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?

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Ideabook Work Product Tool

State Court Redesigns

Open Law Lab - State court - David Boies Ted Olson
Ted Olson and David Boies, the legal team behind Prop 8, have been working with the ABA, worked with a task force on the Preservation of the Justice System. They gathered input from stakeholders around the country on how the court experience could be improved — at the same time as state budgets are cut for courts. Here they are framing the problem space.

This work can be a rich source of on-the-ground research and insights that could fuel a tech- and design-driven process to build new interventions (even small, modest ones) that would improve both the efficiency of the court system & the stakeholders’ experience of it.

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Ideabook Work Product Tool

Access to Justice Tech: Concepts

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice tech

I’ve been searching around for the current landscape of actual initiatives & concept designs for tech tools to provide more access to justice.

I went back to a presentation, Assisted Legal Decisionmaking, by law professor Josh Blackman at Stanford last year. He showed some screenshots of legal products he’s been thinking of.

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice app 2

The concept app would allow the user to input their question. The app would respond with follow-up questions to nail the issue down more concretely. And then it would direct the user to the right resources. It follows the Expert System model, with guided interviews, that the A2J author and other access tech has relied upon.

Open Law Lab - Access to Justice app

Categories
Ideabook Work Product Tool

Assisted Legal Decision Making

Open Law Lab - Assisted Decision Making
Assisted Decision Making from Josh Blackman

Here is the presentation from today’s Stanford Law lunch, with law professor Josh Blackman discussing his startup to rival Pacer in distributing case information in a more usable way, with better ways to see relations between firms, judges, cases, companies, etc.

Assisted Decision Making from Josh Blackman

He also mentioned the possibility of developing a Siri, Attorney at Law, in which a non-lawyer could ask a simple question to their mobile phone: “My landlord won’t fix my heat, what should I do”. The phone would then suggest possible paths of action the non-lawyer could take: call tenant rights’ group; file a pro se suit against the landlord; find a lawyer; or compose a legal document complaining of the problem.

Blackman made the argument that these kinds of future legal tech could be an important means of access to justice — people could get solutions to their legal problems without the hassle and wait of going to a legal services office and waiting for help.


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Current Projects Work Product Tool

A2J Author for Non-Lawyers

Chicago-Kent Law School, out of its Center for Access to Justice & Technology, has started publishing A2J — Access to Justice apps.

A2J Author is a platform that lets non-tech specialists in the government, courts, and legal world to build websites & apps to let non-lawyers get more access — more easily — to the bureaucracy of the courts.

One instantiation is the A2J Guided Interview, which walks people who are representing themselves in court through the process.  It takes them through a flowchart of decisions and tells them what papers they’ll need to assemble for court documents.

You can try it out if you want to pretend you are filing an “Application to Sue or Defend as an Indigent in Cook County, Illinois”.  At the link, an online program to help you create the form to file this for free.