A thought from this morning ‘so session.
Category: Innovations
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.
Categories
Argument Assistant
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.
Categories
Legal Reviewer
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.
Categories
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.
Categories
Strategy Options Calculator
An idea to allow a person with a legal decision to make to play around with possible variables & the outcomes that would result. It would be a way to see multiple different scenarios, and weigh options before making a decision.
The National Expungement Project. is a Maryland-based effort to guide people with a criminal record through an eligibility check (can I expunge my record) and then direct them to how they can follow through on this procedure (where can I find good — and maybe even free — legal help?). Right now, there is a Beta version of a Maryland-based version (ExpungeMaryland.org) and there are plans for more states’ versions.
The project is run by two JD/technologists based in Baltimore — Jon Tippens & Jason Tashea. Their vision:
In search of a better way, we created ExpungeMaryland.org for a local non-profit. It’s a web app that connects people who need an expungement with volunteer lawyers.
Since creating ExpungeMaryland, bar associations, legal service providers, and even a state supreme court have asked us about using tech to improve access to expungement in their states. Our experience building ExpungeMaryland and other projects makes us adept at scaling this project nationally.
Our vision is to bring expungement apps to 25 states by partnering with local stakeholders. This will capture 80 percent of the U.S. population, and 75 percent of its annual arrests. We will also make the code available to any other states interested in replicating the project.
Here are the interface flows —
