The Open Law Lab blog collects my thoughts, drawings, and projects on how design can improve the justice system.
Thanks for visiting + exploring!
The Rise of Legal Design

Come read the MIT journal Design Issues’ special edition on The Rise of Legal Design. I co-edited this volume, which features a number of studies and essays profiling the design of new government systems, privacy communications, legal aid initiatives, and participatory governance processes.
My Legal Design Projects
Access to Justice Innovations
Want to make law more accessible to more people? Here’s a collection of my posts on ideas, projects, research, and tech to improve access to justice.
Read more on Access to Justice innovations posts + drawings here.
Play Law Dojo

Come try out the Law Dojo app to learn law smarter, faster, and funnier! It’s made for law students, high school students, and anyone else who wants to learn US law through a fast-paced game.
My Latest Posts

Administrative Burden book on measuring citizen’s experience of government
This book explains how policy-making often focuses too much on the policies in the abstract and does not focus on their…

What can legal learn from medical when it comes to ethical AI?
Can legal practitioners, particularly those working on access to justice, learn from how AI is being rolled out in medical systems?…

Does virtual court mean more or less meaningful participation by litigants?
What research can we do to understand if virtual hearings improve or degrade the quality of justice that civil litigants get…

Benny, the legal aid unemployment benefits chatbot
On a recent conference call, someone pointed out a new bot from the CARPLS legal aid group in Illinois: Benny, a…

The Access to Justice Pathway: from naming to claiming to action
How do we activate people along the Justice pathway?I am lucky to be in a wonderful group of young scholars focused…

Must Read: Reimagining Courts, a design for the 21st century
Reimagining Courts collects data and ideas for how the court system in the United States might be improved to be more…

Design rules for accessible civic websites
Here is a terrific visual guide for all those making legal aid, court, or government help websites. It is from the…

How do we make a good taxonomy of legal problems?
I have been working on the giant effort to make a comprehensive, user-centered taxonomy of legal issues that people have in…

The future of legal business models and regulation
A quick sketch of Professor Gillian Hadfield’s presentation to the California Bar’s task force on innovation and access to legal services,…

Legal flowcharts from tax law class
Upon some online requests, here is a backlog of 2014-dated tax law flowcharts that I did while studying for my Tax…

Should we regulate public data like a community swimming pool?
A sketch of Arjuna Dibley and Rachelle Cole’s talk on how we might conceive of government/public data not as private goods…

What is a design approach to policy vs traditional policy-making?
Another sketch from Andrea Siodmok, of the UK Policy Lab, about how a design approach to policy work, as opposed to…

Design work for government systems change
My sketches of designer/UK Policy Lab leader Andrea Siodmok’s talk at the Digital Citizens conference in Melbourne. She presented on methods…

How can legal design work be evaluated?
From day 2 of the Digital Citizens conference at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Genevieve Grant of Monash University presented on…

Govt. digital innovation vs. Automated decision-making harms
At the Digital Citizens conference, Dr. Adam Fletcher from RMIT University raised important ethical and justice questions for those working on…

Do we need more laws to respond to AI? #digitalcitizens
Interesting discussion at the Digital Citizens Conference: do we need new laws, bills of rights, etc. to respond to the concerns…

Data privacy, human rights, and social services #digitalcitizens
Today I am at the University of Melbourne at the Digital Citizens conference, where the discussion is about concerns arising around…

How can we build better legal work cultures? Rituals for Work…
I have been lucky to have a lot of autonomy in my career so far, but it’s also been a priority…

Exploding the Fine Print: designing better computable contracts.
I have a new piece out, as a chapter in a larger book on Legal Tech, Smart Contracts, and Blockchain. My…

Visual self help guides for legal rights during pregnancy
Here is a great example of visual self help. It comes from the legal aid group, Legal Aid at Work, here…

A Beginner’s List of Links for those interested in visuals + law
I was having a conversation with a professor this morning who is interested in amplifying her work in doing diagramming, drawing,…

This Year’s LSC ITCon in Pictures + Drawings
January’s Legal Services Corporation ITCon (the conference formerly known as TIG) is the best place for legal aid technology geeks. Someone…

Taking stock of our current state of legal help digital tools
Yesterday I went to the ABA Midyear meeting to attend the Center for Innovation meeting, and also sit in on a…

A big vision of what legal design can do #ldsign18
Today a vision of legal design is coming together at the Jurix workshop. How do we combine the powers of design…

Designing a bot to proactively connect Redditors with legal help #LDsign18
How do we design access to justice tools that get out to where people with legal problems already are — and…

Legal design becomes a tribe, for a creative legal society — with some dangers #ldsign18
Some more thoughts from presenters on Jurix’s Legal Design workshop –about the emergent tribe of legal designers, how they reckon with…

Legal Design coming into its own #LDsign18
Today is the Legal Design as Academic Discipline workshop at Jurix. The big questions are on the table about what this…

Policy facilitation as a new profession #xbd2018
A vision of a new type of policy maker crossed with designer. How can we train our future lawyers and policymakers…

Can Policy Design Labs get from novelty to impact? #xbd2018
Professor Jenny Lewis from the University of Melbourne has been studying the rise of policy labs and design in government. She…

Regulators in the age of emerging tech #xbd2018
What does the near future of government regulation look like in the age of huge tech changes and new business models…

Experimenting with digital public services, in health #xbd2018
One case study on Experimentation By Design, around digital transformation of information for patients coming into the hospital. This comes from…

Experimentation By Design, for agile governance #xbd2018
Kicking off a day of strategic design in Denmark, about better policy-making that uses human-centered experiments.

What Law can learn from Digital Epidemiology
There is an interesting movement in public health research, around using people’s online posts, clicks, website visits, searches, and other behavior…

Steps toward a coherent Access to Justice movement
My sketches and notes for how our current loose coalition around Access to Justice could be stronger and more coherent —…

Where is the Plan for Access to Justice?
A vision of how an Access to Justice movement might blossom, with more judges involved –and with many examples from New…

The Difficulty of Bringing Design into Courts + Tribunals
I have been attending many court innovation conferences over the past year, and taking notes about what points of friction +…

Leadership in disruption/law
I made this sketch of a talk I attended in Australia, where various law firm leaders and business/management professors were talking…

How can you visualize your statistical data?
Here are my drawn notes about the most effective ways to communicate quantitative data, for others to understand – and for…

A theory of change for Legal Design work
I have been reading a tremendous amount of policy and design literature, to find some worthwhile grounding of my Lab’s design…

Testing out new legal bots + chat-based coaches
After doing a few months of user testing in courts, testing out different ideas for innovation — I’m more intent on…

8 Ideas for Better Court wayfinding
For the court user testing I am working on at the Legal Design Lab, we have been testing different ideas to…

Preventative Approaches to Legal Help
If we frame access to justice innovation around scouting what problems people have that might lead to legal or life crisis…

3 levels of better legal communication design
When we think of how to communicate a policy, a rule, a legal process better — we can think of 3…

How do we encourage legal service innovation replication?
One of the teams in my Intro to Legal Design class this quarter is working with Legal Services of North Florida…

Participatory Budgeting as a way to involve more people in justice innovation
I have been teaching and writing on how the Access to Justice movement might improve its innovations by including a wider…

How do we have a wider community influence the algorithms in the justice system?
The hot topic at court and access to justice conferences this year has been around how to make the new wave…

Scaling tools to system change for access to justice innovation
As more law school labs, hackathons, and innovation work lead to more individual products and services that aim to increase access…

How law school labs and clinics are defining a new innovation track
Yesterday I went to Suffolk Law School’s Clinnovation conference, to talk about how law school labs are growing In number and…

Court design + cafeteria design, working in analogies
A few weeks ago, I and a few of my students from Stanford participated as volunteer designers at a weeklong sprint…

A third way of privacy design #LegalDesignGDPR
Oftentimes, conversation about privacy communication design gets caught in a debate about oversimplification versus overcomplication. What’s emerging today at our meeting…
1 Comment
How do we join your mailing list?