gathering & coordinating for her? How could we provide her not just with a suite of resources, but with a way for her to easily & intuitively access these resources, without having to seek them out or coordinate them herself?
The design: give her a smartphone that is pre-popluated with a suite of resources, connections, and welcome messages that will be a smarter, more interactive version of a Welcome Packet. What tools could this smartphone have pre-programmed on it?
case tracker, to watch how her legal petitions are going through the courts
directions and guides to the court house
a calendar that is loaded with upcoming appointments (and which can be updated)
a contact book full of people she can reach out to
Could we put law on the street? Have public space installations that give basic outreach, checklists, resources, if not even full-blown clinics for people to encounter in their daily life?
This idea is in part from conversations with my Mexican colleagues, with ideas for subway station legal clinics.
What would it look like if there was one major site online, that anyone searching out help for a life problem could use?
They would enter their problem, legal issues would be identified, and then the person would be directed to the legal org who can help them.
They will get a warm hand-off and introduction to that org, and maybe even schedule an appointment right there on the website.
All of this is opposed to the current status quo — searching for help, not being able to find local or available service providers on one site, and not figuring out how to actually make an appointment happen (if you are even eligible for an appointment).
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This idea grew out of May 2015’s ABA Summit on Legal Innovation. Watching all the presentations, and participating in Blue Sky innovations — my main priorities and agenda items for innovating services all got boiled down to one blaring message:
Here are some of the people that called for centralizing, coordinating legal help from the users’ point of view:
There are a few initiatives that must happen to get the Internet to be a law-friendly, people-friendly resource for anyone who is going to type in a query seeking out help for their divorce, debt, bankruptcy, child custody, landlord-tenant issue (and beyond…). Here’s what I’m seeing as a shortlist of things to be working on:
Deep, design-driven research into how lay people approach the Internet when seeking out help for their life (legal) problems (Note: I’ve been doing this, now I need to scale it up & publish the resources)
Using understandings from this research to feed into new concept designs, principles/heuristics/guides for what better interventions could be, to get the Online Help Seeker to Quality Legal Services easily, directly, happily
Partnering with the right organizations to get these interventions implemented:
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and other search engine companies — which are really the crucial portal for how a lay person will seek out and find legal help
States’ Legal Help sites
Courts’ Self-Help/Public-Facing sites
Other social service/governmental groups that have adjacent, linked resources to legal services’ resources
Legal Aid groups
Consumer Law websites
For step 2 — what the right interventions are to get the Internet to serve legal help-seekers in a better way, I have my inclination about what some key things will be.
Centralized Legal Help Portals: each state, or maybe even the whole country has one *strongly branded* website that does an issue-based, person-based, and jursidiction-based triage on the visitor, and funnels them to a legal help channel that works for them. Its one central, recognizable place that can warmly hand the person off to the right local resource — tells them what their legal issue is called — and whether they might qualify for legal help.
Smarter, More Directed Search Results: if people are always going to be typing in a query into a search engine (Google, Bing, Yahoo…) then why not intervene right there, at the search result list? Like I’ve written before, I want better legal help directions right there on the search results page.
Coordinated Data & Service Offerings among legal aid groups, courts, pro bono, consumer sites, and any other service-provider — so that a person can see the relevant and applicable offerings for them. A site would be able to triage a general Internet-help-seeker to the right service provider and hand them off. To do this, we need to get the service providers all saving, structuring, and sharing their service-offering-info in a coordinated & open way — so that we can collect it and implement triage and hand-off tools on top of it. Look at what Open Referral (associated with Code For America) is doing along this line for general social service providers. Tools like Purple Binder and mRelief can be built on top of this coordinated system.
Okay, whew! That’s a lot of ideas and lists.
Now, to add on a few sketches of what I’m thinking about for these centralized legal portals, centralized triage, etc… They are all at the raw stage, but hopefully they offer some grounding to the ideas I’ve fired out above.
Looking back through my iPad sketchbooks, I came across this sketch of what an online legal help portal might look like. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot — what the right kind of entry point might be for a lay person trying to figure out what their legal issue is and how to deal with with.
The main points I was trying to make with this sketch were:
Putting a very human-friendly search as the priority entry point: just let the user type in what their issue is, and then have the site be smart enough to direct them to what the legal categorization of their problem is
Having back-up common choices: for those who don’t want to search, or who are in a browsing mood, they can see some common legal categorizations to browse through and see if any of them sounds like a good fit for what’s going on in their life
Official marker: to show trustworthiness and encourage engagement, put the official connection front and center on the page, as a badge that declares “you, casual Internet browser, can trust this site! We are not trying to sell you anything, and we are official experts on the law”. This is what Internet-browsers want to see when they’re sizing up legal info sites.
Upon search, visual card glimpses into resources: rather than show a straight text list, show search query results in distinct cards, that have a straightforward visual, a headline, and a glimpse into the content that awaits upon a click. For a person who doesn’t know exactly what legal terrain they’re in, the cards give them some quick glances at what might apply to them. The visitor can look through them before deciding which to click open & pursue.
Here are some more digital sketches that had come out of earlier design sprints on making courts more accessible.
Can we have forms integrated right into centralized legal help guides? Less clicking, resources right there where you need them.Can we have smart process guides for any of the legal remedies that we offer to lay people online — to let them see what a path would look like, and how to pursue it?Can we triage people right to the correct legal pathway & accompanying, local legal services?What would a central legal help portal look like, that helped people with common Internet legal-ish searches and directs them to guides, resources, and service-providers for relevant legal actions?
Do you have any more thoughts on these action-plans, or these concept designs? Or do you have connections & resources for me? Send them along, please!
I’m excited to see the development of Project Legal Link, a new type of resource that links social & legal services together in the Bay Area.
I was introduced to it last year by the woman who is making it happen — Sacha Steinberger. Sacha is a lawyer, & and decided to focus on the problem of how people other than lawyers can get the right legal help for their clients and users who have come for help on other kinds of social issues. She noticed that it’s hard for non-lawyers to figure out who to be reaching out to, how to make an effective referral, and how to get the right info from group to group.
The Tipping Point Community is funding her work & it is wonderful to see how the site has developed in a short time. She has built a visually appealing, uncluttered & graphic way to help non-lawyers figure out legal options for their clients. There is enormous value in building a system that ensures more holistic care for people with life problems (legal & otherwise) and coordinates warm hand-offs and info-sharing among different service providers.
Here is how the project is officially described, and then find some more screenshots of the site:
In partnership with Tipping Point Community, Project Legal Link assists social service providers to help their clients access legal services. Specifically, we train and equip caseworkers at social service organizations to identify legal issues and refer clients to the appropriate legal resources. We organize the legal landscape so caseworkers don’t have to, and we assist caseworkers in understanding and navigating it.
WHAT WE DO: Our work takes three primary forms:
Train: we train caseworkers to identify and refer legal issues;
Refer: we provide curated referrals for clients’ issues; and
Support: we provide support to caseworkers with questions such as whether a legal issue exists and what to do about it.
Ours is not a one-size-fits-all approach. We get to know each organization, we tailor our services to its staffs’ and clients’ needs, and we support the organization’s work by focusing on the removal of their clients’ legal barriers.
WHY WE DO IT: At Project Legal Link we know that:
The need for legal services is great: low-income households face an average of one to three legal issues each year. If unresolved, these issues are a barrier to meeting basic needs.
The legal system is not intuitive: the legal world is cumbersome, intimidating, and hard to navigate.
Social and legal services rarely coexist: on the social service side, most organizations lack tools such as legal screening devices, referral lists, and trainings related to the legal world.
Caseworkers are the link: caseworkers often become trusted advisors for low-income individuals. In a network of support, the relationship between caseworkers and clients are among the strongest.
Our bet is that caseworkers are a critical bridge between low-income people and the legal services they need. Project Legal Link aims to build on the trust between the caseworker and the client and assist caseworkers in moving their clients out of poverty.
