Open Law Lab
ChartaCourse is a new tool from law professors that unpacks case books, and lays out interactive, visual concept maps of each law course’s content. It’s meant to replace…
I have been working over the past few months on a research paper about how people use the Internet for legal help. I’ve been doing online questionnaires to…
Last night, I helped organize a group of lawyers & designers to kick off a longer design process, about reimagining how we convey Know Your Rights materials to…
Inspired by the Mozilla/Aza Raskin’s Privacy Icons project, I’ve been thinking about how we can improve how we communicate legal warnings online. Particularly, I’m thinking of those standard…
I’m very excited for my quarter-long class, Intro to Legal Design, that’s going to be starting in April at Stanford d.school/Law School. Today was a recruiting event at…
Graphic Justice is a UK-based blog and network of academics who are interested in storytelling, visuals and the law. The posts on the group’s site focus mainly on…
A quick visual guide I made for very low-barrier, easy ways to make your text communications more usable to average readers. This applies to both hard-copy print-outs, and…
In December, I had the pleasure of meeting Kanan Dhru when she visited the d.school on her trip to the US. I had written about her project Lawtoons…
Following up from my earlier post about making Visual cover-sheets for academic work, I was pointed toward this video blog from University of Alberta law professor Peter Sankoff.…
I’ve been talking with some of my colleagues about how to set up some more deliberate & collaborative groups who are working on human-centered design & law. Part…
Here’s an entire special edition of the journal Law Text Culture devoted to Justice Framed: Law in Comics & Graphic Novels. I’ve linked to an introduction to the…
CALI, or the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, created an online law game Time Trial. The game teaches the player legal history, by having them try to place…
Connected to my post last week on crowdsourcing legal investigations, I wanted to spotlight the possibility of using crowd support online to get attention, funding, and social capital…
Isobel Williams is an artist in the UK who on her site Drawing from an uncomfortable position keeps a collection of gorgeous drawings from the UK Supreme Court.…
At the end of November 2014, I published a short survey on this site, asking respondents to weigh in on the ‘Access to Justice movement’ (if we can…
Kristina Brousalis tipped me off to this Canadian initiative at giving trainee lawyers ‘Tours of Duty’ through different parts of the legal profession. Legal Aid Ontario has a…
Another fun little lightweight law game — this time from Koding Global Virtual Hackathon in December 2014. It’s called the TOS Game — it’s more of a live…
Immigration Advocates Network & Pro Bono Net released an app Immigo this year to serve advocates on the go. It is an app with 3 main functions: Listing…
There is an interesting court redesign organization that’s come out of the University of Michigan Law School. There is an Online Court Project that Univ. of Michigan has…
I am on the hunt for law games that are rich, fun, and adaptable to many different ways of learning/practicing law. After I started developing my game Law…
From November’s 5 Question Friday, I have compiled some of the responses and quotes I received in response to this question — Is There a Coherent A2J Movement?…
I got a comment on an earlier post on Legal Health checkups, from Kristina Brousalis who works at CLEO, a public legal education and information organization in Toronto,…
Communication professor Lien Tran of the Univ. of Miami has developed an offline game for users of the US immigration system — called Toma el Paso, or Make …
In response to the surge of Unaccompanied Immigrant Children coming into the US over the past year, a group has come together in Maryland to produce a social…
Law professors Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel published the book Law on Display in 2011. They make the argument that visuals are becoming increasingly powerful in legal courtrooms:…
The State of California has a Pleading Bank that can be used by a licensed attorney to find sample, guiding documents to expedite her work. It links back…
Here’s another example of visual explanations of law. Here it is the 2008 book Bound by Law?: Tales from the Public Domain, with Intellectual Property Law visualized in comic…
Here is a visual I made for the Canadian Bar Association, to illustrate the main takeaways of their new Legal Futures report. And then a version in French…
What would a Github for Law look like? And is it worth building? This afternoon I got an email from a site visitor who asked if I knew…
I’m working on a project right now to bring court reminder messaging systems into some California courts. I’ve been reaching out to different open-source platforms that offer text-messaging…
Law Comics is a Tumblr blog that features a handful of illustrated explainers of law — to start with, patents. These first comics are authored by Julia Powles…
ZoningCheck is a legal web app to help business owners navigate zoning regulations. It’s a winner of one of the grants from the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge from…
Among the many camps of ideas for how to increase access to justice, one of the strongest I keep returning to is Devolved Legal Services. What I mean…
The New York Times profiled the start-up Roompact yesterday, framing it as a roommate dispute tool. It also is a legal product — it’s a platform for two…
Project Nanny Van is an excellent new example of creative legal service design. Dan Jackson from Northeastern Law’s NuLawLab clued me in about it. The NuLawLab & its…
Kanan Dhru of the Research Foundation for Governance: in India (RFGI) think tank reached out to me, sharing her Lawtoons project — as well as a more general…
Carnegie Mellon’s CUPS group, who works on making usable privacy projects for normal people, has just launched a new project. They have published a collection of banks’ privacy…
Here’s a visual for non-lawyers to enter information for a professional to later use in their legal case, and also to understand if they are eligible for DACA.…
David Johnson of New York Law School pointed me to Argz, a platform currently in development (and with Beta Release) to create a puzzle-game out of logic &…
Here is a handout I made for my communication design students, about different visual structures they can use to communicate complex information. I made it particularly for lawyers,…