Justice Innovation
A new initiative, Frontline Justice, has just been launched to build a new set of justice workers who can serve people with legal needs & close the justice gap.
This new group is planning to grow a workforce of justice workers, reform policies and regulations around who can provide legal help, and engage communities in how people are served.
The group is seeking a CEO currently, and has an impressive founding team and leadership council.
I have been scouting out service design inspirations, particularly from airports, that courts could use. This one is from JFK airport, in the Delta terminal. I was very impressed with their service design. They had taken over an entire gate with a help center that had all kinds of touchpoints: paper, phone terminals, people, kiosks. There were multiple entry points and lots of capacity, so that people could self-sort depending on the magnitude of their issue, the speed they needed it resolved, and their comfort with tech.
Of particular interest: the Need Help card. Can we make these for all courts?
A team from Justice Design at Osgoode Law’s Winkler Institute developed a prototype of an app that could prep people for small claims court, and take care of issues directly
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Going to small claims court can be nerve racking, costly and time consuming. #B4 Small claims is an online dispute resolution app that will help people resolve claims of under $2000 in a quick, efficient and user-friendly way! No more complicated forms!*
Osgoode Law School’s Justice Design program created a prototype for Law Speak, a tool for people going through the small claims process who are not fluent in the dominant language.
LawSpeak empowers those who may not speak English as a primary language to navigate the small claims court process. This app translates documents, keeps them in one place and provide additional features like a location services option that will help you find your way to the courthouse.
A team from the Winkler Institute’s Justice Design 2016 class created a game Legal Go, inspired by Pokemon Go, but for learning law. It’s a way to train lay people on what the legal system is and how it works, through a mixture of in-person adventures and on-the-phone characters, challenges, and rewards.
Their description:
Inspired by the Pokémon Go phenomenon, Legal Go is augmented reality legal education game that makes learning about the legal system fun and interactive. As you wander the city you can complete missions that will help you build skills in empathy, understanding the legal process, finding legal and community services, and resources.*
In the article, Hardenbergh profiles the move to use the space of courts to make the judicial system more accessible, navigable, and open to the public. It is because of the increasing focus on service design and customer-oriented services.
This means more spacious waiting rooms.
Better public information and signage.
More support for child care and entertaining environments for them.
Concern and protection for victims and witnesses.
More pleasant treatment of juries.
Easier access to information and services.
Interventions to reduce waiting times and lines.
This means more working spaces and areas for pro se litigants, in particular, as well as more working spaces and counters for people who are trying to carry out tasks.
East Bay Stand Down is a project offered in California in which at-risk and homeless military veterans can access all kinds of service help over four days. It includes medical and dental care, housing, driver’s licenses, court services, hygiene, and more.
Legal Server has a project Houston.AI, a new set of tools that allows for smarter intake of people, finding of their issues, and referring them to the right support.
What?
Houston.AI is a web-based platform designed to help non-profit legal aid agencies more effectively serve those who cannot afford attorneys. Comprised of a series of micro-services leveraging machine learning, artificial intelligence and expert systems Houston.AI is designed to perform many of the simple and routine tasks that lawyers do throughout their day to serve clients.
Such services include:
- Legal Issue Spotting
- Entity Extraction
- Document Analysis (using Computer Vision)
- Tonal Analysis
- Expert Systems to Analyze potential defenses or potential remedies
- Attorney Necessity Scaling
- Predictive Analytics (time and outcomes)
- Intelligent Routing of Cases to Agencies or Attorneys (based on Open Referral)
Why?
In our war to provide meaningful access to justice, it is unrealistic to think that the current army of lawyers devoted to this cause could possibly address the overwhelming legal needs of the most vulnerable and underserved among us without a huge infusion of government funding, a highly unlikely scenario in today’s climate. As such, we must significantly change our strategy on the frontlines to exploit advances in technology.
Simply put: for many of the necessary but routine tasks that lawyers do every day, humans are too slow and too few compared to autonomous machines.
Achieving success on the (asymmetrical) battlefield requires careful coordination between generals (human lawyers) and a cavalry of autonomous foot soldiers (high-speed artificial intelligence applications, leveraging continuously advancing algorithms). In this sense, machine learning as envisioned by this project, is analogous to West Point, preparing and training Justice Bots to help individuals overcome access issues that so pervade the American judicial system.
In the end, these on-demand intelligent resources will allow lawyers to practice at the top of their license (i.e., in their highest and best roles as counselors and advocates) in a far more efficient and effective way, all the while empowering those in need through increased access and equipping them to make better choices, which is to everyone’s benefit.
The Robot Lawyer is a chatbot made to let people get legal options and screening — and even fill in documents by chatting through a messenger interface on a website.
Please note, since first posting about this project, it has now become the DoNotPay tool. This post was about the original version of the tool.
In its original form, the Robot Lawyer covered topics like traffic tickets, refugee asylum applications, and homeless benefits.
