These are slides from my presentation at DATA2J, a roundtable conference hosted by Prof. Elizabeth Chambliss, Director of the Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough Center on Professionalism at the USC School of Law. In my presentation, I addressed ways to increase online engagement between the public and lawyers through the use of gamification. I based the talk on my working paper.
Here is a working paper I wrote that looks at ways to increase online engagement between the public and legal professionals using gamification for the purpose of increasing access to justice. This is the last of the research and writing I have produced this year during my Stanford Law Fellowship. I hope someone out there takes this research and the case studies and puts the information to good use. The working paper will be refined and become part of a white paper series for the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services later in the year. I am open to suggestions and collecting other case studies for this paper.
I posted my other draft paper on Gamification in Law Firms a couple weeks ago. There is more work to be done in this area and it involves multidisciplinary collaboration. Hopefully these two papers will provide a good starting point for those interested in the actual development of gamification strategies within the legal profession – whether for access to justice or for internal improvement of the law firm environment.
A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation on a panel entitled Legal Technology in the Public Interest with Ron Staudt and Phil Malone for Stanford’s Future Law Conference. Below is the video from this:
The LSC has released the final version of the Report of the Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice. This Report resulted from a Tech Summit that took place over the past two years. I attended both the first “blue sky” brainstorming meeting and the second “practical implementation” meeting of the Summit.
Those interested in virtual law practice will note that the Report includes technology that is commonly used in online delivery, such as online client portal access, document assembly and automation tools, mobile access and expert systems. The delivery of unbundled services to the public is also mentioned throughout the report under several of the proposed plans. I was pleased to read that gamification (and games in a footnote) were also included as a way to increase engagement for legal services through the proposed “access to justice portals.”
The Summit was exciting to attend because of the diverse backgrounds of the attendees and the discussions that it generated. The Report summarizes this process into proposals for moving forward. I’m anxious to see where it goes from here.
The following guest post was written by John Wires. John is part of the Foredex initiative to have all lawyers in Ontario connected online. He practices corporate commercial litigation at Wires Jolley LLP (www.wiresjolleyllp.com) in Toronto.
I read about this project and was impressed with its broad implications for virtual law practice and greater access to justice in Canada. Could an initiative like this be duplicated in the States? Some court systems here are attempting to take part of the process online, but nothing on this scale that integrates legal research, case law, local rules, etc. in one online space with regular contributors and a strong online community. This is something to watch. A big “thank you” to John for sharing this initiative.
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The legal system in Canada is facing a crisis. In Ontario, the average cost of a trial is now well over $60,000. Courts are backlogged with 80,000 cases being filed each year and less than 300 judges to hear and manage them. Despite numerous reports by the Attorney General the courts have been slow to adopt appropriate technology to manage cases, digitize and automate the claims process and interact with lawyers.
Likewise, lawyers fees are often making litigation prohibitive for middle and lower income families and individuals.
Noticing a similar trend in Europe and the United States, best selling author Richard Susskind now urges lawyers to ask themselves what elements of their current workload could be undertaken more quickly, more cheaply, more efficiently, or to a higher quality using different and new technologies and methods of working. He argues that the market is unlikely to tolerate expensive lawyers for tasks that can be better discharged with support of modern systems and techniques.
He claims that the legal profession will be driven by two forces in the coming decade; by a market pull towards the commoditization of legal services, and by the pervasive development and uptake of new and disruptive legal technologies. The threat here for lawyers is clear – their jobs may well be eroded or even displaced. At the same time, for entrepreneurial lawyers, Susskind foresees quite different law jobs emerging which may be highly rewarding, even if very different from those of today.
In Ontario (as in the Untied States), we have already begun to see the “commoditization of legal services” which Susskind wrote about. The
rise of online service providers (such as MyLegalBriefCase.com for small claims litigation and legal document providers such as LegalZoom.com) are becoming more attractive to those who can’t afford lawyers and access to the justice system. Yet, few lawyers have ventured into reducing costs by setting up virtual legal practices (Cognition LLP and Sapna Law being the early adopters in Canada). (more…)