Open Law Lab
A drawn dispatch from this week’s National Association for Court Management– from the plenary on how we might use evaluative frameworks to improve how courts perform.
Last week’s New York Times Magazine features a beautiful quote and accompanying exploration of what it means to a person in a bureaucratic building. The original quote from…
Today I am in sunny, lovely Vancouver, British Columbia at a symposium of the Canadian Administrative Tribunals’ adjudicators, advocates, and other professionals. It’s co-hosted by the Council of…
Earlier this week, I presented my Design for Justice work to a group at the Gruter Institute, with a mix of lawyers, biologists, computer scientists, economists, and more.…
Joshua Lennon lays out an argument for wariness of the coming rise of law chat bots. – they often are not jurisdiction based – they may give people…
Andrey Zinoviev and Artem Goldman have built a Facebook bot — VisaBot — to help people figure out their eligibility for different immigration paths and then complete forms,…
Stanford law student Kevin Xu and his team has made a bot, Hilbert, to help people understand and navigate their health insurance plans. They are focusing on young…
Radical– a historian at a Futurist panel! Prof. Norman Spaulding explains the populist roots of legal tools, to drive greater public access to what the law is. Before…
We see more discussion of predictive algorithms to judge people in criminal justice, to analyze whether / how to grant probation, bail, etc. But there are serious risks…
A panel on law, algorithms, ethics, and future tech. How do we build tools that understand when a person says, “I want a divorce,” they might be mad…
One of my academic articles has just been published in the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology. It’s called “The User Experience of the Internet as a Legal…
This afternoon I was privileged to attend the final presentations in the new Stanford class Ending Poverty with Technology. This class is taught by Sociology professor David Grusky,…
The Office of Management and Budget released its proposed budget this week, in which they propose the elimination of the Legal Services Corporation. The LSC is the closest…
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…
What are better ways to help people follow a legal process? To get all the tasks, forms, consults, and decisions made to get to resolution? One mode I’ve…
The International Bar Association has published the app eyeWitness, to allow people on the ground, in situations where atrocities are occurring, to gather evidence. The system they’ve set…
A team from the University of Cambridge have launched Lawbot (BETA), an interactive conversational tool that can consult people on their possible legal situations. It’s a British tool,…
Thanks to Aaron Stienstra for linking me to the Center for Civic Design, an effort to bring good design to elections and ballots. They are a non-profit who…
During a recent visit to the University of Denver, I was so impressed to hear about a project that has come out of IAALS (the Institute for the…
Last week, it was great to see a short article making the rounds about a new chat-bot legal service coded and launched by a Stanford undergrad student, Joshua…
I have been in different working groups and conferences over the past year, all focused on access to justice innovation, and we keep coming back to one new…
If we were to build a 2016 tool to help people, searching online for help with a life problem (that we know has a possible legal solution/redress), what…
Last week I went to an evening talk at Intuit, hearing from a collection of designers, technologists, and strategists working to make personal finance more engaging for laypeople.…
Last week I had the pleasure of attending the White House Forum on Increasing Access to Justice. It was a gathering of lawyers, judges, law clinic leaders, business-people,…
I realize that I am outing myself as a full-on dork with this post, but I am unreasonably excited by coming across the IRS’ Tax Design Challenge —…
Earlier this week I found myself at lunch with an expert in sustainable finance, another expert on healthcare and patient engagement, and a user experience designer. Then there’s…
Earlier this month, I was lucky enough to be a judge at the CourtHack hackathon in Salt Lake City, sponsored by the National Center for State Courts. The…
I was going back through my notebook from conferences I’ve been at for the past few months. One of the themes I was sketching out was about branding…
As I plan out what I might teach next quarter, I’m increasingly decided against having another classroom-based design class. I want to be in the field, where the…
One of the most exciting ideas that came out of last month’s Legal Services Corporation/Technology Innovation Grants conference in San Antonio was the idea of using data to…
I have a much longer post on this coming — but after the session I ran last week at the Legal Services Corporation’s Technology Innovation Grant conference in…
Last week I spoke on a panel of access to justice & technology at the Google/Baker McKenzie event, the Children’s Rights Summit. The goal was to explore how…
Last Friday I was a guest judge at a d.school program on the future of cities. I was responding to student teams’ proposals for ‘Tactical Urbanism’ projects in…
Why doesn’t it resonate with more Americans that we need a better justice system, that gives equal & universal access to all people who need to use law…
Today at the Judicial Council’s Beyond the Bench conference on innovations and user experience in family law & the justice system, I had the privilege to hear a…
This poster is my slightly improved version of a paper-sharpie-poster concept from yesterday’s Beyond The Bench user centered legal services design workshop. I led it with a small…
The voice of Sade Daniels, about what it feels like to go through the court system as a foster youth, at the Plenary of Beyond the Bench.
Setting the tone of a priority on User Experience at the California Beyond the Bench conference. This quote is from Administrative Director Martin Hoshino, about the need to…
Today I had the pleasure of hearing LSC President Jim Sandman speak to a conference hall full of Legal Service Providers from Floria, at the Florida 2015 Legal…
Some insights from Ben Barton at the UCHastings Equal Access to Justice conference, about the convergence of the same massive problem in the US legal and medical…