Welcome to the Legal Design Lab’s blog on justice innovation.
We’ll be posting up blogs from our classes, projects, and pilots here.
Also, check out our Legal Design & Innovation publication on Medium.
Share Your AI + Justice Idea
Our team at Legal Design Lab is building a national network of people working on AI projects to close the justice gap, through better legal services & information. We’re looking to find more people working on innovative new ideas & pilots. Please share with us below using the form. The idea could be for: A…
Summit schedule for AI + Access to Justice
This October, Stanford Legal Design Lab hosted the first AI + Access to Justice Summit. This invite-only event focused on building a national ecosystem of innovators, regulators, and supporters to guide AI innovation toward closing the justice gap, while also protecting the public. The Summit’s flow aimed to teach frontline providers, regulators, and philanthropists about…
Housing Law experts wanted for AI evaluation research
We are recruiting Housing Law experts to participate in a study of AI answers to landlord-tenant questions. Please sign up here if you are a housing law practitioner interested in this study. Experts who participate in interviews and AI-ranking sessions will receive Amazon gift cards for their participation.
NCSC User Testing Toolkit
The Access to Justice team at the National Center for State Courts has a new User Testing Toolkit out. It can help courts and their partners get user feedback on key papers, services, and tools, like: Court Forms: are they understandable and actionable? Self-Help Materials: can litigants find and engage with them effectively? Court Websites:…
Design Workbook for Legal Help AI Pilots
For our upcoming AI+Access to Justice Summit and our AI for Legal Help class, our team has made a new design workbook to guide people through scoping a new AI pilot. We encourage others to use and explore this AI Design Workbook to help think through: Use Cases and Workflows Specific Legal Tasks that AI…
Jurix ’24 AI for Access to Justice Workshop
Building on last year’s very successful academic workshop on AI & Access to Justice at Jurix ’23 in the Netherlands, this year we are pleased to announce a new workshop at Jurix ’24 in Czechia. Margaret Hagan of the Stanford Legal Design Lab is co-leading an academic workshop at the legal technology conference Jurix, on…
Good/Bad AI Legal Help at Trust and Safety Conference
This week, Margaret Hagan presented at the Trust and Safety Research Conference, that brings together academics, tech professionals, regulators, nonprofits, and philanthropies to work on making the Internet a more safe, user-friendly place. Margaret presented interim results of the Lab’s expert and user studies of AI’s performance at answering everyday legal questions, like around evictions and…
Interviewing Legal Experts on the Quality of AI Answers
This month, our team commenced interviews with landlord-tenant subject matter experts, including court help staff, legal aid attorneys, and hotline operators. These experts are comparing and rating various AI responses to commonly asked landlord-tenant questions that individuals may get when they go online to find help. Our team has developed a new ‘Battle Mode’ of…
Autumn 24 AI for Legal Help
Our team is excited to announce the new, 2024-25 version of our ongoing class, AI for Legal Help. This school year, we’re moving from background user and expert research towards AI R&D and pilot development. Can AI increase access to justice, by helping people resolve their legal problems in more accessible, equitable, and effective ways? What…
AI+A2J Research x Practice Seminar
The Legal Design Lab is proud to announce a new monthly online, public seminar on AI & Access to Justice: Research x Practice. At this seminar, we’ll be bringing together leading academic researchers with practitioners and policymakers, who are all working on how to make the justice system more people-centered, innovative, and accessible through AI….
AI & Legal Help at Codex FutureLaw
At the April 2024 Stanford Codex FutureLaw Conference, our team at Legal Design Lab both presented the research findings about users’ and subject matter experts’ approaches to AI for legal help, and to lead a half-day interdisciplinary workshop on what future directions are possible in this space. Many of the audience members in both sessions…
Law360 Article on Legal Design Lab’s AI-Justice Work
In early May 2024, the Stanford Legal Design Lab’s work was profiled in the Law360 publication. The article summarizes the Legal Design Lab’s work, partnerships & human-centered design approach to tackle legal challenges & develop new technologies. The article covers our recent user & legal help provider research, our initial phase of groundwork research, and…
3 Shifts for AI in the Justice System: LSC 50th Anniversary presentation
In mid-April, Margaret Hagan presented on the Lab’s research and development efforts around AI and access to justice at the Legal Services Corporation 50th anniversary forum. This large gathering of legal aid executive directors, national justice leaders, members of Congress, philanthropists, and corporate leaders celebrated the work of LSC & profiled future directions of legal…
User interviews on AI & Access to Justice
As we continue to run interviews with people from across the country about their possible use of AI for legal help tasks, we wanted to share out what we’re learning about people’s thoughts about AI.Please see the full interactive Data Dashboard of interview results here. Below, find images of the data dashboard. Follow the link…
AI as the next frontier of making justice accessible
Last week, Margaret had the privilege of presenting on the lab’s work on AI and Innovation at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a part of the larger conference of Making Justice Accessible, her work was featured on the panel about new solutions to improve the civil justice system through…
AI & Justice Workers
At the Arizona State University/American Bar Foundation conference on the Future of Justice Work, Margaret Hagan spoke on if and how generative AI might be part of new service and business models to serve people with legal problems. Many in the audience are already developing new staffing & service models, that combine traditional lawyer-provided services…
User Persona Template
Is your team working on a legal innovation project, using a human-centered design approach? Then you are likely focused on different kinds of ‘users’, ‘stakeholders’, or ‘audience members’ as you plan out your innovation. Our Legal Design Lab team has a free Canva template to make your own user personas easily. This Canva template gives…
Eviction diversion design workshop
Last week, Margaret Hagan traveled to Houston Texas for the National Center for State Court convening of Eviction Diversion Initiative facilitators. She ran a half day workshop on how to use human centered design to improve the program design, paperwork, and Service delivery of eviction diversion help at housing courts around the country. This Design…
Bringing an AI & Access to Justice Community Together
Our team at the Legal Design Lab presented at the Legal Services Corporation Innovations in Technology Conference co-ran a session of several hundred justice professionals on the future of AI & A2J. Here is what we learned and heard.
User Research Workshop on AI & A2J
In December 2023, our lab hosted a half-day workshop on AI for Legal Help. Our policy lab class of law students, master students, and undergraduates presented their user research findings from their September through December research. Our guests, including those from technology companies, universities, state bars, legal aid groups, community-based organizations, and advocacy/think takes, all…
Filing Fairness Toolkit
The Stanford Legal Design Lab & the Rhode Center on the Legal Profession have just released the Filing Fairness Toolkit. The toolkit covers 4 areas, with diagnostics, maturity models, and actionable guidance for: improving Filing Technology Infrastructure building a healthy Filing Partner Ecosystem establishing good Technology Governance refining Forms & Filing Processes This Toolkit is…
Schedule for AI & A2J Jurix workshop
Our organizing committee was pleased to receive many excellent submissions for the AI & A2J Workshop at Jurix on December 18, 2023. We were able to select half of the submissions for acceptance, and we extended the half-day workshop to be a full-day workshop to accommodate the number of submissions. We are pleased to announce…
Report on litigants’ outcomes on Zoom court hearings
The Indiana University team, led by professor Victor Quintanilla, has released the report Accessing Justice with Zoom: Experiences and Outcomes in Online Civil Courts. The team had set up a novel system to recruit court users to give feedback about their experience attending court in-person or remotely, combining that with administrative data and observational data…
How do we measure mistakes and harms of legal services?
As new services and tech projects launch to serve the public, there’s a regular question being asked: How do we measure if these new justice innovations do better than the status quo? How can we compare the risk of harm to the consumers by these new services & technologies, as compared to a human lawyer…
Presentation to Indiana Coalition for Court Access
On October 20th, Legal Design Lab executive director presented on “AI and Legal Help” to the Indiana Coalition for Court Access. This presentation was part of a larger discussion about research projects, a learning community of judges, and evidence-based court policy and rules changes. What can courts, legal aid, groups, and statewide justice agencies be…
Interest Form signup for AI & Access to Justice
Are you a legal aid lawyer, court staff member, judge, academic, tech developer, computer science researcher, or community advocate interested in how AI might increase Access to Justice — and also what limits and accountability we must establish so that it is equitable, responsible, and human-centered? Sign up at this interest form to stay in…
Report a problem you’ve found with AI & legal help
The Legal Design Lab is compiling a database of “AI & Legal Help problem incidents”. Please contribute to this database by entering in information on this form, that feeds into the database. We will be making this database available in the near-future, as we collect more records & review them. For this database, we’re looking…
Call for papers to the JURIX workshop on AI & Access to Justice
At the December 2023 JURIX conference on Legal Knowledge and Information Systems, there is an academic workshop on AI and Access to Justice. There is an open call for submissions to the workshop. There is an extension to the deadline, which is now November 20, 2023. We encourage academics, practitioners, and others interested in the…
Paths Toward Access to Justice at Scale presentation
In October 2023, Margaret Hagan presented at the International Access to Justice Forum, on “Paths toward Access to Justice at Scale”. The presentation covered the preliminary results of stakeholder interviews she is conducting with justice professionals across the US about how best to scale one-off innovations and new ideas for improvements, to become more sustainable…
AI Platforms & Privacy Protection through Legal Design
How can regulators, researchers, and tech companies proactively protect people’s rights & privacy, even as AI becomes more ubiquitous so quickly? by Margaret Hagan, originally published at Legal Design & Innovation This past week, I had the privilege of attending the State of Privacy event in Rome, with policy, technical, and research leaders from Italy and Europe….
AI & Legal Help Crossover Event with computer scientists and lawyers
What can justice professionals be working on, to make stronger relationships with technologists researching & developing AI platforms? How can legal and computer scientists collaborate for human-centered, effective AI for access to justice?
Opportunities & Risks for AI, Legal Help, and Access to Justice
As more lawyers, court staff, and justice system professionals learn about the new wave of generative AI, there’s increasing discussion about how AI models & applications might help close the justice gap for people struggling with legal problems. Could AI tools like ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Google Bard help get more people crucial information about…
American Academy event on AI & Equitable Access to Legal Services
The Lab’s Margaret Hagan was a panelist at the May 2023 national event on AI & Access to Justice hosted by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. The event was called AI’s Implications for Equitable Access to Legal and Other Professional Services. It took place on May 10, 2023. Read more about the American…
Frontline Justice launch
A new initiative, Frontline Justice, has just been launched to build a new set of justice workers who can serve people with legal needs & close the justice gap. This new group is planning to grow a workforce of justice workers, reform policies and regulations around who can provide legal help, and engage communities in…
Court focus on user-centered experience & inclusive design
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…
Court text messages scripts
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…
Measuring impact of legal help websites
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…
The State of Eviction Prevention Efforts
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…
How the justice system can learn from unemployment insurance
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…
Why doesn’t every new justice reform policy come with a community navigator program?
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…
Benchmark principles for A2J Tech
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…
An International R&D Community for Better Justice Innovations
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…
How do you design a user-friendly court form?
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,…
Making Good Legal Design the Law
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….
Human-Centered Computable Contracts
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…
Can a legal aid group send proactive texts to people who have been sued?
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…
What does a user-centered eviction court summons look like?
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…
People’s experiences with eviction prevention
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…
What are the Barriers Tenants Face to Accessing Eviction Prevention Help?
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…
Legal Design Lab’s 2021 Year in Review
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…
Lessons from the Pandemic on Keeping People Housed in a Crisis and Beyond
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…
Court Observation Hub
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…
How do we assess whether a pilot increases Access to Justice?
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…
An Equity Lens on Eviction Prevention
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…
AI Goes to Court: The Growing Landscape of AI for Access to Justice
By Jonah Wu Student research fellow at Legal Design Lab, 2018-2019 Table of Contents1. Can AI help improve access to civil courts?2. Background to the Rise of AI in the Legal System3. What could be? Proposals in the Literature for AI for access to justice4. What is happening so far? AI in action for access4.1….
Brainstorming new Language Access self help ideas
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…
Observing a county court for language access
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…
A Design Prototype for Policy canvas
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…
Identifying A Single Prototype for language access improvement
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…
Design for Justice: Language Access — an introduction in week 1
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…
How graphic design helps us navigate buildings
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…
Access to Justice for People Who Do Not Speak English
This article by Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard of Indiana describes what justice issues arise out of language access problems in state courts.
The evolution of an eviction self-help website
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…
Eviction design class
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…
Talking with the Public Policy Lab about design and government innovation
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…
The Rise of Design in Policymaking: In conversation with Verena Kontschieder
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….
TSA Feedback service design at Dulles Airport
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.
Service Help Centers in airports, based in JFK Delta airport terminal
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….
Before Small Claims Court prep app
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…
Law Speak: language access app for small claims
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…
Legal Go augmented reality legal ed game
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…
Trends in Courthouse Design : a profile of new space designs
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: coordinated services for at-risk veterans
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.
Houston.ai access AI
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…
Pro Bono matching websites
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.
Robot Lawyer expert chat bot
The Robot Lawyer is 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. Please note, since first posting about this project, it has now become the DoNotPay tool. This post was about the original version of the tool….
Online training for pro bono work
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.
Hospital map app
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…
User journey through Housing Court
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.
Wayfinding signs with language access from hospitals
These were sent from a Kaiser Health facility in California as examples that a court could possibly follow.
DocuBot for filling in forms through SMS
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…
Final report from Prototyping Access to Justice: 7 prototypes to make courts more user-friendly
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…
Public feedback report displays in courts
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.
Drawing of a Housing Court waiting room
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.
Redesigning Summons Forms to be clearer and more supportive
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’s Travelers Assistance Program
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: rapid response pro bono network
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…
Designing a more user-friendly legal system: notes from the field
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…
Know Your Rights App, Carteirada do Bem
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…
The Prototype Journey, from post it to wizard of oz
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…
Legal Document Responder App
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…
Summary of Spring 2016 class findings on Self Help Centers
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…
Creative research reels
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…
Common Problems of people in the civil legal system
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…
Self Help Center essential research
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…
User situations in Self Help Centers
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…
Our big guiding design briefs
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…
“Magic” cards: essential info on a business card
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…
Grassroots Legal Advocates from Namati
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 in Colorado
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…