Catrina Denvir – Justice Innovation

Is the Internet the place for legal help?

I’m working this week on pulling together an academic paper I’ve been writing on best practices & design standards for online legal resource sites, aimed at helping lay people begin to address a legal problem that’s cropped up in their life.

In my literature review, I keep circling back to articles coming out of University College London, which has done a large amount of quantitative & qualitative study of tech-based legal resources. These studies tend to be fairly skeptical of tech’s potential to help people actually resolve their legal issues.

The article Just a phone call away: Is telephone advice enough? from Nigel Balmer, Marisol Smith, Catrina Denvir and Ash Patel, compares the efficiency & quality of the experience of legal help given face to face, versus that provided over the telephone. It finds that telephone-based advice takes significantly longer than face to face.

It also runs down a shortlist of advantages & drawbacks of tech-based legal help. Tech-based legal help tools offer some main advantages to face-to-face services:

immediacy
convenience, enhances ease of access
lower cost to the service providers

Tech-based legal help may offer advantages to those users who have certain constraints:

mobility issues,
rural homes,
time pressures,
caring responsibilities,
without private transport

But it may not serve others:

those with difficulty communicating their needs and situation
those without good English language skills
those who don’t have access to tech in a private setting

Other article from UCL researchers dig into specific demographics’ use of tech-based legal help. These pieces try to deflate the notion that the Internet will change access to justice in a major way, by looking into the limitations of how various groups engage (or do not) internet-based help.

The article Portal or pot hole? Exploring how older people use the ‘information superhighway’ for advice relating to problems with a legal dimension considers how people over 60 search the Internet for help — finding that most of this population in the UK do not use the Internet to find help, except for the ‘young aging’ who are more willing to try tech-based solutions.

On the other end of the age spectrum, the article Surfing the web – Recreation or resource? Exploring how young people in the UK use the Internet as an advice portal for problems with a legal dimension finds that even if young people in the UK have grown up with more technology in their lives, many still do not know how to effectively access legal help online.

The UCL researchers seem to be circling around skepticism about the promise of the Internet to revolutionize access to justice. When they look at UK data sets about lay people’s use of Internet & phone-based resources, they find many shortcomings. Some of them are about users’ general lack of technological literacy & comfort, some of them are about the difficulty for a tech-literate person to navigate the Internet to effectively find relevant & rich help.

To me, this means that we should not stake all our work on exclusively Internet-based resources — but that we should still be investing a much larger amount of research, money & development into making the Internet more usable as a legal resource. This means not only making individual legal help websites better designed — but also making search portals (especially Google) more intelligent in getting people’s search queries diagnosed as legal ones, and then dispatching them to public, non-profit sources of information that fit their jurisdiction & their situation.

Have you read any good research either examining the status quo of how lay people use the Internet for legal help — or about what new concepts, models, and requirements are for innovation in online legal help? Send it along!

Does the Internet improve young people’s legal access?

A blog post from Richard Zorza’s rich blog on Access to Justice discusses an issue I am currently working on — whether the Internet is a usable and effective resource for non-lawyers to get legal information and support.

Some findings of particular interest:

Non-lawyers use search pages to find legal information to diagnose their situation.
They rely on the top search results as their primary resources, regardless of whether they are from the user’s jurisdiction, and without taking measures to check their quality.
The users sped through pages. Text and interfaces were scanned through quickly, and they flipped through sites quickly, back and forth. There was little slow, deliberate, consideration.
The users found some information to help address their legal issues, but they were not confident that their new knowledge was sufficient to truly help them.
After consulting Internet sources, the users were more likely to try non-legal processes to resolve their problems, and they did not register the urgency of taking legal means to protect themselves.

Research on Young People’s Use of Internet to Get Legal Information

Posted on November 5, 2012 by richardzorza

I am happy to report on, and post, a presentation by, Catina Denvir at the University of London, on preliminary results on research on young people’s use of the Internet in the UK. I think these prelimnary results are important and helpful in our ongoing planning and design.

The researcher, after observing that there were high levels of access but low levels of use in this area, decided to conduct an experiment to test actual impact from this use of the Internet. Users were given hypotheticals and then tracked and surveyed in employment and housing law. These are some of the results.

Changes were Subject Specific (example housing):

“Landlord
• Before -‐ Knowledge poor in regards to eviction without a court order and whether the landlord’s employees can remove you from the property

• Uncertainty as to what constituted a breach of the lease

• After -‐ improvement across the board, but uncertainty about who can evict a tenant”

Lots of Searching and Churning Through Pages

Average time on a page less than a minute

Jurisdictional Errors

Did not limit searching to UK — It would be interesting to know about the extent to which people in the UK now assume US law rules (or dear, in some areas of poverty law.) We obviously have the same problem in the US in terms of distinguishing between states.

Lots of back and forth between sites

Little discrimination as to which sites reliable

Order of Search Results was Very Important

Used top page and top result regardless of reliability. (So we need to do a better job of getting our stuff at the top, and educating public.)

After use of Internet, Greater Emphasis on Informal Mechanisms to Resolve Matter

Failure to understand legal processes

Failure to appreciate urgency

May Increase Knowledge, but not Confidence in Ability to Deal with Problem

This is consistent with other research in which I have been involved.

Obviously, this all opens up huge areas of additional inquiry. Some of the most obvious:

How can we do better with search results (like expanding the LSC Google partnership so that it gets more broadly to trusted ATJ sites?

How can we use community eduction so people know to trust ATJ sites (how about a national certification system and courts and legal aid jointly promoting the reliability of those sites?

What would people need to have better confidence in their ability to navigate the system — would better descriptions do it, or does the system itself need to be easier? Some of this could be tested.

Further information about the research is available from Catrina Denvir, catrina.denvir.10(at)ucl.ac.uk, at University College London.