Open Law Lab
The British Columbia, Canada group People’s Law School has an OpenAI-powered chatbot to help people get legal information: Beagle+. You can try out the Beagle+ Chatbot here, or…
Lois Lupica, working with IAALS and the Bohemian Foundation, made a guide for legal help providers about how to effectively communicate information to the public about the legal…
At this year’s Legal Design Roundtable in Brussels, many legal designers presented on what methods they are using for legal reform. One main theme was around Speculative Design,…
At last week’s Access to Justice Symposium hosted by the Stanford Law Review, I was on a panel about A2J and housing, with a focus on evictions. What…
As part of my access to justice innovation work, I realize one big barrier to change is understanding how systems currently operate. For example, filing and court technology…
Last week I had a double conference weekend in DC. The first was with front-line lawyers and executive directors at legal aid groups and public defender officers. The…
Victor Quintanilla presented at Georgetown Law/American Bar Foundation on his research on people’s experience of courts. He’s measuring people’s social psychology while going through a justice journey –…
Can legal practitioners, particularly those working on access to justice, learn from how AI is being rolled out in medical systems? Can we borrow their typology of AI — and also the problems with equity and bias in past AI/health projects?
What research can we do to understand if virtual hearings improve or degrade the quality of justice that civil litigants get in courts?
On a recent conference call, someone pointed out a new bot from the CARPLS legal aid group in Illinois: Benny, a conversational bot that can help a person…
How do we activate people along the Justice pathway?I am lucky to be in a wonderful group of young scholars focused on access to Justice, with support from…
Reimagining Courts collects data and ideas for how the court system in the United States might be improved to be more human-centered and more efficient. It looks at what is happening inside of different types of court systems in the US, including some innovative new models like problem-solving courts.
Here is a terrific visual guide for all those making legal aid, court, or government help websites. It is from the Gov.UK team, and it lays out key…
I have been working on the giant effort to make a comprehensive, user-centered taxonomy of legal issues that people have in the US. It’s called LIST, Legal Issues…
From day 2 of the Digital Citizens conference at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Genevieve Grant of Monash University presented on how rigorous outcome, process, and ethical evaluation…
January’s Legal Services Corporation ITCon (the conference formerly known as TIG) is the best place for legal aid technology geeks. Someone explicitly called me a geek at this…
Yesterday I went to the ABA Midyear meeting to attend the Center for Innovation meeting, and also sit in on a session about ‘Maybe there’s an app for…
How do we design access to justice tools that get out to where people with legal problems already are — and not expect them to come to new…
One case study on Experimentation By Design, around digital transformation of information for patients coming into the hospital. This comes from a Danish startup Emento that has built…
There is an interesting movement in public health research, around using people’s online posts, clicks, website visits, searches, and other behavior to better understand what health issues are:…
My sketches and notes for how our current loose coalition around Access to Justice could be stronger and more coherent — from the Fordham law A2J Summit today.
A vision of how an Access to Justice movement might blossom, with more judges involved –and with many examples from New York. From the former chief Justice of…
I have been reading a tremendous amount of policy and design literature, to find some worthwhile grounding of my Lab’s design work in the civil justice sphere, in…
After doing a few months of user testing in courts, testing out different ideas for innovation — I’m more intent on chat-based, dialogue tools as a promising way…
For the court user testing I am working on at the Legal Design Lab, we have been testing different ideas to make court process more navigable — getting…
If we frame access to justice innovation around scouting what problems people have that might lead to legal or life crisis finding patterns of issues and how they…
One of the teams in my Intro to Legal Design class this quarter is working with Legal Services of North Florida to think through a replication strategy for…
I have been teaching and writing on how the Access to Justice movement might improve its innovations by including a wider community in its policy-making. My colleague Verena…
The hot topic at court and access to justice conferences this year has been around how to make the new wave of algorithms and automated decision tools more…
As more law school labs, hackathons, and innovation work lead to more individual products and services that aim to increase access to need to think about how to…
One of the best sessions at the SRLN 2018 conference in San Francisco in February was one on AI, Ethics, and Decision-making. Speaking at it were Angie Tripp,…
Last Friday, I attended the second day of the Self-Represented Litigation Network’s yearly conference in San Francisco. I presented on the text messenger I am building with Legal…
This year, my work at the Legal Design Lab is shifting from the strictly generative and experimental, to more evaluation and development. That means we’re not working so…
Last week I was in New Orleans at one of the largest legal aid and self-help Innovacion conferences, sponsored by the Legal Services Corporation. I presented on a…
A page from my notebook during a recent conference, all about structuring legal help online in better ways. Engagement is such a huge challenge — and we can…
Last week I went to Orlando to participate in a share-out to the Florida Bar Foundation, by the core design team that worked over the past year to…
I’ve been honored to be the design facilitator on the Escambia Project, a community-driven design initiative in Pensacola, Florida, to reimagine, prototype, and pilot new ways to get…
In some recent testing of possible online court scenarios (with “Wizard of Oz” prototyping — not really coding these online court scenarios), our research team has observed an…
After reading and thinking about various participatory design and open innovation strategies, I’ve been brainstorming around how to get more community input into the redesign of the legal…
My listening this week: a podcast, Jumping Off the Ivory Tower, from Prof. Julie MacFarlane, of Canada’s National Self Represented Litigant Project. Here’s how Julie presents her vision…