(And the Different Ways to Design for Them)
by Margaret Hagan
In the access to justice world, we often talk about “the justice gap” as if it’s one massive, monolithic challenge. But if we want to truly serve the public, we need to be more precise. People encounter different kinds of legal problems, with different stakes, emotional dynamics, and system barriers. And those differences matter.
At the Legal Design Lab, we find it helpful to divide the access to justice landscape into three distinct types of problems. Each has its own logic — and each requires different approaches to research, design, technology, and intervention.
1. David vs. Goliath Conflicts
This is the classic imbalance. An individual — low on time, legal knowledge, money, or support — faces off against a repeat player: a bank, a corporate landlord, a debt collector, or a government agency.
These Goliaths have teams of lawyers, streamlined filing systems, institutional knowledge, predictive data, and now increasingly, AI-powered legal automation and strategies. They can file thousands of cases a month — many of which go uncontested because people don’t understand the process, can’t afford help, or assume there’s no point trying.
This is the world of:
- Eviction lawsuits from corporate landlords
- Mass debt collection actions
- Robo-filed claims, often incorrect but rarely challenged
The problem isn’t just unfairness — it’s non-participation. Most “Davids” default. They don’t get their day in court. And as AI makes robo-filing even faster and cheaper, we can expect the imbalance in knowledge, strategy, and participation may grow worse.
What Goliath vs. David Conflicts need
Designing for this space means understanding the imbalance and structuring tools to restore procedural fairness. That might mean:
- Tools that help people respond before defaulting. These could be pre-filing defense tools that detect illegal filings or notice issues. It could also be tools that prepare people to negotiate from a stronger position — or empower them to respond before defaulting.
- Systems that detect and challenge low-quality filings. It could also involve systems that flag repeat abusive behavior from institutional actors.
- Interfaces that simplify legal documents into plain language. Simplified, visual tools to help people understand their rights and the process quickly.
- Research into procedural justice and scalable human-AI support models
2. Person vs. Person Conflicts
This second type of case is different. Here, both parties are individuals, and neither has a lawyer.
In this world, both sides are unrepresented and lack institutional or procedural knowledge. There’s real conflict — often with emotional, financial, or relational stakes — but neither party knows how to navigate the system.
Think about emotionally charged, high-stakes cases of everyday life:
- Family law disputes (custody, divorce, child support)
- Mom-and-pop landlord-tenant disagreements
- Small business vs. customer conflicts
- Neighbor disputes and small claims lawsuits
Both people are often confused. They don’t know which forms to use, how to prepare for court, how to present evidence, or what will persuade a judge. They’re frustrated, emotional, and worried about losing something precious — time with their child, their home, their reputation. The conflict is real and felt deeply, but both sides are likely confused about the legal process.
Often, these conflicts escalate unnecessarily — not because the people are bad, but because the system offers them no support in finding resolution. And with the rise of generative AI, we must be cautious: if each person gets an AI assistant that just encourages them to “win” and “fight harder,” we could see a wave of escalation, polarization, and breakdowns in courtrooms and relationships.
We have to design for a future legal system that might, with AI usage increasing, become more adversarial, less just, and harder to resolve.
What Person Vs. Person Justice Conflicts Need
In person vs. person conflicts, the goal should be to get to mutual resolutions that avoid protracted ‘high’ conflict. The designs needed are about understanding and navigation, but also about de-escalation, emotional intelligence, and procedural scaffolding.
- Tools that promote resolution and de-escalation, not just empowerment. They can ideally support shared understanding and finding a solution that can work for both parties.
- Shared interfaces that help both parties prepare for court fairly. Technology can help parties prepare for court, but also explore off-ramps like mediation.
- Mediation-oriented AI prompts and conflict-resolution scaffolding. New tools could have narrative builders that let people explain their story or make requests without hostility. AI prompts and assistants could calibrate to reduce conflict, not intensify it.
- Design research that prioritizes relational harm and trauma awareness.
This is not just a legal problem. It’s a human problem — about communication, trust, and fairness. Interventions here also need to think about parties that are not directly involved in the conflict (like the children in a family law dispute between separating spouses).
3. Person vs. Bureaucracy
Finally, we have a third kind of justice issue — one that’s not so adversarial. Here, a person is simply trying to navigate a complex system to claim a right or access a service.
These kinds of conflicts might be:
- Applying for public benefits, or appealing a denial
- Dealing with a traffic ticket
- Restoring a suspended driver’s license
- Paying off fines or clearing a record
- Filing taxes or appealing a tax decision
- Correcting an error on a government file
- Getting work authorization or housing assistance
There’s no opposing party. Just forms, deadlines, portals, and rules that seem designed to trip you up. People fall through the cracks because they don’t know what to do, can’t track all the requirements, or don’t have the documents ready. It’s not a courtroom battle. It’s a maze.
Here many of the people caught in these systems do have rights and options. They just don’t know it. Or they can’t get through all the procedural hoops to claim them. It’s a quiet form of injustice — made worse by fragmented service systems and hard-to-reach agencies.
What Person vs. Bureaucracy Conflicts Need
For people vs. bureaucracy conflicts, the key word is navigation. People need supportive, clarifying tools that coach and guide them through the process — and that might also make the process simpler to begin with.
- Seamless navigation tools that walk people through every step. These could be digital co-pilots that walk people through complex government workflows, and keep them knowledgeable and encouraged at each step.
- Clear eligibility screeners and document checklists. These could be intake simplification tools that flag whether the person is in the right place, and sets expectations about what forms someone needs and when.
- Text-based reminders and deadline alerts, to keep people on top of complicated and lengthy processes. These procedural coaches can keep people from ending up in endless continuances or falling off the process altogether. Personal timelines and checklists can track each step and provide nudges.
- Privacy-respecting data sharing so users don’t have to “start over” every time. This could mean administrative systems that have document collection & data verication systems that gather and store proofs (income, ID, residence) that people need to supply over and again. It could also mean bringing their choices and details among trusted systems, so they don’t need to fill in another form.
This space is ripe for good technology. But it also needs regulatory design and institutional tech improvements, so that systems become easier to plug into — and easier to fix. Aside from user-facing designs, we also need to work on standardizing forms, moving from form-dependencies to structured data, and improve the tech operations of the systems.
Why These Distinctions Matter
These three types of justice problems are different in form, in emotional tone, and in what people need to succeed. That means we need to study them differently, run stakeholder sessions differently, evaluate them with slightly different metrics, and employ different design patterns and principles.
Each of these problem types requires a different kind of solution and ideal outcome.
- In David vs. Goliath, we need defense, protection, and fairness. We need to help reduce the massive imbalance in knowledge, capacity, and relationships, and ensure everyone can have their fair day in court.
- In Person vs. Person, we need resolution, dignity, and de-escalation. We need to help people focus on mutually agreeable, sustainable resolutions to their problems with each other.
- In Person vs. Bureaucracy, we need clarity, speed, and guided action. We must aim for seamless, navigable, efficient systems.
Each type of problem requires different work by researchers, designers, an policymakers. These include different kinds of:
- User research methods, and ways to bring stakeholders together for collaborative design sessions
- Product and service designs, and the patterns of tools, interfaces, and messages that will engage and serve users in this conflict.
- Evaluation criteria, about what success looks like
- AI safety guidelines, about how to prevent bias, capture, inaccuracies, and other possible harms. We can expect these 3 different conflicts changing as more AI usage appears among litigants, lawyers, and court systems.
If we blur these lines, we risk building one-size-fits-none tools.
Toward Smarter Justice Innovation
At the Legal Design Lab, we believe this three-type framework can help researchers, funders, courts, and technologists build smarter interventions — and avoid repeating old mistakes.
We can still learn across boundaries. For example:
- How conflict resolution tools from family law might help in small business disputes
- How navigational tools in benefits access could simplify court prep
- How due process protections in eviction can inform other administrative hearings
But we also need to be honest: not every justice problem is built the same. And not every innovation should look the same.
By naming and studying these three zones of access to justice problems, we can better target our interventions, avoid unintended harm, and build systems that actually serve the people who need them most.
