Category: Ideabook

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Ideabook Training and Info

Law content on Wikipedia

Last week, I was a facilitator at a Shaping Davos design thinking workshop at Stanford’s d.school.  Several local non-profits had brought some big social impact challenges they’re facing — around gentrification, housing, food waste, community-building, and information access.

Margaret Hagan - Wikipedia workshop - 2015-01-22 19.46.19

Then small groups of engineers, public policy-makers, business people, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals spent 2 hours brainstorming & prototyping possible solutions to these challenges. Our goal wasn’t to solve the problem then and there, but rather to start scoping target areas for future work and laying out promising directions for solutions.

I was working with Wikimedia (the non-profit that runs Wikipedia among other projects) on the challenge of how it can get more content from more kinds of people — especially people in the Global South — included on Wikipedia.Margaret Hagan - Wikipedia workshop - 2015-01-22 20.18.08

The group ended up generating some interesting ways to make contributing to Wikipedia more lightweight, multimedia, and interactive.  Many of them tied back to work I had done a few years ago on how the UN could support more communication & knowledge-sharing among refugees. But the really interesting conversation happened after the official event ended, and I got to speak to the UX designer from Wikimedia who was attending the event.

I inquired about how we might be able to get more legal content onto Wikipedia. Since my main focus these days is how the Internet can be a better legal service-provider, I have been thinking of how to rope Google & Wikipedia into more thoughtful efforts to show high-quality, localized, responsible legal information to lay people searching online about legal problems.

If Wikipedia entries are nearly always the top hits of a Google Search — and especially as their content is given prime real estate in highlighted boxes on many searches thanks to Google’s Knowledge Graph — wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were more high quality Wikipedia entries on legal matters?

I’m thinking especially of 2 use cases, where legal content on Wikipedia could be terrifically helpful:

  1. The law student who is trying to learn concepts, cases, and theories — and wants to do this with online content and references rather than the standard case book. (This was me as a law student — I was so disappointed to see how little legal commentary and expertise Wikipedia had to offer on what I was studying).
  2. The lay person searching for context & orientation for a legal problem that has cropped up in her life.  She is not necessarily looking to file papers, find a lawyer, or take any other concrete step along a legal process. Rather, she is trying to get literate in a legal topic & start to understand what this part of the legal world is about — and hopefully find links to jurisdiction-specific materials, if not actual legal providers.

Talking with Wikimedia’s UX designer, it seems there are several ways to get higher quality legal content onto Wikipedia, for both these types of users.

  • Get active inside the WikiProject Law to direct the creation of more legal content
  • Create a game experience over Wikipedia to feed and edit more content
  • Make Wikipedia content creation part of law school curriculum

One way is to be active inside the WikiProject on Law.  This is a collection of Wikipedia users who are trying to generate more quality content about law — covering everything from public policy to philosophy as it relates to law. Open Law Lab - Legal content on Wikipedia - WikiProject Law

If I — or you — wanted to join this WikiProject, we could help set out an agenda of what kind of legal pages should be created, and what the priority for content development should be.  The community is open to applications. New members can add to the group’s collective to-do list & direct content creation.

Another possibility for getting more law on Wikipedia is to build a new interface or app on top of Wikipedia.  One model for this is The Wiki Game.  A 3rd party developer built a web & app game on top of Wikipedia, that allows for content-consumption & -creation via quick, lightweight games.

Open Law Lab - Legal content on Wikipedia - The Wiki Game

This kind of venture would take some more work & inspiration. What would a gamefied experience of getting people to submit legal content to Wikipedia look like? Or could we gamify the checking, tagging, and editing of possible legal content? There could be a very engaging experience here, but I don’t have any precise thoughts on how something like ‘The Wiki Game’ could be adapted to legal content.

And the final idea — probably fairly feasible — is to integrate Wikipedia content creation into law school curriculum.  Could 1Ls be assigned the creation of Wikipedia articles for the topics and cases they’re studying? It would be nice to see all of law students’ study material be made open-source and usable by the crowd online.

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Advocates Ideabook

Design Lessons from the 1980s Legal Clinics for the Access to Justice

Consumer Law Design Insights - by Margaret Hagan - from Legal Clinics - dark brown

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
Categories
Ideabook Training and Info

Access to Justice & self-representation tools

As I’ve been writing up a paper on new legal tools & an agenda for access to justice innovation — I keep coming back to the same point.
Margaret Hagan - what we need for access to justice

To really address the access problem, we should be focusing on scalable, modular tools.  They could be in the form of software & other tech — or they could take other forms: new roles, new organizations, new workshops, new services, new designs of forms & pamphlets.

But the basic point is the same: we don’t just need more lawyers (though this is certainly needed too), we need to be investing on ways to help people get informed about legal processes & give them tools to navigate them.  Even if we (as lawyers) would prefer people to only use lawyers to address their legal problems, this is not what most people want and they will try the DIY route.  We should be building the tools that allow for more responsible & competent self-representation.

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Ideabook Work Product Tool

Legal Design Ideas: Crowdsourcd Parking Ticket Map

Legal Design Idea - Parking Ticket Map

One branch of Legal Design Ideas I’m working on is using crowdsourced information to improve transparency of how legal regulations are implemented & processes are carried out.

An idea in this branch is a Parking Ticket Map — that could use a crowdsourced map like Ushahidi, or other reporting platforms. Individual users can report when & exactly where they’ve received parking tickets or traffic tickets.

How it would work

Ideally, the resulting map would be populated with advice on each parking space in a region — telling potential parkers what common problems with the parking space are. Peer advice can help ensure that the parker would be able to comply with all of the laws that apply to her when she’s parking.  The map can also be a public resource, showing trends in enforcement & making it clear how government authorities are behaving.

The crowdsourced map could be integrated into other services, like Google Maps, or parking availability apps, that have already mapped parking spaces with some exactness. the information about

Why this idea?

This originates out of problems we’ve heard in user research, in which the parking signage does not communicate all the rules that actually apply to a parking space.  There are some common problems that people make mistakes with, and that cost hundreds of dollars.

This might be about the special rules that apply to a parking space — like when it is sufficiently on a slant that the parker must have their wheels turned toward the curb. Or it might be when there is a danger in that space — like where registration stickers are commonly stolen & then the parker will be ticketed for out-of-date stickers.

This could also be useful in tracking trends, biases, and overpolicing.

 

Categories
Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

Expungement.io App for youth

A group out of Chicago, the Mikva Juvenile Justice Council, is making an app to help young people understand & go through an Expungement legal process. The Knight Foundation is funding the project through its Prototype fund. The project aims “To create a prototype version of Expunge.io, a mobile app designed to aid juvenile offenders in navigating the legal process.”

via JJC Recommends App for Expungement.

Mikva’s Juvenile Justice Council met with the Cook County Board President, Toni Preckwinkle, to present their recommendation on creating an app for juveniles to get more information on the expungement process. The group has been working all through the summer to address the question of “what tools, policies, and practices do youth need to successfully transition from corrections to community?”

Through online research, site visits and talks with pioneers in the field, Mikva youth found that out of 25,000 arrests made in 2012, there were only 70 requests for expungement (expungement refers to the process of sealing prior convictions or arrests). Given this information, and the dearth of accessible information about the process, the Council suggested creating an Expungement App. This tool will serve to educate young detainees and parents about the process and help them find appropriate lawyers and classes.

The group is very excited about this project. “This will help make the expungement process more convenient for teens; teens can easily start the process from their phones,” they said.

 

Categories
Ideabook Work Product Tool

State Court Redesigns

Open Law Lab - State court - David Boies Ted Olson
Ted Olson and David Boies, the legal team behind Prop 8, have been working with the ABA, worked with a task force on the Preservation of the Justice System. They gathered input from stakeholders around the country on how the court experience could be improved — at the same time as state budgets are cut for courts. Here they are framing the problem space.

This work can be a rich source of on-the-ground research and insights that could fuel a tech- and design-driven process to build new interventions (even small, modest ones) that would improve both the efficiency of the court system & the stakeholders’ experience of it.

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Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Courthouse Design: Insights from Zorza and Keating

In 1994, Richard Zorza and Judge Robert Keating published a paper full of insights from their attempt to redesign the interfaces that judges & court officials used when prosecuting drug offenders, in Midtown Community Court.

This quick 4-pager paper The Ten Commandments of Electronic Courthouse Design, Planning, and Implementation: The Lessons of the Midtown Community Court nicely summarizes their findings into ‘Commandments’.

Open Law Lab - 10 Commandments A2j courthouse

On his Access to Justice blog, Zorza also has some new reflections, two decades out, on the redesigns he proposed for the court interface. That blog post also includes images of his proposed redesigns (not included here) of what the judge would see when making sentencing decisions, and also follow-through mechanisms to make sure the court was keeping track of the defendant’s path.

Zorza writes that the point of their design project was giving court officials more oversight & resources when making sentencing decisions in drug courts.

…the key to the concept was to combine immediacy of actual consequences with close judicial monitoring, and real community input into policy.   As we designed the technology, a major goal was to ensure that judges got broad information before they made a sentencing decision, and also afterwards, so they could monitor ongoing compliance.  Important to the model was having a broad range of intermediate sanctions available for the judge to choose.

The pair proposed a design that would give a variety of information about the defendant to the judge, as well as tools to track & monitor the progress after sentencing.

Some of the designs weren’t accepted, but some user research came out of the project, in the form of the commandments. The commandments are sometimes particular to the project Zorza & Keating were working on, and not generalizable to other legal design projects. Others (in bold) are more relevant widely.

One: Start with an Electronic Judicial Desktop
Two: Build a Web of Electronic Relationships Between Court and Other Justice Agencies
Three: Design the System to Collect and Display Information About the Progress of the Case Within the Courthouse, as Well as Information About the Case Itself
Four: Imaging Is not Enough. The Issue is Document Collection and Display
Five: Use Graphical Interface Design for Courts
Six: Use Color, Flashing, and Positioning to Enhance Information
Seven: Use Technology to Enhance Community Access
Eight: Build Tools that Put Users in Charge; Do Not Make them Feel Controlled
Nine: Use Automated E-Mail to Build Connections Between People and Data
Ten: Recognize that an Integrated Computer System Has the Capacity to Make Fundamental Changes in the Way a Courthouse Works

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Ideabook Work Product Tool

Access to Justice Tech: Concepts

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice tech

I’ve been searching around for the current landscape of actual initiatives & concept designs for tech tools to provide more access to justice.

I went back to a presentation, Assisted Legal Decisionmaking, by law professor Josh Blackman at Stanford last year. He showed some screenshots of legal products he’s been thinking of.

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice app 2

The concept app would allow the user to input their question. The app would respond with follow-up questions to nail the issue down more concretely. And then it would direct the user to the right resources. It follows the Expert System model, with guided interviews, that the A2J author and other access tech has relied upon.

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice app

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Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

How Might We: Provide DIY Legal Diagnosis

Open Law Lab - How Might We Provide Legal Diagnosis DIY

For a paper I’ve been working on, here is a preliminary mind-map I’ve been sketching out.

It’s a quick brainstorm of how DIY legal tools may be provided to non-experts. It considers what models might be breakthroughs, how technology might interact with the person, and what challenges might block their success.

The map is a work in progress.

 

Categories
Advocates Ideabook

An Angie’s List for Lawyers

I have heard from a few people that they want an Angie’s List for Lawyers — a service they are willing to pay for, to get quality, real, vetted reviews of lawyers in the area.  I decided to seek out some user research, from blog posts and other Internet discussions, to see what this ‘Angie’s List for Lawyers’ discourse is all about.

angieslist

Here are some queries on Angie’s List itself.

Speaking as someone who logged in today to try to find an attorney, I see this category as one that’s exactly what I have my Angie’s List membership for:

1. It’s important that I find a good one
2. I’m not an expert enough to know myself who is a good one
3. The industry is full of advertisements and misinformation
4. I wish I knew what experiences other people have had

This points out the scope of the need.  Some users find it very hard to navigate the (limited) information available about attorneys online and in other communications.  They want to hear recommendations of others.  They want to make a good investment — and feel that the choice is a very important one — but fear going down a wrong path.  Importantly, they (or at least this user) is aware of the limits of their knowledge about law, and want to defer to those who have more expertise.

Some more discussion from another user on the site:

I was truly confused as to why Angies List does not provide a category for legal professionals. I was thinking of signing up because I needed a good lawyer and when I noticed that they dont provide such a category, I called them. They claim that they do not want to list attorneys because the services provided by attorneys cannot be effectively rated. I highly disagreed. People go to attorneys for specific help (i.e. file for bankruptcy, real estate closings, divorces, etc.) and the services that the attorney provides to the person (i.e. timeliness, cost, professionalism, promises, knowledge, etc.) can easily be rated. I am not going to pay a monthly fee for this service if it doesnt include all areas that someone needs help with. What I mean is, whats the point for paying a monthly fee for this site if I could find a plumber but need to pay another site to find an attorney. It should be all in one site. Really, there reasons for not having attorneys make no sense, and they should be added.

This shows the resistance of Angie’s List to jump into legal service ratings.  Obviously there are some legal and quality dynamics behind the scenes, and Angie’s List feels it’s better not to take on the risks and difficulties of rating lawyers.  But the user need is still there…

Another quote from the same site.

I think rating attorneys would be a very valuable service. I’m a middle aged woman that has many young adults come to me for advice. When I’m asked how they can find a good attorney I just hang my head and sadly tell them that they have to talk around. Hopefully they can get a free interview. This has not always been good advice and is not always possible depending upon their situation. If there was a resource to go to where an individual could read about previous experiences of the services provided by an attorney, it would be a great asset. In my mind, Angie’s List is a prime place for this kind of referral

And another, scouting out what a legal problem situation looks like…

Legal services are one of those things:

(1) that you use only occasionally,

(2) that you’ve GOT to get good consumer information about beforehand to avoid disaster, and

(3) that it’s almost impossible to research effectively without a big network of family, friends, and colleagues.

In other words, it’s perfect for Angie’s List!

I got lucky a few weeks ago, finding an attorney to help an elderly friend with a housing problem, but I’ll be needing a completely different kind of lawyer in a few months for a house sale – so here’s hoping Angie’s List gets this category up and running FAST.

Here is some pushback from another poster on the same site — that makes some points on why reviews are hard and may be misleading — and so there should not be an Angie’s List style of referral.

It is difficult to rate attorneys because not only are there a lot of them, but there are as many specialties as there in the medical field. That said, it’s not that it can’t be done or that reviews don’t exist. Most County Bar Associations, such as Dallas County Bar Association, will have an Attorney Referral Program. The good part about it is that they will set you up with an attorney, and for $20 (unless it’s changed), you get 30 minutes of an attorney’s time. Sometimes that is all you need, sometimes you will decide to work with that attorney, sometimes that attorney will know a colleague who will be a better fit, or you can go back to the Bar Association and ask for another referral. This is a low risk way to get started.

Another difficulty with rating attorneys is that they can be rated on several aspects including legal expertise, absence of Bar complaints, bedside manner, how their practice is set up, how many “wins”, etc. Sometimes a non-lawyer isn’t even sure what kind of lawyer they need and may be barking up the wrong attorney tree, so to speak. (Another good reason to contact the county’s Bar Association where you live or where the disputed transaction/conduct took place. Anyone rating a lawyer, like other ratings here, will be doing so as much on subjective expections and win/loss rather than the true compentency and professionalism of the attorney. If I need a trial lawyer to take my case to trial, I’d be less concerned about his bedside manner and more with how he/she does in the court room. (A bit like how I don’t care how nice my surgeon is as long as he/she is the best cutter in the field.) However, if I need a tax lawyer, family lawyer, or estate lawyer, for example, my relationship with the lawyer may require more contact, and I would want to know not only about competency, reputation, ethics, costs, but also whether there is a fit, I feel comfortable, I trust I will be dealt with in a manner to which clients are entitled, among other things. These factors can all vary depending on whether the firm is small, medium or large.

It is best, if possible, to meet with several attorneys. There are a number of ratings sites on the web, but there is not one single site of which I’m aware that can truly encompass all aspects of whether an attorney is right for you. However, looking at these various sites can be a good start of what to look for and where to go. For any name you find or get, you will want to go to the website of State Bar of Texas (or whatever state is involved) and check to see that the lawyer and/or the law firm is in good standing. There’s more, but that’s a quick overview.

Interesting about this last quote: though the user is writing saying that there should NOT be a review site for lawyers, in the 2nd to last paragraph, s/he seems to lay out a set of factors that a Lawyer Rating site could be compiling and creating a wonderful, accurate, reliable rating score for a lawyer.  It could be an adjustable rating, based on the size of the practice, the type of practice, and the type of case.

Out of these user needs, an outline of a product may be coming together — not exactly like Angie’s List — but accomplishing ‘the trusted reviews of expert professional’ that are so in demand…