Some more radical thoughts from Denis Weil, provoking lawyers to rethink how they relate to their users to find effective paths toward innovation.
Category: Work Product Tool
What are the tools we can give to people to help them make strategies and carry them out as they go through a legal process?
A challenge from Justice Cuellar’s at the ABA Legal Innovation Summit.
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
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.
An idea for schematically diagramming a legal brief — to make it more instantly clear what its content is.
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.
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?
ZoningCheck is a legal web app to help business owners navigate zoning regulations. It’s a winner of one of the grants from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge from last year.
It’s an Open Government app, that processes local city codes into searchable, navigable experiences online. Rather than going in person to a government center, a business owner can search for their city’s code, find the rules that apply to their (prospective) business and property plans, and find what regulations & process will apply to them.
It’s in Beta for a limited number of cities, only in California. The design is ultra-simple & clean. It has four clearly demarcated steps: choose your city, your business type, your prospective location & then see if your business type would be permitted in that location or not.
Here’s a write-up from ZoningCheck’s team about their ideas & development.
ZoningCheck helps entrepreneurs find a home for their next business – Knight Foundation.
Peter Koht and Joel Mahoney are co-founders of OpenCounter, a winner of the 2013 Knight News Challenge: Open Gov. Below, they write about their work and the launch of their latest project, ZoningCheck.
To most citizens, zoning is invisible: We’re aware of it in the abstract, but it doesn’t seem to affect our daily lives. But if you’re an entrepreneur trying to open a business, zoning has a direct and immediate impact on your plans and your pocketbook.
Thanks to the support of Knight Foundation, we’re announcing a new product that will help entrepreneurs navigate the zoning clearance process. We call it ZoningCheck.
Here’s where it will help: Like the computer code that powers our laptops and mobile phones, the legal code that runs a city is dense and difficult to understand. There’s a lot of jargon, references to other documents, and all the narrative tension of a phone book.
Large corporations navigate this complexity by hiring site selection experts and attorneys to read the legal code for them. Small business owners, on the other hand, are often left to their own devices.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to open a bakery in an up-and-coming neighborhood. First you would need to get a copy of the city’s zoning map, and find out how your location—if you even have one picked out—is zoned. Then you would need to dive deep into the code to look for a list of approved land uses for that location. This list of uses can include quite a few arcane business types (“wool pulling and scouring” is one of our favorites in San Francisco) while being noticeably silent on more modern operations, like co-working spaces or food trucks—let alone a maker space.
In addition to picking the right use, our baker will have to learn about issues such as zoning “overlays” and special districts, and “conditional” rules. A bakery isn’t just a bakery if it includes a retail component, and it might not be permitted in a downtown area if it operates a wood-fired oven.
Confronting this level of ambiguity, entrepreneurs often will resort to a trip to city hall to talk to a planner, which can be an enlightening conversation, but usually involves a fee and a five- to 10-day turnaround for a formal response.
Enter ZoningCheck. This tool asks a few simple questions, such as “what type of business are you planning to open?” and “do you have a location picked out.” It also displays an interactive map of how the municipal code would process this hypothetical application. ZoningCheck turns a five- to 10-day process into a five- to 10-second process.
At OpenCounter, we believe that small businesses play a critical role in building strong local economies, and that governments can do more to help entrepreneurs get started. Our main product — opencounter.us — does this by guiding applicants through the business permitting forms, and calculating the costs and processing time to register the company. By moving the process online, we make an important city service available 24/7, and give municipalities a new level of insight into economic trends in their communities.
ZoningCheck expands this experience. It is built on open data and existing regulations. As part of our product launch, we’re offering to configure and host ZoningCheck for free for one year for qualified cities. If you work for a town or city and are interested in joining our public beta, please email us at beta@zoningcheck.us.
One branch of Legal Design Ideas I’m working on is using crowdsourced information to improve transparency of how legal regulations are implemented & processes are carried out.
An idea in this branch is a Parking Ticket Map — that could use a crowdsourced map like Ushahidi, or other reporting platforms. Individual users can report when & exactly where they’ve received parking tickets or traffic tickets.
How it would work
Ideally, the resulting map would be populated with advice on each parking space in a region — telling potential parkers what common problems with the parking space are. Peer advice can help ensure that the parker would be able to comply with all of the laws that apply to her when she’s parking. The map can also be a public resource, showing trends in enforcement & making it clear how government authorities are behaving.
The crowdsourced map could be integrated into other services, like Google Maps, or parking availability apps, that have already mapped parking spaces with some exactness. the information about
Why this idea?
This originates out of problems we’ve heard in user research, in which the parking signage does not communicate all the rules that actually apply to a parking space. There are some common problems that people make mistakes with, and that cost hundreds of dollars.
This might be about the special rules that apply to a parking space — like when it is sufficiently on a slant that the parker must have their wheels turned toward the curb. Or it might be when there is a danger in that space — like where registration stickers are commonly stolen & then the parker will be ticketed for out-of-date stickers.
This could also be useful in tracking trends, biases, and overpolicing.
The recent UX Sprint for Security & Privacy Tools in San Francisco featured a great list of projects that work to empower citizens. Most center on:
- How can we enable citizens to communicate free of government surveillance? and
- How can we help people report on & document atrocities and abuses?
Here is a list of the projects, with links to fuller documentation — as inspiration in what’s possible in empowering citizens and protecting them from government monitoring.
Guardian Project:
The Guardian Project creates easy-to-use open source apps, mobile OS security enhancements, and customized mobile devices for people around the world to help them communicate more freely, and protect themselves from intrusion and monitoring.
Commotion Wireless:
Commotion is an open-source communication toolkit that uses mobile phones, computers, and other wireless devices such as routers to make it possible for communities to set up decentralized mesh networks and share local services. Deployed already in a handful of U.S. cities and internationally, it is a key tool for internet freedom, providing alternatives where surveillance and censorship compromise traditional infrastructure.
Martus
Martus is a secure and open-source human rights documentation system used by human rights initiatives to document and preserve evidence and testimonies of human rights violations.
StoryMaker
StoryMaker is an open source app for making and publishing multimedia stories with any Android phone or device, as safely and securely as possible. It provides an interactive storytelling training guide, walkthroughs, and templates for users to follow as they plan their story and capture media. The app then helps assemble the content into a finished format that can be shared directly with social media or anywhere– no computer editing station required, even for video!
Lantern
Lantern is a network of people working together to defeat internet censorship around the world. Install and share Lantern, our new peer-to-peer censorship circumvention software, to give or get access to people in places where access is censored
The Serval Project:
Serval is a telecommunications system comprised of at least two mobile phones that are able to work outside of regular mobile phone tower range due thanks to the Serval App and Serval Mesh.
ChatSecure:
ChatSecure is a free and open source encrypted chat client for iPhone and Android that supports OTR encryption over XMPP. ChatSecure was originally available for only iOS devices, but is now also available on Android via The Guardian Project’s similar app, formerly named Gibberbot.
Open Whisper Systems:
Whisper Systems produces simple and easy-to-use tools for secure mobile communication and secure mobile storage. Their products include RedPhone and TextSecure, which allow encrypted VoIP phone and text (SMS) communication between users
People’s Intelligence
People’s Intelligence is an award winning idea that makes use of USSD, SMS and voice to establish a conversation with victims and witnesses of mass atrocities. The envisaged tool helps victims and witnesses to better document and verify their stories and provides them as well as relevant organisations with actionable information, thereby facilitating early warning and targeted assistance. It supports analysis and allows networking between affected communities, relevant organisations and experts through the use of ubiquitous technologies.
Mailvelope:
ChMailvelope allows individuals to encrypt and decrypt email in their favorite webmail provider following the OpenPGP standard. This includes, among others, Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com, and GMX. It integrates directly into the webmail user interface; its elements are non-intrusive and easy to use in a user’s regular workflow.