Category: Innovations

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Ideabook Work Product Tool

Visual, Machine-Readable Legal Briefs

An idea for schematically diagramming a legal brief — to make it more instantly clear what its content is.

Legal Design Idea - Make Briefs more comprehensible with maps and layers

Ideabook - visual legal briefs

Legal Claim Map - Brief Redesign - Ideabook - visual legal briefs

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.

Better modeled legal brief

Formally modeling legal briefs and opinions

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Ideabook Training and Info

Legal Concept Card

Ideabook - 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.

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Ideabook Procedural Guide

Google Maps for Law: Interactive, Personal Process Map

Legal Design Ideabook - google maps for law
Could we build an interactive & responsive map, that would show a person the steps and path of a legal process — and then document where they are on it?

This would be a personal, living map for the person to follow. It could be formatted like a roadmap, a flowchart, or a decision tree.

Legal Design Projects - title cards-12 - interactive legal map User Flow - Legal Navigator Maps - Concept Design of a user experience flow Legal Navigator Maps - our initial idea

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Advocates Ideabook Integration into Community

Legal Care Team

Legal_Design_Concepts - legal care team
Could we create a collaboration platform & network that would provide a holistic service for a person with a legal problem — so they have all the different kinds of support they need?

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Ideabook Work Product Tool

Mobile tech for dispute resolution

Online_Dispute_Resolution
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?

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Current Projects Integration into Community

The DOJ’s Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable Toolkit

Last week I was at a symposium at the Univ. of South Carolina Law School, all about access to justice and doing more empirical, data-driven research about how to create better & more impactful access initiatives. Karen Lash, the Deputy Director of the DOJ’s Access to Justice Initiative, presented on what the federal government is doing to address civil legal needs in the US.

In 2012, the White House Domestic Policy Council & the DOJ launched a working group (the Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable) that would explore how diverse federal agencies could include civil legal aid needs in their agendas, to help improve their specific objectives. The driving insight is that legal aid can help all kinds of problems not typically thought of as “legal problems” — like health, housing, education employment, family stability, and community-building.
Open Law Lab - doj - legal aid interagency roundtable toolkit - Screen Shot 2015-03-29 at 3.26.17 PM

The Roundtable group has released an online Toolkit, that provides a roadmap to ways in which legal services can be used by other — not specifically ‘legal’ groups — to serve vulnerable & underserved groups. The toolkit is available on the DOJ’s website — here are some of the pages & resources covered.Open Law Lab - doj - legal aid interagency roundtable toolkit - Screen Shot 2015-03-29 at 3.26.25 PM

Open Law Lab - doj - legal aid interagency roundtable toolkit - Screen Shot 2015-03-29 at 3.26.31 PM

And here are photos of the Toolkit as printed out in a hard copy. It has lots of explanations, stories, and resources to begin thinking about legal aid in a more holistic way — how legal processes can help a person with other ‘social service’ problems.

DOJ civil legal aid toolkit

DOJ civil legal aid toolkit

I am excited by this multilateral, collaborative approach to civil legal aid. Since most people don’t think of their problems as ‘legal problems’ (even though they could use legal means to address them) — and since many social service providers & government workers don’t understand the power of legal channels to address root causes of other social problems — we as legal professionals need to be better at explaining how legal aid can help them in their mission to serve their clients. And we need to give clear, procedural ways for them to access legal support for their clients.

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Ideabook Training and Info

Can we use games for legal engagement? from Stephanie Kimbro

Margaret Hagan - games for online engagement - Steph Kimbro
A sketchnote of the start of a talk from Stephanie Kimbro, speaking at Univ. of South Carolina Law School about her research on how games & gamification mechanics and motivators could be used to improve the delivery of legal services.s

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Current Projects Training and Info

Cartoon interventions for legal engagement, from Jim Greiner

Some quick sketchnotes of a talk from Jim Greiner of Harvard Law School, speaking with Univ. of South Carolina Law School about how to engage people in debt procedures — how to get them to show up in court. They tried to reach out to people in debt proceedings with paper-based, cartoon-based interventions. They created a cartoon character and storyboards to explain the coming proceedings & try to orient and activate the litigants.
Open Law Lab - Margaret Hagan - Legal Services - Jim Greiner Open Law Lab - Margaret Hagan - Legal Services - Jim Greiner 2

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Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

Exploring Models of Triage Tools

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.

Triage Models - Margaret Hagan sketch - legal navigators

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!

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Current Projects Integration into Community

Integrated Legal-Medical care at health centers

The National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership has a New issue brief on medical-legal partnership and health centers. Marsha Regenstein, PhD, Joel Teitelbaum, JD, LLM, Jessica Sharac, MSc, MPH, and Ei Phyu authored the piece “Medical-Legal Partnership and Health Centers: Addressing Patients’ Health-Harming Civil Legal Needs as Part of Primary Care.” You can download it as a PDF here.

The brief explores the link between social & economic issues — like income, housing, education, employment, legal status, and personal/family stability– and how civil legal aid and health care can combine to provide positive impact on these issues.

Civil legal aid becomes an ‘enabling services’ that allows people who have come in as medical patients to a health care facility to get the appropriate government services and support. Legal aid supplements and reinforces the medical care, by addressing root issues that have led to medical problems. Legal help in hospital help patients to deal with health-harming civil legal needs, like those around housing and utilities.

Medical-legal partnerships train clinicians and health care staff to know enough about the law to spot when a patient has a potential legal issue. Then this health care worker can hand the patient off to an in-house legal worker (who may be part-time or permanently at the facility) to get the legal support for their problem. Sometime the lawyer comes into the medical exam room, sometimes they may schedule a follow up off site.

The majority of patients seen at health centers are living at or below the poverty level, and because of this, they have unmet legal needs — related to housing, public benefits, education — that negatively impact their health. Medical-legal partnership is an approach to health that integrates the expertise of health care, public health and legal professionals and staff to address and prevent these health-harming civil legal needs for patients, clinics and populations. There are currently 60 FQHCs and Look-A-Like health centers that operate medical-legal partnerships with civil legal aid agencies across the United States. In the fall of 2014, HRSA released guidance, which clarified that civil legal aid services may be included in the range of enabling services that health centers may choose to provide to meet the primary care needs of their patients.

This issue brief explores the medical-legal partnership approach to health in the context of health centers. It is intended to help health centers understand the benefits – to patients and to their institutions – of partnerships with civil legal aid agencies, and to introduce additional resources that can help health centers implement these programs.