Class blog for justice innovation work

Margaret Hagan, Dec 16, 2021 In Winter Quarter, our Lab Team is working with the Stanford Law CodeX team, to co-teach a new class at Stanford Law School. It is a hands-on, project-based class, about how to make insurance contracts more accessible, intelligent, and human centered. It builds on our past classes on user-friendly privacy… Read more: Human-Centered Computable Contracts

From a team in the Justice By Design: Eviction Class, 2022. I: Overview of Activities  Our policy lab interviewed sixteen tenants, navigators, and landlords across the country, learning from their experiences and hearing their ideas. We asked general questions about their experiences with eviction, their experiences with seeking out help, and their ideas for change.… Read more: People’s experiences with eviction prevention

A design research report from Stanford’s Justice By Design: Eviction class in Winter 2022 This report is by the class team Trevor Byrne, Emma Dolan, Jordan Payne, Alexandra Reeves, Amy Zhai — along with the teaching team Nora Al Haider, and Margaret Hagan. As the eviction crisis spreads throughout the United States, there is an access… Read more: What are the Barriers Tenants Face to Accessing Eviction Prevention Help?

By Jonah Wu Student research fellow at Legal Design Lab, 2018-2019 Table of Contents 1. Can AI help improve access to civil courts? 2. Background to the Rise of AI in the Legal System 3. What could be? Proposals in the Literature for AI for access to justice 4. What is happening so far? AI… Read more: AI Goes to Court: The Growing Landscape of AI for Access to Justice

Brainstorming Potential Solutions in the Design for Justice Class: Language Access (Week 3) By Sahil Chopra Having experienced the court first hand, we returned to the classroom to revisit the tenets of Design Thinking and coalesce our thoughts, before engaging in a productive, rapid-brainstorming session. Here’s a quick reminder of 5 “tenets” behind the design… Read more: Brainstorming new Language Access self help ideas

Initial Observations at the Santa Clara Family Justice Center (Week 2) By Sahil Chopra During our second week of the course, we paid our first visit to the Santa Clara Family Justice Center in order to observe, explore, and immerse ourselves in the court experience. Our day at court was structured around exploring the self-help… Read more: Observing a county court for language access

For our Design for Justice: Language Access class, our teaching team made a canvas to help a design team craft a forward plan for the projects they have been working on to advance language access in the courts through technology. The canvas can be useful to have a one-page hand-off for a policy partner to… Read more: A Design Prototype for Policy canvas

By Sahil Chopra (Part of a series of posts documenting the Design for Justice: Language Access class) Entering home stretch of the Autumn quarter, we spent today’s class first synthesizing our findings and working on our final pitch to the California Judicial Council and then selecting one of our prototypes for further development. To start… Read more: Identifying A Single Prototype for language access improvement

by Sahil Chopra Language is the medium by which we interact with culture, express our ideas, and maintain our rights. Without “language access”, i.e. the ability to convey one’s thoughts effectively and understand others correctly, one is disempowered altogether. At a societal level this can lead to systemic inequality, whether intentional or not; and one… Read more: Design for Justice: Language Access — an introduction in week 1

by Margaret Hagan, also published at Legal Design and Innovation Along with Daniel Bernal, I’ve been teaching a Stanford d.school pop-up class, Design for Justice: Eviction. We’ve been working with a team of 10 students and a network of experts, legal aid groups, and courts, to plan out new ways to support people who have received eviction… Read more: The evolution of an eviction self-help website

In late April 2018, Daniel Bernal and Margaret Hagan taught the first part of the d.school pop-up Design For Justice: Eviction. The class focused on how we might better empower people who have received eviction notices (specifically, in Arizona) to know their rights, their options, and to go to court to fight eviction. In the… Read more: Eviction design class

This quarter, I’m co-teaching a class, Community-Led System Design with Janet Martinez at Stanford Law School/d.school. We are bringing various innovators who are doing human-centered design work in government and legal systems. We, and our students, will be documenting what we learn during this class from our guest speakers and our own work. The Public Policy Lab… Read more: Talking with the Public Policy Lab about design and government innovation

By Ayushi Vig, This was originally posted in our Medium publication Legal Design and Innovation In Community-Led System Design, a Stanford Law School/d.school course this quarter, we are speaking with people working on systems- and policy-design projects, from a human-centered design perspective. One of our guests was Verena Kontschieder, a visiting research student at the Center for Design Research.… Read more: The Rise of Design in Policymaking: In conversation with Verena Kontschieder

In our classes, we map out different users’ journeys through the court. This is one of the Northeastern University student teams’ map, that abstracts different users’ journey through housing court in Boston.

Last Friday was the final class in the Stanford Law School/d.school class Prototyping Access to Justice. Kursat Ozenc and I were teaching the course as a practical, service design effort. The big question guiding the work: if hundreds of thousands of Californians go to the courts to deal with their divorce, child custody, debt, and… Read more: Final report from Prototyping Access to Justice: 7 prototypes to make courts more user-friendly

A sketch from my notebook, while I was observing a waiting room in a Court Service center in Boston, for people who were waiting for help with housing cases.

Today we held our Prototyping Access to Justice class on-site at San Mateo County court house, specifically in and around the Self-Help Center and Family Law Facilitator. The six student teams are all at the point where they have working prototypes that they want to test. They each have hypotheses about how they can make… Read more: Designing a more user-friendly legal system: notes from the field

In our Prototyping Access to Justice class, Kursat Ozenc and I are leading student teams to get quickly from speculating about how the courts could be improved to implementing new concepts. In our class today, in week 3 of the course, we had the students make some more progress along the Journey of Prototypes. The… Read more: The Prototype Journey, from post it to wizard of oz

In Spring 2016, Margaret Hagan and Janet Martinez taught a course at Stanford Law School, through the Policy Lab program, called Prototyping Access to Justice: Designing New Legal Services for Self-Help (see the official class description on Stanford Law’s site here). In partnership with the California Judicial Council and Self-Help Centers in San Mateo and… Read more: Summary of Spring 2016 class findings on Self Help Centers

Court user experience can be heavy sometimes due to the entangled nature of court use cases and structures. This past week, our course participants took that challenge and conducted research in the field with court employees, and end users. When they were preparing to present their findings, we asked them to think them as highlight reels of… Read more: Creative research reels

Talking to the experts in the court system, we heard what some of the most wicked, common problems are for people — the common places that they fail in getting to a good resolution. It’s very hard to finish a divorce case. Even if you get it started, and do many of the tasks, divorce’s… Read more: Common Problems of people in the civil legal system

In our interviews with experts and court professionals, we identified some of the core challenges and needs. Here are some of the highlights: More and more people are coming to the civil court system without a lawyer Judges, clerks, and other court professionals have an obligation to be neutral, but they also must serve these… Read more: Self Help Center essential research

As we have been researching the status quo situation of the Self Help Centers, we’ve identified some common types of users. They are as follows. People with their kids, stressed and overwhelmed. They either can’t get child care, or brought them hoping to use court child care, but couldn’t because of the age/potty-training requirements People… Read more: User situations in Self Help Centers

After our first two classes, we began to identify some of the big questions that characterize how the court needs to improve. We decided to segment based on where the person is in their journey through the system. Each brief focuses on a different moment. We are going to use these design briefs to frame… Read more: Our big guiding design briefs