Recent Posts on Justice Innovation

The National Center for State Courts has a working group of justice leaders who have released a December 2022 report “Just Horizons” — pointing to systemic vulnerabilities in the court system and opportunities for building a better future, where the institutions are strong, the public is served, and there is a healthy justice ecosystem. There…

As more courts use text messages to improve litigants’ access to justice, many wonder exactly how to set up texting. What are the words, schedule, and flow of text messages for a court to use? From our experience with working with criminal, traffic, housing, and other civil courts in doing text message projects, we have…

At the LSC ITC conference 2023, the legal help website People’s Law School in British Columbia, Canada shared their strategy to measure what works on their website. They were motivated by knowing ‘What works?” They want to know if the website is making a difference or not. Did they help people who were seeking guidance…

Lessons Learned from the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab cohort As eviction rates go back up following the court shutdowns and emergency moratoria during the pandemic, communities are struggling with the question: how can we prevent evictions? How can we help people stay in their homes, avoid lawsuits to force them out of their houses or…

The federal government is newly focused on Customer Experience (CX). That has meant that their teams are creating better websites, tools, and forms that can help people get their business with agencies done more easily. The Department of Labor has a team working on modernizing Unemployment Insurance. See their examples & guidance about how to…

Margaret Hagan, Dec 1, 2022 Reflecting back on all of our legal design work over the past 10 years, I’ve spotted a common pattern happening: Momentum builds around a justice reform policy that intends to address a fundamental problem in people’s ability to access the justice system. This could be around giving people facing traffic tickets…

The State Courts in Washington established a set of guiding technology principles for the development and release of new technologies in the justice system. They are benchmarks that teams can use to evaluate their new idea, pilot, or even existing program with. Equitable access to the system, with technology enhancing (and not diminishing) opportunities to…

Margaret Hagan, Aug 16, 2022 Building a network that’s researching, designing, and evaluating what works to increase access to justice Earlier this summer I was lucky to spend a Saturday in conversation with Professor Monica Palmirani & her research group CIRSFID at the University of Bologna. It was a pleasant afternoon talking about projects & giving feedback on early-stage…

Margaret Hagan, Jun 29, 2022 (Even if we should be moving away from forms altogether…) I am thinking a lot about forms these days! At the Stanford Filing Fairness Project, our team is working on a near future in which PDF forms no longer are key to people’s access to the court system. In that vision,…

Margaret Hagan, Jan 13, 2022 We have been talking and working on the importance of the justice system’s user experience — as have many others in other public interest sectors. We have been talking and working on the importance of the justice system’s user experience — as have many others in other public interest sectors….

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…

More legal aid and court groups are excited to use text message strategies to reach people facing lawsuits. Texting may help encourage participation, increase uptake of free services, and empower people to avoid defaults & other bad legal outcomes. But the problem many of them face is how to legally & ethically reach out to…

Margaret Hagan, Sep 14, 2021 If you are sued by your landlord to evict you from your home, how would you like to find out? The papers you get from the court — the Summons to the eviction trial, and the Complaint from your landlord about why they’re suing from you — most often are…

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.We…

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…

Margaret Hagan, Dec 22, 2021 Greetings from the Legal Design Lab! Our team has been busy throughout this year on both emergency projects and long-standing research & development work. We wanted to say hello, send our holiday wishes, and give you a few updates on what we have been working on. Hope you had a…

Margaret Hagan, Mar 30, 2021 Notes from a multi-city eviction prevention cohort Our Stanford Legal Design Lab has spent the past several years working to develop new solutions to address the eviction crisis. We’ve been redesigning the documents that courts send out to tenants who are being sued for eviction. We’ve built new websites to help tenants…

Nóra Al Haider, Oct 21, 2021 “Please wait for the host to start this meeting” Nowadays, in many jurisdictions, litigants can opt to use Zoom to access their hearing. This is one of the many effects that the pandemic had on the legal system. Webex, Teams and Zoom are starting to feel like a regular…

Rachel Wang, Oct 12, 2021 A spotlight on Hugh McDonald’s law review piece “Assessing A2J” Hugh McDonald published Assessing Access to Justice: How Much ‘Legal’ Do People Need and How Can We Know? in the UC Irvine Law Review earlier this year.The article helps us operationalize two terms that we use in legal design & policymaking: access to…

Housing Justice Work that gets to structural inequalities The Stanford Legal Design Lab has been collaborating with the National League of Cities to run a 30-city cohort, the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab. We run regular meetings, technical assistance sprints, and peer-learning to spread best practices on eviction prevention. And every quarter we have a big meeting on…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

This 99 Design article by Alex Bigman gives a photo tour of wayfinding designs from hospitals, airports, and other government buildings. If it weren’t for graphic design, you’d have a lot more trouble finding the restroom. Office buildings, museums and libraries would also become virtually impossible to navigate. And garages? Don’t even bother trying to…

This article by Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard of Indiana describes what justice issues arise out of language access problems in state courts.

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…

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…

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…

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….

More analogous learning from airports, this time from Dulles — and all their feedback prompts and props right around the security experience. These are all posted around the TSA, for people who have just gone through their pre-flight screening, to get feedback on the experience.

I have been scouting out service design inspirations, particularly from airports, that courts could use. This one is from JFK airport, in the Delta terminal. I was very impressed with their service design. They had taken over an entire gate with a help center that had all kinds of touchpoints: paper, phone terminals, people, kiosks….

A team from Justice Design at Osgoode Law’s Winkler Institute developed a prototype of an app that could prep people for small claims court, and take care of issues directly. Going to small claims court can be nerve racking, costly and time consuming. #B4 Small claims is an online dispute resolution app that will help…

Osgoode Law School’s Justice Design program created a prototype for Law Speak, a tool for people going through the small claims process who are not fluent in the dominant language. LawSpeak empowers those who may not speak English as a primary language to navigate the small claims court process. This app translates documents, keeps them…

A team from the Winkler Institute’s Justice Design 2016 class created a game Legal Go, inspired by Pokemon Go, but for learning law. It’s a way to train lay people on what the legal system is and how it works, through a mixture of in-person adventures and on-the-phone characters, challenges, and rewards. Their description: Inspired…

The National Center for State Courts has a 2004 article from Don Hardenbergh, president of Courtworks, on Trends in Courthouse Design :: Courthouse Facilities. In the article, Hardenbergh profiles the move to use the space of courts to make the judicial system more accessible, navigable, and open to the public. It is because of the…

East Bay Stand Down is a project offered in California in which at-risk and homeless military veterans can access all kinds of service help over four days. It includes medical and dental care, housing, driver’s licenses, court services, hygiene, and more.

Legal Server has a project Houston.AI, a new set of tools that allows for smarter intake of people, finding of their issues, and referring them to the right support. What? Houston.AI is a web-based platform designed to help non-profit legal aid agencies more effectively serve those who cannot afford attorneys. Comprised of a series of…

Florida Pro Bono Matters is a website that allows for matching volunteer lawyers with cases. It allows for legal aid groups to easily post cases from their case management system, to then be easily found, filtered, adn signed up for by lawyers.

The Robot Lawyeris a chatbot made to let people get legal options and screening — and even fill in documents by chatting through a messenger interface on a website. It has been applied to traffic tickets, refugee asylum applications, and homeless benefits.

The Pro Bono Training Institute in LA offers online training modules to prep lawyer volunteers to do good work as they volunteer to provide legal help. They developed these modules with OneJustice, with funding from the LSC’s Pro Bono Innovation Fund.

An Ohio hospital has created an internal navigation system through a mapping app. It lets anyone find their doctor or destination by putting it into the app, and getting step by step directions about where to go. Mercy Health’s Jewish Hospital has created a customized mapping system to help patients or visitors find their way…

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.

These were sent from a Kaiser Health facility in California as examples that a court could possibly follow.

DocuBot is a tool to fill in legal documents and other forms through an SMS or other chatbot-like experience. The bot asks questions to fill in the form. Here is more information from its creator, 1Law. 1LAW is proud to announce the creation of Docubot™, a legal document generating artificial intelligence. In conjunction with some…

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…

I took a photograph of this display in London Heathrow Airport, Terminal 5. It is a very public display of the customer feedback for the airport. It has the results of surveys for different factors of the airport experience, displayed right on the monitors that show flight times and other important information.

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.

What should a paper-based warning or order look like, to make it actionable and clear for people? Ideas42 worked with the New York City government to create new designs of the Summons document that people get for criminal court cases. Read more about it at Ideas42 page. This change in the document accompanies more systemic changes….

CAIR Chicago has sponsored a new initiative to mobilize legal help and interpreters (as well as knowledge) for people at risk of civil rights violation or immigration problems. Their Travelers Assistance Project was launched to give travelers alerts, assemble an Attorney Corps, and an Interpreters Corps. T.A.P CAIR-Chicago’s Traveler’s Assistance Project, a first of its kind nationally,…

Dulles Justice Coalition is a grassroots organization in the DC area, in which lawyers have come together to provide help to immigrants. Specifically, it arose after the January Executive Order that upset the travel plans and border-crossings of refugees and people from Muslim-majority countries. They formed as an impromptu group and also stood up a website…

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…

One of my Brazilian students in my Prototyping Access to Justice class alerted me to a very cool app in Brazil, all about empowering people about their legal rights. It’s called Carteirada do Bem. It’s a native app (on Android) and (on ioS) + a website. It is put out by the assembly of Rio…

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…

Could we build an application that would let a person, who receives a legal document or government document in the mail to: Scan it in, either through a mobile-photo-scanner, or a QR code on the document that makes it easy to capture into the app Figure out what the document says, in jargon-free language. It…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Can we boil down all of the most essential things to know for a legal issue onto a business card? We can list out What Not To Do, What to Say, What to Do, What to Expect. We could perhaps even diagram the procedure to expect. The goal would be to give people a prep…

Namati has a program called Grassroots Legal Advocates. It has paralegals trained in the basics of local law, as well as complementary skills like community organizing, training, advocacy, and strategic mediation. The paralegals and advocates can help empower local communities with legal knowledge and procedures. Namati intends them as a frontline that can be in…

Project Homeless Connect, run by the Colorado Lawyers Committee brings together coordinated services on a single day for homeless individuals. Legal volunteers help people connect to legal assistance, as well as public benefits, medical care, housing, employment, and other needed services. There is also a “Homeless Court” to allow people to resolve outstanding warrants if they…

The Colorado Lawyers Committee has assembled a list of community clinics that are around the state, to get legal resources to people. There are “Legal Nights” in Denver and Greeley. At these nights, lawyers come to resource centers and churches in the community, with volunteer interpreters. They provide legal info and referrals to people who need…

University of Georgia has a Street Law program. It holds sessions to train people, especially young people, on legal topics. Much of their work is focused on how young people can understand the criminal justice system and the social services system, to be smart when navigating them. Street Law UGA conducts community outreach geared primarily…

The Providence Public Library hosts lawyers who will answer questions for free. It’s called “Lawyers in the Library.” No appointments are needed, and the series is free. It’s run with a Presentation from a lawyer, and then an opportunity with people to speak to that lawyer about the presented topic. For example, they’ve had presentations and…

The Chicago Law & Education Foundation  has a high school law clinic that works on providing services, particularly around immigration law, to students in need. The Chicago Law and Education Foundation was started in 2010 by teacher/attorney Dennis Kass. CLEF launched a pilot clinic at Little Village Lawndale High School during the 2009-2010 school year….

Could we remake the Self Help Center to be more colorful, friendly, and humanized? This could be with more art on the wall, with more aesthetically and purposefully structured walls of resources. It could also have things for toddlers and other kids to focus on, so that they are focused, calm, and not distracting their…

At Self Help Centers, we observed that people got a lot of paper, but didn’t know exactly what to do with all of them. The idea of a Resource Guide is that there would be a streamlined collection of resources, with forms, to-do lists, timelines, and maps. It would be akin to what new moms…

What is it? Have standardized maps of all the court’s floors and rooms, as well as adjacent buildings. These should use the color scheme to direct people on a certain pathway to the right location. It should have plentiful white space, so people can annotate their paper map with where to go. The maps should…

How can we make lines in courts less painful? One idea is to have a numbering system. People can take a number and hang out til their number is called — instead of waiting in line and getting exhausted and frustrated. The numbering system would have paper numbers to take, along with a digital system…

We identified that Form Packets are a central ‘thing’ in the Court System. People come to court for help, and the Clerks and Self Help Centers deliver them help through a large selection of paperwork. These papers, most especially forms, are the key commodity in which their help is communicated — and what they can…

Our proposal is for courts to make huge posters to display on the walls, that lay out the steps of a legal process. They can be replicated on handouts and brochures. These giant maps would show an illustrated way that a person would get through the individual tasks. They could also show the back-and-forth between…

We use this one-page Evaluation sheet to review a service, product, or idea. It prioritizes the user’s point of view — to make sure that the thing you’re reviewing has a good user experience. It can be used for proposals or existing things. The sheet forces the reviewer to give a number on each factor,…

One of the needs we uncovered at the Self Help Centers in courts was to make it clear to people that they couldn’t expect full legal representation. The courts wanted to make sure they didn’t expect full confidentiality or an ongoing relationship. To do this, we propose a poster that could also be replicated as…

What is it? Posters and other large-scale signage that can be placed physically throughout and around the court building, and on any web- or mobile-based court technology. It would reach out to people considering using the court by framing the problem in words they understand, using iconography and colors. It would give the person a…

Public legal education groups, including the Justice Education Society, in British Columbia have created online guides to help a person have difficult conversations. They are particularly meant to resolve disputes before they become more problematic. These give a small training in the mindsets and approaches a person can use to get to better outcomes. It’s…

King County provides a  Neighborhood Legal Clinics program to give free, limited legal help to people in Washington State. There are specialty clinics, like around family, debt, elder law, civil rights, etc. They don’t offer help on criminal issues. The purpose of the Neighborhood Legal Clinics program (NLC) is to offer free, limited legal advice and…

In Iowa, there are two programs that sponsor Free Legal Aid for low-income residents at libraries. The Iowa State Bar Public Service Project and the Iowa Legal Aid Volunteer Lawyers Project offer statewide services through the library. People can come to the library on certain dates to consult with lawyers without charge. Source: Free Legal…

  What is it? Have a standardized paper map of the steps in a legal process laid out, with tasks, hand-offs, and roles. This map can then be marked-up and customized by the user and by lawyers and court staff, to help them understand the process in terms of their own situation. Ideally, it would…

  What is it? It is a standing easel, about five feet high, with clips to attach a series of booklets. It would be more attractive than a standard “Wall of Handouts”, and it would have more structured categories and flows of resources to take. For example, each easel would be for a specific Problem,…

A model for feedback is the Happy/Not Happy card, a simple folded card that gives the user two sets of things to do to give feedback. It comes from a headphone company, Anker. They include this card with their product, to give a very clear set of steps to follow up with feedback.

The San Mateo County Law Library has a Lawyer in the Library Program. Once a month, the Redwood City-based library has a live lawyer present for 20 minute free consultations. You must sign up before hand. The San Mateo County Law Library participates in the San Mateo County Public Library System’s ‘Lawyer in the Library’ Program. Every…

What if courts documented real-life stories of people who went through various processes, and how they did so. This could be through pictures and words, or through interactive media or videos. It would give the user a sense of how others have used the process, what background they came from, and what they achieved. This…

Court MD is a project from the National Center for State Courts that lets court admins run an audit of their own organization, to figure out what’s going wrong and where they should focus resources. Here’s the description from NCSC: …start with CourtMD, a new and improved online diagnostic tool from NCSC that can help…

BillFixers is a service that lets you have someone else deal with your bills, to figure out how to negotiate them down. Our expert negotiators are ready to lower your bills up to 35%! Get started by signing up with BillFixers today! You pay them half of what you can save, after they negotiate with…

AirHelp scouts your flight details to see if you can make a claim for compensation. You can enter your flight details with airports and dates if your flight has been cancelled or overbooked. Then you can check your eligibility to see if you can apply for compensation. Flight delayed? Canceled? Missed connection? You could receive…

Tenants in Action is an app for tenants in LA to document and report issues they have with housing problems. They can use the app to note what problems they’re experiencing, match that to codes in the government-speak, and then register a complaint — all through the app.  

Paribus is a tool that finds you ways to get reimbursed in part from companies you’ve bought products from. You give them access to your emails where you get receipts, and then it looks for opportunities for you to get money back from that company when prices drop or there are other obligations for them…

Can we use technology to seek out problems that have legal dimensions, that people aren’t aware of? Heat Seek is a technology-based legal tool to help people see if heating code violations have occurred. It uses sensor technology to watch whether and how homes are being heated in NYC, and identifying when violations happen. It…

SquaredAway is a web-app that promotes healthy relations between landlords and tenants — helping resolve and prevent housing disputes. It does so by providing a communications platform for landlords and tenants, as well as wikis, checklists, and other guides. It lets Chicago tenants and landlords keep track of what issues there are with a given…

JustFix is an app that is built for NYC tenants to understand their housing rights, gather documentation that could be used to support their legal claims, and to share their case file with advocates. JustFix.nyc adds another tactic to the fight for housing justice by partnering with grassroots organizations to create better support systems for…

This concept proposal is to create a single map and wayfinding system for all the different types of legal services, across all kinds of different providers, in a jurisdiction. It can be a geographic map, as well as organizational and process map. It would lay out where a person could go find help, and direct…

The web-app Due Processr takes the user through an interactive questionnaire that helps the person to determine if they are eligible for the qualification of ‘Indigency’ in Massachusetts. The app breaks apart the eligibility factors into distinct questions, and in one page of responses the user will get their answer about whether they qualify.

Mobile apps aimed at non-legal service providers help them screen for legal problems for their clients. For example there is an app specifically designed for use in medical-legal partnerships, in which users have come to a medical facility to deal with a medical problem. The app can be used by a service provider at the…

An increasingly popular concept for access innovations is the Legal Health Checkup, that would serve as an initial outreach to laypeople. It would help them understand what issues they are currently dealing with that might have legal recourse — and then would give them resources to follow up on this. For checkups, I’ve observed three…

There is a lot of interest in developing new, and new modes of, legal health checkups. There are some such checkups currently in action — like this one from Ontario, which is delivered through a web survey. This one, created by Halton Community Legal Services, is specifically for low-income individuals in Ontario to figure out…

Mobile legal help apps are becoming increasingly common. In these apps, often developed as standalone applications for Android or iOS systems, the user gets a wide range of legal help information specifically geared for self-represented litigants all on their phone. The advantage of these apps is that once they’re downloaded you don’t need a web…