I’ve been prototyping various means to deliver & build legal knowledge — with a specific consideration of bolstering Access to Justice. One pathway, of course, is Visualized Law.
I’ve been playing with it with cartoons and illustrations, and in other forms (hyperlinked, layered checklists — visual expert systems).
One promising prototype is the Visual Mind Map, that is hyperlinked & lively with images, videos, & other cues that can guide the user through. The promise of such a map is that it lets the user locate themselves in a specific cluster of resources within a broader field of information. They can see the broad scope of the area they are in, while still focusing in on what precise information they need to retrieve & actions they need to pursue.
What would such an interactive legal mind map look like in practice? See this embedded Popplet for a first generation play with this format. I’ve used Popplets a lot for my own brainstorming, paper-writing, research, and collaborations with teams. I know there is great potential in scoping out a version of such a mind-mapping specifically for legal resources.
I see a future mash-up of interactive mind map diagrams with a curated, semi-open wiki format. I would love all the legal knowledge and advice out there on a specific legal problem to be extracted out of forums, pamphlets, q-and-as, blog posts, news articles, and other random clips of text around the web — and diagrammed out clearly & visually (if not beautifully too).
I can understand legal topics better when they are composed on the page in a meaningful way, and my guess is that most people with legal problems who are searching around the Internet would also benefit from a Legal Map to ground them & guide them. No more blocks of text!
Another kind of navigator, that shows you how to get from point A to point B, from problem to resolution — this one came out of our immigration hackathon.
Could we use the same methods of those television lawyers who bombard daytime-tv-watchers with ‘Are you injured? Can you sue? Call now to find your rights!’ — to increase lay people’s awareness of their rights, of civil remedies, of free or low-cost legal services?
On Friday July 24th, 2015 the Bay Area NPR-affiliate, KQED, reported on a local juvenile court that takes a unique user-oriented approach to justice.
Matthew Green’s report Inside Oakland’s Youth Court, Where Kids Call the Shots describes the Centerforce Youth Court, that takes on offenders who are juveniles with first-time misdemeanors. Most everyone working in the court are also juveniles — including the jurors judging the offender, the attorneys prosecuting and defending her, and the bailiffs and clerks ensuring the court operates correctly. The only non-juvenile is the judge.
The overarching goal of the program is to reduce recidivism, promote restorative justice, and reduce the mainstream court’s caseloads by redirecting these types of juvenile cases to this special design — which promote more community involvement and workshops.
This style of youth court exists throughout the US, with more than 1000 nationwide and some 120 in California.
What would other radically redesigned court systems look like — particularly ones that take the peer-to-peer model to heart? Could other specific types of cases be siphoned off the mainstream criminal/civil systems into courtrooms & organizations designed to be more community-oriented, rehabilitative, and understanding from the lay-person’s perspective?
On a recent evening, kids waited nervously in the hallway for their trials to begin. The court serves about 120 offenders each year, usually referred by police or school officials. To participate, offenders have to first confess to their crimes.
The docket was full that night – cases ranging from vandalism and minor drug possession to theft — as in the case of one shy young lady named Preva, who stole some makeup before a piano recital.
“Preva wanted this night to be perfect, every little thing, so she went to a store and stole some makeup,” Gabrielle Battle, a petite 13-year-old serving as Preva’s attorney, tells the jury.
“She was blinded by the idea of perfection and looking perfect for her big night. … I will prove to you, the jury, that Preva was just a young kid making a mistake, and she is sorry for what she did.”
Following opening statements, the jurors ask the defendant questions and then deliberate. Decisions are legally binding: If defendants complete the sentences, their records are closed, as if the crime never happened.
“At the end of the day, their record is closed to the public,” explains Angela Adams, the court’s program coordinator. “On some job applications, there’s a form where they check off the box, ‘Have you ever committed a crime?’ and they’re able to check the box that says ‘no.’ ”
….
“When you come here, you actually get to, like, go to workshops, do community service, do things that can actually give back to the community,” says Akili Moree, another feisty 13-year-old who joined the program voluntarily last year and works the courtroom like a mini Perry Mason. “And you can learn from your mistakes, instead of just receiving a punishment that you’ll really get nothing out of.”
For Michaela Wright, things ended much better than she expected. The jury gave her 12 hours of community service, three workshops and two jury duties. She plans to start college this fall, with a clean record.
Wright says she appreciates that the process wasn’t just focused on punishment, and wishes she could say the same for her parents, who were none too pleased about her arrest.
When asked if she got in trouble at home after her arrest, she simply replied:
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.
One of the projects on my front-burner is getting a great legal navigator built, that takes a person step-by-detailed-step through a legal process. Here are some of the sketches from my notebooks on how I hope to actually lay these out on a webpage and/or printed page. Composition has turned out to be a fun but non-linear design challenge. How to lay out lots of complicated steps thoroughly, but without overwhelming the user? You can see some of my rough initial thoughts here in my sketches.
On the show, a civil court case will play out, and the TV-watching public will play the jury. Like with American Idol or other reality shows, people watching at home can use their digital devices to vote on the outcome they think best.
Producers from other reality competitions — Master Chef & Project Runway — will also be working on this show as well.
What does this mean, is it good or bad? One part of me is excited for more view into the realities of the legal process on primetime television — perhaps this is a democratizing effort to make the legal system more comprehensible and visible to normal people. And like other online proposals to crowdsource dispute resolution, through lots of people voicing ‘what’s right, what’s wrong’ — then there might be some model that could be useful in new dispute resolution design.
But my big fears are (1) that a narrative/reality-based show approach will oversimplify the case and lead to distorted outcomes, and (2) that like with Serial, when you open a real-life case open for public scrutiny through mass media, the public might end up pursuing mob justice on platforms like Reddit and otherwise.
Any thoughts, should we be hybridizing our justice system with entertainment channels? Is there any upside to this that makes it worth the potential risks?
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).
—
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!
Could we build stronger legal public relations, outreach, and onramping to the world of legal services?
One stream of ideas for improving access to justice: can we brand legal services & lawyers, to make them more known, more trustworthy, more purchase-able & engaging for non-lawyers?
