Justice Innovation
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.
News appeared today that NBC picked up a pilot from the man behind Law & Order, Dick Wolf, to create a show for next TV season, called You The Jury.
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?
More calls for streamlined legal help services, this time from Jim Sandman of the Legal Services Corporation.
A thought from this morning ‘so session.
We need to think from immigrants’ points of view — where they are now, what tech they use, who they trust.
Some more radical thoughts from Denis Weil, provoking lawyers to rethink how they relate to their users to find effective paths toward innovation.
A challenge from Justice Cuellar’s at the ABA Legal Innovation Summit.
I’m excited to see the development of Project Legal Link, a new type of resource that links social & legal services together in the Bay Area.
I was introduced to it last year by the woman who is making it happen — Sacha Steinberger. Sacha is a lawyer, & and decided to focus on the problem of how people other than lawyers can get the right legal help for their clients and users who have come for help on other kinds of social issues. She noticed that it’s hard for non-lawyers to figure out who to be reaching out to, how to make an effective referral, and how to get the right info from group to group.
The Tipping Point Community is funding her work & it is wonderful to see how the site has developed in a short time. She has built a visually appealing, uncluttered & graphic way to help non-lawyers figure out legal options for their clients. There is enormous value in building a system that ensures more holistic care for people with life problems (legal & otherwise) and coordinates warm hand-offs and info-sharing among different service providers.
Here is how the project is officially described, and then find some more screenshots of the site:
In partnership with Tipping Point Community, Project Legal Link assists social service providers to help their clients access legal services. Specifically, we train and equip caseworkers at social service organizations to identify legal issues and refer clients to the appropriate legal resources. We organize the legal landscape so caseworkers don’t have to, and we assist caseworkers in understanding and navigating it.
WHAT WE DO: Our work takes three primary forms:
Train: we train caseworkers to identify and refer legal issues;
Refer: we provide curated referrals for clients’ issues; and
Support: we provide support to caseworkers with questions such as whether a legal issue exists and what to do about it.
Ours is not a one-size-fits-all approach. We get to know each organization, we tailor our services to its staffs’ and clients’ needs, and we support the organization’s work by focusing on the removal of their clients’ legal barriers.
WHY WE DO IT: At Project Legal Link we know that:
The need for legal services is great: low-income households face an average of one to three legal issues each year. If unresolved, these issues are a barrier to meeting basic needs.
The legal system is not intuitive: the legal world is cumbersome, intimidating, and hard to navigate.
Social and legal services rarely coexist: on the social service side, most organizations lack tools such as legal screening devices, referral lists, and trainings related to the legal world.
Caseworkers are the link: caseworkers often become trusted advisors for low-income individuals. In a network of support, the relationship between caseworkers and clients are among the strongest.
Our bet is that caseworkers are a critical bridge between low-income people and the legal services they need. Project Legal Link aims to build on the trust between the caseworker and the client and assist caseworkers in moving their clients out of poverty.
An idea for having a document-software plugin (think, for Microsoft Word) that would track its lawyer & law students’ mark-ups of legal documents, learn where the arguments were and what good arguments are, and then use those patterns to make smart recommendations to the lawyer as she is crafting arguments in her document. It could be an encoded-up knowledge bank of what makes for good arguments & logic, baked right into the current workflows of how legal professionals create arguments.