Could we welcome people in to have free coffee, free ice cream, even candy, and then get them directed to legal services from there?
Category: Advocates
How do we get people help that they can use easily, transparently, and with satisfaction?
What if we had more legal services that provided people in crisis with empathy? It might be in the form of someone to listen to their story and engage them in conversation. It might be a computer algorithm that gives a sense of conversation and attention. It might be with small interventions in the typical court, legal aid, or lawyer processes that make people feel more ‘listened to’ and ‘understood’.
What if every person had a lawyer that was closely related to them, that was responsible for advising them and keeping them legally healthy, and dealing with any problem that arises for them.
Could we create a collaboration platform & network that would provide a holistic service for a person with a legal problem — so they have all the different kinds of support they need?
As more talk grows about Internet & mobile-based technology opening up a new era of Consumer Law, it’s useful to look back a few decades when there was a similar tide of activity around expanding access to civil legal procedures to the middle classes of Americans.
After the Supreme Court ruling of Bates v. State Bar of Arizona opened up the possibility for lawyers to advertise on television, several upstart law firms tried to capture 70% of the population’s routine legal needs through scaled-up, commodity-based law firms located on America’s main streets. These started off calling themselves Legal Clinics — most prominent among them were Hyatt Legal Services and Jacoby & Meyers.
These Legal Clinics don’t exist today in their original form. Both firms morphed into other kinds of legal beasts, no longer the consumer-law centered main street law, now Hyatt is mainly in the business of group legal services plans and Jacoby & Meyers is more focused on personal injury litigation.
But thanks to a trove of articles from the 1980s that my colleague Neal Sangal found for his research on legal clinics, I’ve been looking into what the exact strategies and values these legal clinics had in their heyday.
Even if their business model & scaling strategy ultimately didn’t pay off in the 1980s legal environment, the Legal Clinics did enjoy many types of success before they morphed away from the clinic model. They engaged middle class consumers to tackle their legal problems. They build tech-based systems to handle routine problems. They radically lowered the prices that people would have to pay for legal solutions. They built a distinct brand that people trusted, had name recognition, and could be a go-to for finding legal help.
That’s not to say that I would start my own consumer law business in their footsteps — more careful attention needs to be paid to why their expansion model ultimately didn’t pay off.
What I did want to take away especially are the core value propositions & changes that Hyatt Legal Services put forward back in the early 1980s. This shortlist of 5 things that a law firm, court, or legal aid organization should be doing is crucial, and still relevant thirty years later.
Here are the points that Hyatt put forward in October 1984 of how it would do legal services differently — and that still are breath of fresh air:
Price: “Hyatt offers fees about 30% lower than the average. Fixed fees for standard services were found to be much more important to middle-class clients than low cost.”
Convenience: “Neighborhood centers, evening & Saturday hours, ground level signage, and retail characteristics all contribute to the firm’s accessibility and lower client anxiety about coming to the office.”
Quality: “Internal training programs, experienced lawyers, and expertise in focused areas are measures taken by Hyatt to deliver legal service quality. Checklists, flow charts, and forms help achieve quality control in all branches.”
Speed of Service: ”Document production is computerized to cut down on time spent by lawyers on paperwork.”
Respect: “Lack of respect by lawyers toward their clients is the No. 1 factor in resistance to seeing a lawyer. Hyatt is sensitive to this issue and takes steps to ensure attorney compliance.”
(quotes taken from the article “Hyatt targets legal market with five benefits: Advertising only part of formula,” from Marketing News, October 26 1984 — write me for a copy).
What I take away from these 5 points, that should be applicable in 2014’s tech-based consumer law movement are the following insights:
- Fixed fees will draw in users, because of greater transparency and assurance about costs. Discounts may work, but they still leave a sense of the unknown that consumers will dread. Give as much upfront reassurance about how much money a person will spend, and they will be more likely to engage in the transaction.
- A process-based guide to law, with maps and lists that guide a legal task, will train lawyers better and give consumers more confidence & co-piloting ability.
- A consumer law organization needs to build its brand, whether online or in person, so people know that it is available and trusted. Its brand needs to convey that it’s convenient, transparent & accessible — even if this is not in an actual retail location.
- The service professionals need to show respect in their demeanor & their actions to the client. This means giving more agency to the client with co-piloting tools, clear explainers that make the lawyer’s work more transparent, and other tools & resources that make them feel in control, in the loop, and getting it right. We need more research into legal users’ experience to find out what these ‘respectful’ tools might be, that get the balance right in the lawyer-client relationship.
Pangea Legal Services is a San Francisco collective of lawyers who are working to support immigrants with legal support — through a low-bono and pro-bono model that provides services on a sliding scale of fees.
It works on asylum cases, deportations, DACA and U-visa applications, among other services. It also does policy work on behalf of immigrants.
Pangea’s ultimate goal is to be larger non-profit that provides legal services for fees that fit potential clients’ budgets — to bring greater access to legal support to immigrants.
Its self-description:
Vision
We envision a world where the fundamental right to move is respected and appreciated by all. Our view is that all human beings are entitled to respect, documents, and a process through which to move, settle and resettle in the world.
Mission
The mission of Pangea Legal Services is to stand with immigrant communities and to provide services through direct legal representation, especially in the area of deportation defense. In addition to direct legal services, we are committed to advocating on behalf of our community through policy advocacy, education, and legal empowerment efforts.
Organizationally, we aim to create a non-profit that is scalable through a sliding scale fee structure and can grow in immigrant communities around the United States.
Immigrant Justice Corps is a fellowship program (or legal incubator) to train people to serve as legal assistants for immigrants in the US. Its application is currently open for a new round of fellows — with applications due in just over a week. Both JDs and non-JDs can apply to serve immigrants through the Corps
It offers two kinds of fellowships, Justice Fellows and Community Fellows. Justice fellows are placed with legal service groups and work with their host to represent complex cases. Community fellows are placed in organizations in community groups and conduct outreach & represent community members on more basic cases.
It accepts 15 Community Fellows annually, from a pool of non-JDs, including people with just a college degree. It offers an unset number of Justice Fellows to recent law graduates and law clerks. This year there are 25 Justice Fellows.
Its self-description:
The Immigrant Justice Corps (IJC) is the country’s first fellowship program dedicated to meeting the need for high-quality legal assistance for immigrants seeking citizenship and fighting deportation.
Inspired by Chief Judge Robert Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the IJC brings together the country’s most talented advocates, connects them to New York City’s best legal and community institutions, leverages the latest technologies, and fosters a culture of creative thinking that will produce new strategies to reduce the justice gap for immigrant families, ensuring that immigration status is no longer a barrier to social and economic opportunity.
Extension of the Community Fellowship application deadline:
The IJC is pleased to announce that the deadline for submitting applications for the Community Fellowship has been extended to May 15. Apply today!
Fixed – The easiest way to fix a parking ticket.
Fixed is an app that lets you hand off your parking ticket to the company, for them to fight it for you on your behalf. You pay them nothing if you lose the contest and have to pay the fine. You have to pay them 25% of your prospective fine if they win the ticket for you.
Here is a sampling of their apps’ interactions
It’s outsourcing a small bit of legal advocacy — so you don’t have to deal with traffic and parking court. The interactions couldn’t be simpler: you just take a photo of the ticket, make a few selections, and then you get notified of your advocate, your chances of beating the ticket, and other details about the process.
This is a possible model for other Legal Advocacy – Outsourcing products & services. Its’ cleanliness and simplicity make it seem quite promising.
For more details on the company and its business model, here is a CNN article by Heather Kelly about Fixed:
Few things enrage normally calm people like finding a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper of their car.Parking tickets can be infuriating, especially when they seem undeserved. (Officer, there’s no sign saying I can’t park here!). But most people don’t want to invest the time and energy to would take to dispute them.
Now there’s a new iPhone app, Fixed, that will fight parking tickets for you. The app, expected to launch next week, will do the heavy lifting of contesting a ticket: suggesting reasons it might be invalid, gathering supporting evidence and submitting the proper appeals paperwork.
If the driver beats the ticket, they pay Fixed 25% of what the citation would have cost. If they can’t get out of the ticket, Fixed doesn’t charge them anything.
In this way, Fixed hopes to add navigating bureaucracy to the list of urban tasks and nuisances — catching a cab, ordering food, finding a place to crash — made easier by popular tech startups.
Fixed hopes to capitalize on people’s feelings of injustice over unfair parking tickets.“When you mention parking tickets to people it engenders such an emotional reaction … because so many people think they’ve received an unfair parking ticket,” said Fixed co-founder David Hegarty, who came up with the idea after getting six parking tickets in one day. Much of this anger is directed at local governments, which many people see as using parking tickets to fill budget gaps.
That emotional response, as well as a desire to not shell out $100 for blocking a couple inches of someone’s driveway, could make Fixed a hit. But its success will depend on how good the service is at navigating parking laws, which are often a confusing hodgepodge of local and state ordinances.
Here’s how Fixed works: When someone gets a ticket, they snap a photo of it on their iPhone and enter the violation code. The Fixed app will tell them what percentage of those types of tickets are usually overturned and then show a list of possible reasons it could be found invalid. For example, a street cleaning sign might be obscured by a leafy tree, or a parking meter could be broken.
If the motorist thinks they have a case, the app will prompt them to capture any additional photographic evidence with their phone and then digitally sign a letter.
Fixed has contracted with a team of legal researchers fluent in local traffic laws who will review each case before printing out the letter and submitting it via snail mail to the city. Over time, Fixed hopes to learn more about what methods and which errors have the highest success rates when contesting tickets. That information will be used to make the system more automated.
“It will always be reviewed by human eyes before it’s sent, but I’m pretty confident that we can get to the point where 80% of tickets are 95% automated,” said Hegarty.
Fixed is expected to launch in the Apple App store next week, although its service will only be available in San Francisco at first. The startup has been testing its service with a small group of 1,000 people, mostly friends and friends of friends, and there’s already a waiting list of 25,000 people wanting to sign up.
Hegarty and with Fixed’s other two co-founders, David Sanghera and DJ Burdick, hope to expand into the top 100 U.S. cities over the next 18 months.
San Francisco is fertile ground for motorists who can effortlessly rack up hundreds of dollars in parking tickets. As in many cities, parking in San Francisco is an exercise in frustration, with a limited number of spaces on the street and parking garages charging top dollar.
The company hasn’t had any official talks with the city. But Hegarty hopes his service is not seen as adversarial. Rather, he thinks Fixed could help people pay their legitimate parking tickets in a more timely manner.
“We do not have concerns if people want to use a third-party service, but there is no secret to overturning a citation if it has been issued erroneously. If someone feels that their citation was written in error, they might want to consider protesting themselves, for free,” said Paul Rose, a spokesperson for San Francisco’s transportation agency.
San Francisco issues about 1.5 million parking tickets every year, typically for $45 to $115 each (there are also some significantly pricier violations, such as having an expired plate or abandoning a car on a highway). The fines add up to about $95 million a year, according to Hegarty.
Of those 1.5 million citations, only five percent are actually contested. And of that small amount, only 30% are actually overturned, according to Rose. There are three rounds of appeals — two by mail and a court hearing.
Fixed will only handle the first two appeals for the time being.
The number of overall citations in San Francisco has fallen in recent years as the city has rolled out its own technological tools, such as pay-by-phone and meters that take credit cards, in an effort to make payment easier.
“We’d much rather have people pay the meter than pay a fine,” said Rose.
Fixed’s business model isn’t completely new. There are companies that handle driving and parking violations for large corporations such as FedEx and UPS. In New York City, commercial delivery companies account for 20% to 30% of the city’s 10 million parking tickets every year, according to Crain’s New York Business.
The difference is that Fixed is making this service available to individuals. Hegarty can see eventually expanding into speeding tickets and other small financial annoyances, such as cable company fees. He thinks Fixed could help in any area where the fee amount is small enough not to protest in person, but still big enough to make someone angry.
“That’s our sweet spot,” he said.
via NYC Housing Court – Resolution Assistance Program (RAP).
New York just began a pilot program of Court Navigators for Housing Courts in some jurisdictions. Non-lawyers would help self-represented litigants navigate the court system.
The Court Navigator Program was launched in February 2014 to support and assist unrepresented litigants – people who do not have an attorney – during their court appearances in landlord-tenant and consumer debt cases. Specially trained and supervised non-lawyers, called Court Navigators, provide general information, written materials, and one-on-one assistance to eligible unrepresented litigants. In addition, Court Navigators provide moral support to litigants, help them access and complete court forms, assist them with keeping paperwork in order, in accessing interpreters and other services, explain what to expect and what the roles of each person is in the courtroom. Court Navigators are also permitted to accompany unrepresented litigants into the courtroom in Kings County Housing Court and Bronx Civil Court. While these Court Navigators cannot address the court on their own, they are able to respond to factual questions asked by the judge.
In addition to this court-based program, the courts will also be utilizing non-lawyers to provide legal information and access to homebound individuals.
The Navigators would perform the following functions in certian proceedings:
The Court Navigator Program trains college students, law students and other persons deemed appropriate by the Program to assist unrepresented litigants, who are appearing in Nonpayment proceedings in the Resolution Part of Housing Court or the Consumer Debt Part of the Civil Court.
Nonpayment proceedings are cases where landlords sue tenants to collect rent. In these disputes, tenants and owners/landlords face the possibility of losing their homes through eviction or foreclosure. Consumer debt proceedings involve credit card companies, hospitals, banks or any other person or company that a litigant may owe money to. Despite the high stakes, most litigants appear in court without an attorney to advocate on their behalf.
In Kings County Housing Court, the Program operates in partnership with the non profit organizations University Settlement, and Housing Court Answers.
The goal of the Court Navigator Program is to help litigants who do not have an attorney have a productive court experience through offering non-legal support. Participating volunteers work in the courtroom under the supervision of a Court Navigator Program Coordinator. They have the opportunity to interact with judges, lawyers and litigants, and to gain real-world experience. Whatever a student’s goal is in volunteering — helping people in need, making new contacts, learning more about assisting a person in court or developing professional skills — the Court Navigator Program sets the stage!
For more information contact: courtnavigator@nycourts.gov
Court Navigators:
- Help in using computers located in the courthouse to obtain information and fill out court forms using the Do It Yourself (DIY) computer programs.
- Help find information about the law and how to find a lawyer on a website called Law Help
- Help persons find resources in the courthouse and outside the court to assist in resolving their cases.
- Help persons collect and organize documents needed for their cases.
- Accompany persons during hallway negotiations with opposing attorneys.
- Accompany persons in conferences with the judge or the judge’s court attorney.
- Respond to a judge’s or court attorney’s questions asking for factual information on the case.
Court Navigators do not give legal advice or get involved in negotiations or settlement conferences. Generally, court navigators also do not give out legal information except with the approval of the Chief Administrative Judge of the Courts.
A two and half hour seminar and a training manual will provide information on what a navigator can do to help.
Training topics include:
- Civil and Housing Court Overview
- Basics of Consumer Debt Cases and Nonpayment Proceedings
- Interviewing and Communication Skills
- Using the DIY Computers and Law Help
Prospective volunteers are trained at their school or at one of the Civil Court of the City of New York courthouses.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Consumer Law Design — meaning, how do we build new products & experiences for lay people who want to get their legal tasks accomplished well. These are the subdomains of Consumer Law that I’ve drawn out — step by step in a linear process.
- How to figure out you have a legal task to get done at all
- How to put a name on exactly what this task is & why it’s important
- How to prepare yourself to know what steps are needed to accomplish it
- How to find the resources or advocate that will help you accomplish it
- How to actually get the task done, step-by-step
- How to evaluate whether you’ve gotten the task done sufficiently (& perhaps also give feedback to the resource-provider or advocate about how the process has been)
Of course not all consumers of law will follow these steps in order, or need help on all 6. But it’s useful to think of the entire possible flow. If you are looking to design a new legal venture, there are many of these steps that are yet to be tackled. If you are already selling consumer law products, then there is a possibility to integrate support for more of these steps along the chain.
Many of the current crop of legal startups are focused on Step 4 — how to find a lawyer to help you get your legal task done. For example, Mary Adkins on the Huffington Post has a new article on the startup Priori Legal which focuses on how to get a consumer a better lawyer. (HT to Umbreen for sending this article along to me.)
Adkins interviews the co-founders of Priori Legal, Basha Rubin & Mirra Levitt, about what their model is & what kind of consumer law model they are looking towards.
Some themes are echoed here, which have been becoming increasingly clear to me of late. They could be useful to anyone interested in building new legal tech:
- The DIY-forms model is not enough. Helping a consumer put forms together is a low-hanging fruit that some companies may do well, but there are many more opportunities for consumer law
- Finding a great lawyer to work with is not an easy task online. The website experience is not rich enough with cues, advice, and signals for an average consumer to feel supported or in a trustable environment. Getting a consumer coming to a website to trust a lawyer she meets on the site is a huge hurdle, that companies need to pay a lot of attention to. I have some ideas for experiments in this space — but the general insight is that putting a photo and a name of a lawyer on the site & then saying “trust him” is not enough.
- How to balance trust with efficiency? Building trust online is a long process, lots of talking & meeting to make up for the lack of our usual signals that we get in a face-to-face context, when we have more sources of information about whether a potential lawyer is trustworthy enough. But the consumer also wants to just get their legal task done. So how can we get the consumer who is both hesitant to trust and also in a perceived rush to get the task done? Striking this balance, of having a quick & efficient process and also building up trust & supporting the consumer to make quality choices in hiring a lawyer — is going to be a particular challenge.
Now on to the article, and Priori Legal’s approach:
How does Priori work?
There are already lots of ways to find a lawyer on the internet. Some sites aim for comprehensiveness and produce pages upon pages of results—accuracy notwithstanding. Others are bargain-basement cheap, where you can hire a lawyer for $99.99 without the slightest nod toward quality.
What we’re doing is different than anything else out there. You get a short-list of vetted lawyers and pre-negotiated pricing options at a 25% discount off market rates with fixed fees, where possible, for comparison. Then, after you’ve chosen a lawyer, you schedule a half-hour complimentary phone call through the site. If you decide to work with the lawyer, all payment and billing happens through the site, as well.
Who can use Priori? Your site says “for small businesses,” but what does that mean? Could an artist who is a freelancer use it?
Anyone who wants to talk to a lawyer for a business-related matter. Our lawyers practice in a wide range of areas that service small businesses and can help from a straightforward trademark matter to complex litigation. Which is to say: Freelancers can definitely use it, too. Freelancers encounter many of the same legal issues and questions that small businesses do but often don’t have the time or business infrastructure to handle those issues. We have many lawyers in our network who are extremely interested in working with freelancers—both to resolve legal issues and think more proactively about avoiding future problems.
What kinds of lawyers use it?
Small-practice lawyers with an entrepreneurial, innovative mindset who are passionate about providing high-quality legal counseling to small businesses. We vet all the lawyers we work with through personal interviews and reference checks. It’s certainly no free-for-all. These are people who went to top schools and worked at top firms, but decided they wanted to strip away many of the inefficiencies of big firm practice to offer services and advice to small businesses owners and individuals at competitive rates.
How much does Priori actually save people on legal fees?
Straight math answer: 15%. Priori negotiates a 25% discount with each lawyer on our site, and we take 10% on fixed fees for our Management Fee.
More holistic answer: In our conversations with small businesses, we hear a lot of, “I meant to hire a lawyer to deal with [insert issue here] but I couldn’t find the time and I didn’t know how to go about finding the right lawyer in the first place.” Time is money for small businesses. Our business makes it possible to easily connect with a lawyer saves money down the road.
How is the field of law going to change, and do you envision Priori playing a role in this?
Economic pressure on fees has existed for years now. New technologies–everything from document production services, e-discovery, predictive coding, and services like ours–are changing the way lawyers spend their time, increasing the value of certain legal skills and decreasing the value of others.
Many consumers have noticed the proliferation of do-it-yourself (DIY) document sites, such as LegalZoom. These sites make it easier for consumers to go it alone and not hire a lawyer. Though proceeding without a lawyer is problematic except for the most basic legal issues, these site have already—and will likely continue to—greatly enhance access to the forms required to complete simple legal tasks.
But these kinds of DIY services have barely scratched the surface of how technology is going to change the way consumers find and relate to legal services because they address such a limited swatch of the legal market. Though there may have to be a contraction in the total number of lawyers, many of these technologies mean lawyers can have more control over their practices and be able to spend more time advising clients and less time processing paperwork. We see Priori as very much part of this movement.
Is Priori like the health insurance marketplace for law? Are there tiers named after metals?
Yikes. We hope it’s less confusing!