Category: Innovations

Categories
Ideabook

Legal aid group purchasing platform

What if legal aid groups banded together, to make their office, software, services, and other purchases together? If they buy in bulk and together, they can negotiate better prices, licenses, and other terms. A platform could bring these groups together to make smarter decisions (based on the wisdom of the group, so that each group doesn’t have to relearn the space or redo the negotiations). It can also save them money and time, and get more favorable conditions.

This idea came out of the Florida 2015 Legal Aid Summit, and was a finalist for the awards.

Categories
Ideabook Training and Info Work Product Tool

Interactive Online Workshops for legal tasks

Interactive Online Workshops for legal tasks
Could we take the workshops that self-help centers already run in person, and make online versions of them to get wider distribution? To people who can’t travel to self-help centers or need it during weekends or evenings? If we package up the guides into more usable formats, we can help amplify their impact.

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Ideabook Work Product Tool

Cover Sheets to Forms

Cover Sheets to legal forms
What if we made templated, user-tested Cover Sheets to all legal tasks (whether it’s filling out forms or going through a procedure) so that people have great introductions and orientations to the task before being asked to do it?

Categories
Current Projects Dispute Resolution

Small Claims online dispute resolution in British Columbia

Talking to Bonnie Hough of the California Judicial Council last week, she recommended checking out several great projects coming out of Canada — specifically British Columbia — for inspiration about how courts can be more user-friendly. Many of them are efforts of the Justice Education Society, which is a public-oriented organization that is developing new tech tools & new user-oriented approaches to delivering legal services.

One example is the Small BC platform online. It is an online dispute resolution system to at least get a person started with filing the forms & tackling the process to resolving a small claim.

Notice also the lady in the bottom right corner — she’s a virtual assistant who speaks in a friendly, conversational way to tell you what the site has to offer and get you started with using the services.

Good Legal Design out of British Columbia - Screen Shot 2015-10-04 at 9.10.18 PM

This page gives you the two main options they have to help you recover your claim — giving you a diagramatic view of what each has to offer & what you can start doing now. It’s action-oriented as well as informative.

Good Legal Design out of British Columbia - Screen Shot 2015-10-04 at 9.10.03 PM

 

Categories
Ideabook System Evaluation

CourtVoice Feedback Line

Inspired by the civic technology project CityVoice, that lets any person call up to leave a voice message about a problem they’re experiencing with their city government or infrastructure — can we provide a similar feedback loop in court and legal services?

Cityvoice - feedback to government

Categories
Ideabook System Evaluation

Court Feedback cards

Feedback cards - for court UX

What if people in the legal system had ways to give their feedback, so that the courts, lawyers, and other professionals could improve their services based on user experience metrics?

The metrics could be:

– comprehensibility

– accessibility

– ease of use

– sense of fairness

– positivity/negativity of experience

This is a simple feedback card — a piece of paper — from Uniqlo, a clothing store. Could we use these cards along with SMS text lines, phone voice lines, a visual ideas board, or other ways to gather user input into what their baseline current experience is, and what they would prefer.

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Ideabook Wayfinding and Space Design

Interactive Board of Resources

Legal Navigator Project - community board interactive resources

At courts, at community centers, at libraries, at cafes — can we have interactive boards full of resources and services that people could access?

Using a large touch screen, a court or clinic could have a Triage screen, a Resources Screen, or a Directions Screen. People could come up to ask a question or find resources.

The person could jump to the most relevant content — making it a more personalized experience, and to have an interactive experience akin to a human-to-human one.

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Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

Can we improve how we deliver legal help via the Internet?

This week I have been finishing up my research paper on what user-centered standards for better online legal help sites would be. I had surveyed lay adults about how they’ve used the Internet in the past to respond to legal issues, and then also had them do some searches for legal help & reviews of certain legal help websites.

I’ve been playing around with small graphics to sum up some of the comments that the users have reported back. Here is one such visual:

Internet for Legal Help user voices

In addition, at Legal Design Lab we have started a working group around this topic specifically. You can read about our process here, and our outcomes, standards, and work here.

Categories
Ideabook Procedural Guide

One-Page Self-Help worksheets

I have been sketching out some possible templates for what a good one-pager worksheet would be, to guide a lay person through a legal process. The he one-pager has limits, so instead of thinking about it as a total ‘process guide’, I’m thinking of it more as an ‘orientation tool’ that gives the person their bearings in a legal area, with some key terminology, major red flags and warnings, and an overview of what to be doing.

As for composition, my thoughts have been to prioritize white space (not try to cram information on), use icons & faces as accents & markers on the page, and show priority through font size & spaces.

The header is also key — I’m thinking that along with the title of the procedure, the header can also give a ranking about how difficult the procedure will be. This could be a way to encourage the user not to do too much on their own, and seek out expert help while going through it.

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Categories
Current Projects Integration into Community

How can social service providers get people to legal help?

During my Spring 2015 class at Stanford d.school/Law School on Intro to Legal Design, we were lucky enough to have Sacha Steinberger visit us and present on her Project Legal Link. I drew up some notes during her presentation, about what she’s working to do — bringing social service providers into the world of legal services.

Here are my sketches:

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Even if a social service case worker spots legal issues in their client’s situation, they often don’t know how to effectively reach out to get legal help for the client.

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Sacha has identified the social service caseworker as a key ‘legal portal’ — someone who can help get lay people to legal services that they need, and start them on the journey to resolving their problems around housing, debt, relationships, employment, custody, and other common problems that people have and don’t know there is legal recourse for.

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So what does Project Legal Link do, to help improve social services’ capacity to serve as an effective legal portal?image

 

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The ideal new workflow would be that social service providers would be this portal, and would do the following:

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Sacha’s approach is to make it easy for social service providers to know what to do when spotting legal issues and referring for legal help — and empower them to serve their client in fuller ways.

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With smarter caseworkers, then the client will get a fuller team of people to help them.

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