A tool that would read contracts & legal documents so that you don’t have to. It would boil it down into key things that you should know — the essential conditions, trade-offs, etc.
Category: Ideabook
Court Companion app
Could we have a tech-based companion for people going through a court process? It could have timing advice, location directions, and other support to make sure the person is prepared for their day in court.
The value of this design would be to coordinate all the resources into a single place — the app. It would assemble and time out the information, and remind people of it.
Strategy Options Calculator
An idea for schematically diagramming a legal brief — to make it more instantly clear what its content is.
What would a better legal brief look like? What would it be to submit writings for the judge’s consideration in ways that are more formally structured — so that these communications could:
1) be laid out systematically for the judge & her clerks (think in tables or side-by-side comparisons),
2) perhaps even made machine-readable (so that computers could process them and give the judge more ways to read/compare/index them), and
3) be composed by the lawyer/litigant in more straightforward ways (less laboring over blank pages in Microsoft Word, and more using universally accepted templates or forms).
I’ve hinted at this possible redesign in earlier posts – that one after a conversation with a clerk who wished that she could have tools to help her systematically compare & analyze opposing sides’ arguments. Now I’m picking up that conversation after speaking with an appeals court judge from Milan, Italy, who is exploring ways to formalize both judges’ opinions & lawyers’ briefs.
Legal Concept Card
An idea for better education around law — summing up a concept in a card, with a visual to illustrate it, and some key writeups of the concept. It would make the concept stickier and clearer.
This kind of movie poster version of the legal service or rule would be useful in getting people aware of its existence, and comfortable that they can understand the basics of it.
There could be a series of them — the 10 key legal concepts you should know to protect yourself in everyday life.
From my growing ideabook for new legal services, here is a sketched out note on what mobile tech could do for how we resolve small disputes between people. Whether it’s through the government courts or through a private solution, how can we use interactive communication tech to help people have a say about a problem they’ve experienced with each other, and then work their way through towards a resolution of this problem?
I’ve been thinking systematically about the suite of tools that we need to be building for better access to justice. I wrote earlier about the different product families — what some of these different camps of tools are. One I’m circling around with some intent is the Triage Tool.
A triage function would help take a person searching for legal remedy, and help them figure out what their condition is called in legal terms and what legal processes are open to them to achieve some kind of resolution.
Other terms for Triage tools: Eligibility-Checkers, Diagnostic Tool, Intake-and-Bucketing.
The main task of the triage tool is collecting essential info from the user, and then matching it with the system’s rules about what terms and paths fit their info.
I’ve been collecting many different examples of tech-based triage tools, and I’ll be publishing a pattern library with a discussion of what the main types of triage tools are, with examples of each. In the meantime, here’s a sketch I made as I start to group together this typology.
Do you know any triage tools that you think work well? Send me links, images, or write-ups — I will include them in my pattern library!