What are ideas to improve access to justice?
In our design research, we’ve pinned down some central questions about how we can increase legal empowerment. For each of these briefs, we’ve gathered together ideas, analogies, background, and current projects that can inspire new solutions.
For each brief, you can explore proposed concepts and existing projects. Please let us know if you have other things to include here!
Design Briefs for innovation
In our classes, we’ve identified a series of key challenges, or design briefs, that new legal help solutions should address. These are useful when organizing the many new ideas & programs that exist to improve access to justice. These briefs are as follows:
- Process Guides: How do we help people get a series of legal tasks done correctly?
2. Diagnosis, Triage & Matching: How do we help people make sense of their options, and choose a good one?
3. Coordination of Services: How do we put legal help resources throughout the community, so they’re easier to access? How do we make it easy for a person to go through all the help services that are available?
4. Better Advocate Options: How do we help find human or tech advocates to assist a person? How can we make sure everyone needs expert assistance and advocacy can get it?
5. Legal Empowerment: How can we help people to know what the law is and how it matters to them? How can we ensure that they are able to improve the legal system to better match their needs?
6. Legal Task Tools: What can we provide to people to help them take care of specific tasks in a legal process? How can we help them do legal paperwork, evidence preparation, negotiation and settlement contracts, and presentations in court in better ways?
7. Space and Wayfinding: How can we improve the space design of courts, offices, and clinics — and especially enhance people’s wayfinding of these places, to improve users’ experiences?
8. Community Feedback & Iteration: Courts, lawyers, and other people who run the legal system want to make it better. How do we get user input and feedback to them, to improve their ability to make the system more user-centered?
9. Better Resolution of Conflicts and Disputes: Are there more efficient, friendly, and supportive ways to have people present their dispute, get details and evidence, and make a decision about the best resolution?
Ideas for Process Guides
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
Rechtwijzer is a Dutch platform to help laypeople through the start of a legal process -- from problem to legal process.
Probleem of conflict? Vul stap voor stap Rechtwijzer in. U krijgt advies over wat u in uw situatie kunt doen en wie u daarbij kunnen helpen.
It takes an 'expert ...
I have been sketching out some possible templates for what a good one-pager worksheet would be, to guide a lay person through a legal process. The he one-pager has limits, so instead of thinking about it as a total 'process guide', I'm thinking of it more as an 'orientation tool' ...
I've been prototyping various means to deliver & build legal knowledge -- with a specific consideration of bolstering Access to Justice. One pathway, of course, is Visualized Law.
I've been playing with it with cartoons and illustrations, and in other forms (hyperlinked, layered checklists -- visual expert systems).
One promising prototype is ...
An idea to help lay people go through legal processes by giving them interactive and customized guides to going through them step by step.
It is a website that gives a serialized set of prompts and information. We have made a first version of this as Navocado.
One of the projects on my front-burner is getting a great legal navigator built, that takes a person step-by-detailed-step through a legal process. Here are some of the sketches from my notebooks on how I hope to actually lay these out on a webpage and/or printed page. Composition has ...
Could we have a tech-based companion for people going through a court process? It could have timing advice, location directions, and other support to make sure the person is prepared for their day in court.
The value of this design would be to coordinate all the resources into a single place ...
The National Expungement Project. is a Maryland-based effort to guide people with a criminal record through an eligibility check (can I expunge my record) and then direct them to how they can follow through on this procedure (where can I find good -- and maybe even free -- legal help?). ...
Could we build an interactive & responsive map, that would show a person the steps and path of a legal process -- and then document where they are on it?
This would be a personal, living map for the person to follow. It could be formatted like a roadmap, a flowchart, ...
Two years ago, there started some talk about US courts using SMS and other phone-based communication to issue reminders for court hearings to people. It seems several other countries have already launched such pilots.
The Qatari government's Supreme Judiciary Council has one such program live, at Court Hearing SMS Reminder - ...
I've just posted a project summary up for my team's work at the FWD.us DREAMer Hackathon at the Program for Legal Tech & Design's site. Come over & read about what we built, see our demo, and read about our future plans. And I uploaded my entire photo ...
I've been searching around for good information & graphic design, to communicate laws to average people. I stumbled across some amazing booklets & posters from the Center for Urban Pedagogy, or CUP.
One of their missions is to make law & policy comprehensible to normal New Yorkers. This is one of ...
Here is another current initiative for Access to Justice through design/tech: Pocket DACA.
Pocket DACA is an app, released this summer for free for Android & IOS, to help people who came to the US as a child, who might be eligible for DACA. It was produced by Pro Bono Net ...
Citizenshipworks is building online and mobile apps aimed at non-citizens in the US -- trying to give them resources and tutorials to navigate their way through citizenship.
They have checklists, expert system interviews, and tutorials to help the users along.
Damian Thompson of the Knight Foundation, writes of the new app.
I’m also ...
Ideas for Triage and Diagnosis
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Online intake is an always-on service, that lets anyone with an internet connection enter their information and find what services they might qualify for. The advantage of an online intake system is that it prevents the need for a person from having to figure out how to connect to an ...
Source: New Mexico - Diagnostic Tool to Assess Potential for Self-Representation
The New Mexico Access to Justice Commission used an ATJ Innovation Grant to develop a diagnostic tool to assess factors that might help or hinder a particular individual in self-representation, as a first step in developing a comprehensive on-line intake ...
A small sketchnote of different ways we could get people's legal issues sussed out: decision trees, telephone q-n-a, etc.
This week I have been finishing up my research paper on what user-centered standards for better online legal help sites would be. I had surveyed lay adults about how they've used the Internet in the past to respond to legal issues, and then also had them do some searches for ...
A few weeks ago, when I logged into my browser, I got a notice from Google that they wanted to walk me through a Privacy Checkup of my Google Account. I agreed, more to observe how they treated me as a user & how they guided me through the experience ...
An idea for gathering intake information & triage-ing users to the right legal resource by giving them video scenarios/stories to watch and then figure out which best corresponds to their situation.
Could we use the same methods of those television lawyers who bombard daytime-tv-watchers with 'Are you injured? Can you sue? Call now to find your rights!' -- to increase lay people's awareness of their rights, of civil remedies, of free or low-cost legal services?
I'm working on a project right now to bring court reminder messaging systems into some California courts. I've been reaching out to different open-source platforms that offer text-messaging systems to be customized in local installations. I'll be publishing a full-blown write-up of the project soon enough -- but first a ...
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A group out of Chicago, the Mikva Juvenile Justice Council, is making an app to help young people understand & go through an Expungement legal process. The Knight Foundation is funding the project through its Prototype fund. The project aims "To create a prototype version of Expunge.io, a mobile ...
For the problem of getting people's information gathered as efficiently as possible, to get them to the correct service-provider, there are several online 'triage' projects that are developing apps and websites.
Here is a recent slide presentation of online intake models from a few different projects around the country.
Webinar Next ...
For a paper I've been working on, here is a preliminary mind-map I've been sketching out.
It's a quick brainstorm of how DIY legal tools may be provided to non-experts. It considers what models might be breakthroughs, how technology might interact with the person, and what challenges might block their success.
The ...
I am writing a paper on ways to bring good design to create new models of access to justice. I have been scouting out some such threads, to see what might be worth developing further.
In my browsing, I came across this pdf pamphlet from the State Bar of California. It ...
For the excellent Legal Tech class I'm taking at Stanford Law School on the future of legal technology, I am proposing to build a WebMD for law.
My central question is ‘how might we build tech that could help a lay person diagnose their own legal problems’? I am asking it ...
Ideas for Integrating Services into the Community
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
What if there were physical locations in communities, in which people with life problems could drop in and get help?
There would be lawyers there, but there could also be medical, mental health, social service, immigration, and all kinds of other specialists.
It would be a center for holistic care, that you ...
As the client goes to a 2 hour consultation, the lawyer takes notes straight into the client’s portable data point. It means that the client can then take this with them to all other care team members — and very easily & quickly show them what’s going on, with the ...
What if we provided coordinated legal-medical-mental health-housing-family-education support all in one big pop-up zone? Like a Food Truck park, with lots of different options to browse around and engage with.
Could we have a traveling courthouse, that offers limited legal services to you in more convenient, and people-friendly places? Like in ...
During my Spring 2015 class at Stanford d.school/Law School on Intro to Legal Design, we were lucky enough to have Sacha Steinberger visit us and present on her Project Legal Link. I drew up some notes during her presentation, about what she's working to do -- bringing social service providers ...
Could we build a single portal to all kinds of legal support, help, counsel? If it's a simple, memorable number that's the same across the country -- that would be terrific from a branding approach.
The LSC-TIG Summit last year listed centralized state-by-state legal portals as one of their central agenda ...
During the Legal Design Bootcamp that I was running last week, one of the participating groups came up with a very interesting concept that I wanted to share.
We spent one day going through a design cycle, and they began by choosing a very particular user -- a young Guatemalan girl, ...
Could we put law on the street? Have public space installations that give basic outreach, checklists, resources, if not even full-blown clinics for people to encounter in their daily life?
This idea is in part from conversations with my Mexican colleagues, with ideas for subway station legal clinics.
What would it look like if there was one major site online, that anyone searching out help for a life problem could use?
They would enter their problem, legal issues would be identified, and then the person would be directed to the legal org who can help them.
They will get a ...
More calls for streamlined legal help services, this time from Jim Sandman of the Legal Services Corporation.
We need to think from immigrants' points of view -- where they are now, what tech they use, who they trust.
I'm excited to see the development of Project Legal Link, a new type of resource that links social & legal services together in the Bay Area.
I was introduced to it last year by the woman who is making it happen -- Sacha Steinberger. Sacha is a lawyer, & and ...
Could we create a collaboration platform & network that would provide a holistic service for a person with a legal problem -- so they have all the different kinds of support they need?
Last week I was at a symposium at the Univ. of South Carolina Law School, all about access to justice and doing more empirical, data-driven research about how to create better & more impactful access initiatives. Karen Lash, the Deputy Director of the DOJ's Access to Justice Initiative, presented on ...
The National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership has a New issue brief on medical-legal partnership and health centers. Marsha Regenstein, PhD, Joel Teitelbaum, JD, LLM, Jessica Sharac, MSc, MPH, and Ei Phyu authored the piece "Medical-Legal Partnership and Health Centers: Addressing Patients’ Health-Harming Civil Legal Needs as Part of Primary Care." ...
In response to the surge of Unaccompanied Immigrant Children coming into the US over the past year, a group has come together in Maryland to produce a social service-finding portal for these kids. Buscando offers a very clean, usable platform for a child or her advocate to find the right ...
[caption id="attachment_2878" align="alignnone" width="700"] from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership's Toolkit[/caption]
Among the many camps of ideas for how to increase access to justice, one of the strongest I keep returning to is Devolved Legal Services. What I mean by this:
How can we devolve legal services out of offices -- ...
Project Nanny Van is an excellent new example of creative legal service design. Dan Jackson from Northeastern Law's NuLawLab clued me in about it. The NuLawLab & its law students have been working with Rev Tank & Marisa Jahn in creating this mobile van that comes to locations where nannies ...
Ideas for Getting to Better Advocates
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Online intake is an always-on service, that lets anyone with an internet connection enter their information and find what services they might qualify for. The advantage of an online intake system is that it prevents the need for a person from having to figure out how to connect to an ...
The winner of the New Mexico Tech for Justice hackathon was THE BUOY PROJECT .
Here is the description of the project -- an emergency services line for a community -- from the site.
Buoy is a private, enhanced 9-1-1 for your website and community. It is a community-driven emergency dispatch system because ...
A mobile-first solution, that would let any lay person connect to basic legal knowledge and education through virtually free SMS back-and-forths. It could be lessons taught in small bite-size chunks and stories, through a series of texts. It could be daily reminders with key lessons to remember. Or it could ...
What if there were physical locations in communities, in which people with life problems could drop in and get help?
There would be lawyers there, but there could also be medical, mental health, social service, immigration, and all kinds of other specialists.
It would be a center for holistic care, that you ...
If one of laypeople's main concerns about using the legal system is the lack of transparency around hiring a lawyer (how much do they cost? are they any good? will they be the right fit for me?) -- then how can we give a person more insight into their possible ...
NYC Housing Court - Resolution Assistance Program (RAP) offers the Court Navigator Program:
The Court Navigator Program was launched in February 2014 to support and assist unrepresented litigants - people who do not have an attorney - during their court appearances in landlord-tenant and consumer debt cases. Specially trained and supervised ...
The Alabama Access to Justice Commission used an ABA Expansion Grant to implement the web-based pro bono program Online Tennessee Justice, which allows pro bono attorneys to answer questions submitted by clients through a website. In Alabama the website has been launched as Alabama Legal Answers.
Project Summary & Assessment
See more: Alabama - Online SRL ...
This project received an Innovation Grant through the ABA. Read more: Colorado - Serving Modest-means Clients
The Colorado Access to Justice Commission and Colorado Bar Association used an ATJ Innovation Grant to develop a two-part project aimed at providing legal assistance to moderate-income individuals. The first is providing assistance to low- and ...
What if we provided coordinated legal-medical-mental health-housing-family-education support all in one big pop-up zone? Like a Food Truck park, with lots of different options to browse around and engage with.
Could we have a traveling courthouse, that offers limited legal services to you in more convenient, and people-friendly places? Like in ...
Could we welcome people in to have free coffee, free ice cream, even candy, and then get them directed to legal services from there?
What if we had more legal services that provided people in crisis with empathy? It might be in the form of someone to listen to their story and engage them in conversation. It might be a computer algorithm that gives a sense of conversation and attention. It might be with ...
What if every person had a lawyer that was closely related to them, that was responsible for advising them and keeping them legally healthy, and dealing with any problem that arises for them.
Could we build stronger legal public relations, outreach, and onramping to the world of legal services?
One stream of ideas for improving access to justice: can we brand legal services & lawyers, to make them more known, more trustworthy, more purchase-able & engaging for non-lawyers?
Could we create a collaboration platform & network that would provide a holistic service for a person with a legal problem -- so they have all the different kinds of support they need?
As more talk grows about Internet & mobile-based technology opening up a new era of Consumer Law, it’s useful to look back a few decades when there was a similar tide of activity around expanding access to civil legal procedures to the middle classes of Americans.
After the Supreme Court ruling ...
Pangea Legal Services is a San Francisco collective of lawyers who are working to support immigrants with legal support -- through a low-bono and pro-bono model that provides services on a sliding scale of fees.
It works on asylum cases, deportations, DACA and U-visa applications, among other services. It also does ...
Immigrant Justice Corps is a fellowship program (or legal incubator) to train people to serve as legal assistants for immigrants in the US. Its application is currently open for a new round of fellows -- with applications due in just over a week. Both JDs and non-JDs can apply to ...
Fixed - The easiest way to fix a parking ticket.
Fixed is an app that lets you hand off your parking ticket to the company, for them to fight it for you on your behalf. You pay them nothing if you lose the contest and have to pay the fine. You ...
via NYC Housing Court - Resolution Assistance Program (RAP).
New York just began a pilot program of Court Navigators for Housing Courts in some jurisdictions. Non-lawyers would help self-represented litigants navigate the court system.
The Court Navigator Program was launched in February 2014 to support and assist unrepresented litigants - people who ...
I've been thinking a lot about Consumer Law Design -- meaning, how do we build new products & experiences for lay people who want to get their legal tasks accomplished well. These are the subdomains of Consumer Law that I've drawn out -- step by step in a linear ...
Another offline idea for Access to Justice (thanks to Briane for the mention!) -- this time being piloted by attorney Donald Howard in New Britain, Connecticut. The Connecticut Tribune reports on how he has opened a barbershop inside of his legal office, as a hybrid-business to serve more people's legal ...
The SikhCoalition has put together an ingenious app out to crowdsource reports of discrimination at airports and on airlines. If the government and companies won't release information about how many complaints they have received, then why not ask people to report their complaints themselves?
The app lets a person report ...
A short cartoon I made while listening to Professor Nora Engstrom's talk on Legal Clinics & attorney advertising at Stanford Law School last month.
I have heard from a few people that they want an Angie's List for Lawyers -- a service they are willing to pay for, to get quality, real, vetted reviews of lawyers in the area. I decided to seek out some user research, from blog posts and other Internet discussions, ...
Usable law design from Legal Force, in the quick snapshot handouts it provides passersby at it store in Palo Alto.
Here's an article by Jennifer Smith in the Wall Street Journal on new crops of apps that help clients find and monitor lawyers. It mentions Viewabill (tracking how much their lawyers are charging them, in real-time); Rocket Lawyer's mobile app (create basic legal documents and buy plans for low-cost access ...
Ideas for Legal Empowerment
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
Source: A team at Northeastern Law has been building a simulation game to help self-represented litigants prepare for their court appearance.
The simulation game is particularly targeted to the growing number of people who cannot afford legal representation and thus represent themselves in legal proceedings ranging from evictions and mortgage foreclosures ...
Could we make gripping cartoon outreach posters -- with basic primers on key points of law and legal services, that apply to people who are likely to be hanging out in a certain physical space?
This idea came up for Trafficking, in airports, bus terminals, and other places of transit. Could ...
When people are called into court -- like a parent whose kids have ended up in the justice system, or like a person who gets called in to deal with a problem -- could we prepare them in a better way?
Give them strategies?
Give them orientation about what the timelines and ...
Could we take the workshops that self-help centers already run in person, and make online versions of them to get wider distribution? To people who can't travel to self-help centers or need it during weekends or evenings? If we package up the guides into more usable formats, we can help ...
Can we make navigators that are game-like, or make games that allow a person to do a prep-run of what an actual legal procedure will be like?
This concept came out of a workshop on improving immigration support. It was for a board game that a group could play together, to ...
An idea for better education around law -- summing up a concept in a card, with a visual to illustrate it, and some key writeups of the concept. It would make the concept stickier and clearer.
This kind of movie poster version of the legal service or rule would be useful ...
A sketchnote of the start of a talk from Stephanie Kimbro, speaking at Univ. of South Carolina Law School about her research on how games & gamification mechanics and motivators could be used to improve the delivery of legal services.s
Some quick sketchnotes of a talk from Jim Greiner of Harvard Law School, speaking with Univ. of South Carolina Law School about how to engage people in debt procedures -- how to get them to show up in court. They tried to reach out to people in debt proceedings with ...
Last night, I helped organize a group of lawyers & designers to kick off a longer design process, about reimagining how we convey Know Your Rights materials to lay people. We had a great mix of people who work on Know Your Rights initiatives as a part of community law ...
Last week, I was a facilitator at a Shaping Davos design thinking workshop at Stanford's d.school. Several local non-profits had brought some big social impact challenges they're facing -- around gentrification, housing, food waste, community-building, and information access.
Then small groups of engineers, public policy-makers, business people, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and other ...
As I've been writing up a paper on new legal tools & an agenda for access to justice innovation -- I keep coming back to the same point.
To really address the access problem, we should be focusing on scalable, modular tools. They could be in the form of software & ...
Communication professor Lien Tran of the Univ. of Miami has developed an offline game for users of the US immigration system -- called Toma el Paso, or Make a Move. It uses a familiar board game structure to present the legal system to the youth who are currently proceeding through ...
I just found out about Judgepedia, a site that collects information about courts and judges, in a shared wiki. Its primary user seems to be someone interested in how the judicial system in the US works, and how individual jurisdictions have established judicial systems. It's a project out of the ...
The SikhCoalition has put together an ingenious app out to crowdsource reports of discrimination at airports and on airlines. If the government and companies won't release information about how many complaints they have received, then why not ask people to report their complaints themselves?
The app lets a person report ...
The Immigration Legal Resource Center (ILRC) has put out a sketched-out (at least in part) guide for a young non-citizen audience -- trying to equip them with some basic legal knowledge & set of strategies. Some excerpts are below. There are a lot of great starting points in the PDF ...
I've been searching around for pre-college legal curriculum. When is law taught to young people in America, other than in pre-law classes in university?
I took a Civics class in my public high school, which reviewed some basic First Amendment rights, and was oriented around the rights of young people. ...
I just came across the company TrueOffice that is putting together (inspiring!) games for businesses to train their employees on 'compliance' issues. Think sexual harassment, information security, or ethical behavior in the office.
The issue is that these trainings are typically boring, unimpressive, without lasting impact -- more of a burden ...
CanLii is an app out of Toronto that allows for easier searching of Canadian law. It's an effort to make the legislation more accessible, and hoping that trickles down to more numbers of people in Canada being in control of their legal pathways.
New mobile app gives free access to legal ...
A major problem in governance is the spread of misinformation and rumors. Sometimes these result from concerted campaigns by political actors, to manipulate politicians with rumors meant to make them suspicious or fearful about something. Other times rumors are not driven by anyone, but snowball on their own. Either way, ...
Ideas for Tools to Get Legal Tasks Done
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 ...
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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
There are many HotDocs and A2J document assembly projects that have been funded by TIG that have replication potential. Listed below is a brief synopsis of a couple of those projects.
From South Central Michigan: automated forms completion.
Legal Services of South Central Michigan developed information and resources for self-represented litigants throughout the state. The project ...
I-CAN! Legal is a software tool to help laypeople prepare court forms through a more interactive and user-friendly online questionnaire.
I-CAN! Legal helps people prepare their court forms using an easy online questionnaire. I-CAN! provides step-by-step instructions for how to file the forms and proceed with the court case. In Orange ...
This concept is for an online service that would allow for secure uploads from places that are under surveillance or without great digital freedoms. The service would allow them to anonymously, securely upload videos and photos that document human rights abuses and other potentially controversial events. The service would ensure ...
Source: Arkansas - Document Assembly Software
The Arkansas Access to Justice Commission used an ATJ Innovation Grant to develop a pro se document assembly form for uncontested divorce with children. The software will be used in a court-house based pilot project in which attorneys assist pro se litigants on a limited ...
An app or SMS/MMS based tool to let a person get expert feedback on their legal document: Is this correct? What does this mean? Is this ready to go?
We do this by having the person take a photo of it, then sending it on to the Self-Help Center, Law Librarian, ...
Could we make a software tool to quickly customize and verify the appropriateness of a contract?
Could we build a smart system inside courthouses that provide Internet access, connections to printing/copying, and electrical power for all those who need to be computer-connected while doing their business in the court?
Could we take the workshops that self-help centers already run in person, and make online versions of them to get wider distribution? To people who can't travel to self-help centers or need it during weekends or evenings? If we package up the guides into more usable formats, we can help ...
What if we made templated, user-tested Cover Sheets to all legal tasks (whether it's filling out forms or going through a procedure) so that people have great introductions and orientations to the task before being asked to do it?
What would an all-in-one collaboration platform look like, for clients & lawyers to work together? If there could be one place that coordinates a person's journey from having a legal problem, to seeking help, to actually carrying through resolution of the problem -- it could help reduce so many of ...
A thought from this morning 'so session.
Some more radical thoughts from Denis Weil, provoking lawyers to rethink how they relate to their users to find effective paths toward innovation.
A challenge from Justice Cuellar's at the ABA Legal Innovation Summit.
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 ...
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.
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) ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
...
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 ...