Virtual Law Practice

Tag: Games

  • Gamification for Access to Justice

    Gamification for Access to Justice

    Vector mobile game concept - icons in styleHere 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.

  • Gamification in Law Firms

    Gamification in Law Firms

    Here is my draft working paper on Gamification in Law Firms which looks at the use of gamification in law firms to increase productivity and collaboration, among other benefits. This paper provides a framework for approaching implementation of a gamification strategy within the law firm.gamification

    For this paper I had fun researching in the fields of psychology, sociology, education, game design and development, behavioral science, marketing, human-computer interaction (HCI) and a little neuroscience. This paper provides a background on gamification, including the science behind why it works, and then looks at how law firms could apply gamification for different purposes within the firm.

    The second half of the paper actually provides a map for a law firm to design a gamification strategy and move forward with experimenting with this in the firm.  I have many case studies of different forms of gamification at companies and even a small handful of law firms that have experimented with gamification and had success.

    gamificationpapercoverSome of the objectives for the use of gamification in law firms might be:

    1. Increased associate retention rates,
    2. Efficient and effective training of new technologies and processes, including methods to improve associate recording of billable hours,
    3. Human resources productivity, such as onboarding new associates, training new hires, collecting associate reviews, etc.,
    4. Increased communication between members of the firm,
    5. Encourage inter-generational mentorship,
    6. Increased participation in pro bono activities,
    7. Desired use of firm resources, such as training and education,
    8. Encouragement for individual law firm members to innovate for the benefit of the firm.

    Please note that this paper is a work in progress. I am currently working on a paper related to gamification for access to justice and with client-facing applications that focuses more broadly on increasing online engagement between lawyers and the public.  I’ve found some great, fairly recent, empirical studies for that paper that I may go back and add to the analysis in this one for law firms. Stay tuned.

  • Meaningful Play & Legal Games Research

    The annual Meaningful Play Conference (@meaningfulplay, #mplay) is being held this week at Michigan State University. This game conference takes an academic approach to how games can be used to educate and persuade the players. The conference explores how games can be designed and developed for meaningful purposes acknowledging that

    …games have the potential to impact players’ beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, emotions, cognitive abilities, physical and mental health, and behavior.

    I am unable to attend the conference, but my two fellow panelists, Lien Tran and Dan Jackson, are there to present information about how games might be used in the legal industry and to raise questions about the development and funding for those games. I wanted to share their important work here and provide an update on my own research progress.

    Lien Tran is a game designer and Assistant Professor at the University of Miami. She has started an initiative, Amiguía Americana, to provide interactive, game-based resources for unaccompanied immigrant minors (UIMs), youth who may have been taken into custody by the government because of their undocumented status. Her first immigration project, Toma El Paso (Make a Move in English), is a board game currently being used by ICAN (a team of community volunteers who deliver a tailored curriculum to UIMs) with UIMs in a juvenile shelter in Miami, Florida, to teach them about the shelter release process.

    Dan Jackson is the Executive Director of the NuLawLab at Northeastern University School of Law. They have created game that is a simulation for self-represented parties. The game is a nominee with the HiiL Innovating Justice program.

    Keep an eye on both of these individuals and their projects as the concept of games for legal services begins to take hold.

    meaningfulplayAs for my research at Stanford Law, I’m reading through examples of how games and gamification have been used in the medical profession and the reported outcomes from use in caregiver/patient or medical organization/public relationships. This is requiring me to read through journals outside of law which makes this work really fun and challenging. I’ve been reading books on persuasive games and radical game design.

    I am also writing a couple of introductory white papers that look at 1) gamification within law firms, and 2) the use of games and gamification to increase online engagement between the public and the legal profession. I’ll share. More to come.

  • Top Take-Aways from GSummit for the Legal Profession

    play“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein

    I attended GSummit in San Francisco this week. (The “G” stands for gamification.) This annual conference looks at ways to increase user engagement through gamification and games. With all of the online “noise” surrounding us and the invasiveness of mobile technology pulling people in many different directions, no industry – not even the legal profession – is immune from the problem of getting the public’s attention long enough to convey a message.

    As I’ve written before, I am researching ways to increase online engagement between the public and the legal profession. Specifically, I am looking at ways to use online games to educate and empower the public about their legal rights. While I knew this conference was aimed more at how companies could increase brand loyalty and engagement of consumers, I thought the lessons here were definitely something that might translate over to our profession.

    I was not the only person thinking this. There were a couple other people from the legal profession, including a member of the Legal Services Society in BC and someone from a big law firm scoping out methods of gamification to motivate associates to collaborate and share work. I gathered a lot of useful information in the sessions that I will be exploring further in my research at Stanford.

    Below are only a few of the top take-aways from GSummit 2014. With each of these, I am thinking about multiple applications of the concepts to our profession, such as 1) implementation in a large law firm for associates, training, employee motivation, etc., 2) a technique that a legal tech startup or existing branded network for legal services could adopt, or 3) a way that games could be created that would educate the public about the law and where to go for legal assistance whether that’s to a legal aid organization, a branded network, a law firm or a solo practitioner.

    1. Games can be incredibly adept at explaining complex systems. – IBM’s Serious Games Solutions (And what could be more complex than the legal system?)

    2. Games can be used to change cultures in a positive fashion. – IBM’s @INNOV8ATE

    3. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation may not be specific enough to explain behavior. Behavior is systematic. Designing should be for behavior change and not for persuasion. – BJ Fogg (Stanford) (@BJFogg)

    4. How to troubleshoot when a behavior is not happening (such as people not take some preventive legal action): 1. Trigger the behavior (Tell them “You need to have this legal document executed!”), 2. Is it simple enough? Can they do it from an ability perspective? 3. Motivation (do they want to do it? do they understand the legal consequences of doing or not doing an action?) – BJ Fogg (Stanford)

    5. Validation, especially social validation, is always better than out-right rewards, but it’s harder to orchestrate. Rewards have a short-term result. – BJ Fogg (Stanford)

    6. For intervention and prevention, you only need to create an experience that is short but impacts the player for a longer time. This is contrary to the belief that you have to build a game that people will keep playing repeatedly or come back to. You only have to get them to do it in a short burst and that exposure to the experience in the game mechanics will be long enough to have the impact desired to convey the lesson. – from a recent study on games that Jane McGonigal spoke about during her session

    7. Technology didn’t make a difference in the results regarding the success of a game. It could be a pen and paper game and innovative technologies or apps didn’t make a difference. – from McGonigal’s talk [McGonigal also told about the push-back she has gotten with her games and research geared towards improving people’s health and how the “bias” against games by the medical profession is unfortunately preventing potentially useful clinical data from getting into the hands of the people it could help. I expect the same initial resistance with the legal profession. Gathering user data and outcome reporting is going to be important.]

    8.  Co-op play, social gaming, or adding a social component to the game increases positive feelings about the players and increases interaction.  – McGonigal

    9. Connecting the subject you want to teach to pop-culture references can have enormous impact at both increasing the engagement but also in spreading the lesson to people who otherwise might not be interested in engaging long enough to learn it.  – Neil DeGrasse Tyson spoke about his work as an astrophysicist and how he teaches by finding ways to connect his ideas out into pop-culture references. The same could by connecting legal games with pop culture icons and references – maybe even cat memes.  While that may sound “distasteful” to some in the profession, it would actually work really well to get the engagement necessary to teach the legal lesson.

    10. There is a psychology of fun (her slide deck on this) and different types of fun that can lead to desired engagement. – Nicole Lazzaro, XEODesign

    Top insight gleaned: The legal profession is not engaging with the public we serve in ways that will make a meaningful impact. As society becomes more mobile, it will become increasingly difficult for us to get the public’s attention and therefore more difficult to increase access to justice and help guide them to self-help resources. There are ways we could use gamification and game mechanics to create meaningful connections between the public and legal services providers and/or legal information for self-help purposes.

  • ABA Journal Covers Crowdfunding for Game for Legal Services

    CoverpicThe ABA Journal wrote an article about the RocketHub crowdfund campaign to develop the game for legal services, Estate Quest.

    I’m still working with Illinois Legal Aid Online on a game about eviction law, but the estate planning game has been on hold until I can get more funding to complete it. There are five days left in the campaign.

    Please consider helping to develop this project with me. If we can learn ways to increase online engagement with the public around the law and their legal rights, then we can increase awareness, access, and education. If you are interested in ways that other industries are using games to create positive change, check out Games for Change.

     

     

  • Game for Legal Services Launched. Giving Away Virtual Practice Materials for Donations.

    The RocketHub crowdfund campaign was launched yesterday to raise funds to build out the estate planning game, Estate Quest.

    Funds will be used to build out four additional levels of the game, playtest, refine, and provide to the public to play for free. In exchange for donations, I’m giving away some signed copies of my books, a bundle of books, legal tech resources, legal tech consulting time, and some other interesting gifts.

    I’d like to make this a game that’s free for the public to play and learn about some basic estate planning concepts. I’m also doing this to learn about how the crowdfund process might be used for other legal services related projects.

    Building a high-quality game that would be more easily distributed and catch on with the Facebook crowds, is expensive. But that’s the audience we need to reach to really share this as a tool for learning legal concepts. I’m still working with Illinois Legal Aid Online on a game related to eviction and landlord/tenant issues. There is something here in terms of increasing engagement with the public online through games. The legal profession needs to experiment to see if games are one way of increasing legal knowledge and access options. Below is me taking a chance on this. Please consider joining in. Thanks!

  • Video: Estate Quest Game

    Below is a video walkthrough of the Estate Quest game.

    I’m learning many valuable lessons about how to design and build a game related to legal services. If my team and I can build this game out to additional levels, it will be cross-platform which means playable in a browser and published for play on mobile devices and on Facebook.  The final game will have a rewards system built out that rewards the player after successfully completing a level with a discount or access to real-world legal services or resources.

    You can read my other posts about why I am experimenting with games for legal services. I’m also still working on a game with Illinois Legal Aid Online on the topic of eviction. More details coming soon.

  • Balancing Fun with Legal Nuance in Game Design

    BalanceLawyers are trained to over think things to the point of taking the fun out of them. I’ve learned I am no exception. This was one of the first obstacles in the process of creating a game for legal services.

    The game design document, the blueprint for the actual game, is almost finished. We will take this doc to the developers and rest of the team necessary for the next steps in production. Getting the theme nailed down was the first step in the process. The second was to present legal consequences in a way that is humorous and instructs through problem solving.

    I provided my game designer with a variety of different legal scenarios related to estate planning and administration. I have practiced estate planning for ten years and had done estate administration before going into solo practice. I have seen the damage done to families and loved ones when they fail to handle their estate planning. Many Americans should have their wills and medical directives drafted, but most do not know that they need these documents in the first place or the value that they have to protect their families.

    We are dealing with a depressing topic that not many people are eager to discuss. Who wants to think about their eventual demise? How do you make that fun? We are going to try humor.

    I tried to analyze all of the potential ways the player could solve the legal issues that were being presented in the game. This is where my training threatened to take the fun out. This is part of the reason I wanted my team to be made up of individuals from the game industry who do not have a legal background. One lawyer throwing cold water on the production is enough.

    Of course the necessary disclaimers will be slapped on the final product to provide notice that we are not providing legal services and so that no one will assume that the solutions in the game play are the actual solutions the player should take in real life. We are trying to reach players on an emotional level to engage in thinking about estate planning and, through sharing components in the game play, engage in a dialogue with their friends and family about it as well.

    My game designer has her own analysis of the mechanics of the game play that she must work through. That type of over thinking through the process is practical. My analysis as a lawyer needed to stop at a certain point in order for us to proceed with making a good game. In fact, the deeper we went into the “but if this, then that” or “but also this is a possibility”, the closer the game got to becoming a traditional, educational legal game. This game is intended to be broad in scope and to provide basic legal education. The game rewards the player with access to real-world legal services if they choose them and at that point the player can seek assistance that goes deeper into their personal legal needs.

    Then came another issue in the game design when we thought about levels and rewards. How do you rank or assign points to personal choices? How do you place values on choices in game play that result in a reward when the choices made in solving the problem are based on the personal values and priorities of the player?  One potential good solution to a legal problem may not be a priority to another player based on personal preferences or individual circumstances. (more…)

  • Gamification vs Games for Legal Services

    As I’ve started talking about the game I’m developing, I hear people throw out the phrase “gamification of legal services” to describe my project. That’s not what I’m doing, and the terminology does make a difference. There is gamification, serious games and simulations and then there are games. The difference really has to do with the design goal.

    This is a running debate that gets pretty heated in the game industry. The best known example is the “Gamification is Bullshit” position statement given by scholar Dr. Ian Bogost at the Wharton Gamification Symposium. He has since been featured in several pieces explaining his position that have been published in Wired, The Atlantic, and Kotaku. If you want a good book on gamification, one written by a couple of lawyers even, check out For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize your Business, by Dan Hunter and Kevin Werbach. And if you are into that, just re-read Drive by Daniel Pink and you’ll notice how ridiculously connected those books are to each other. (There are also some wonderfully brilliant presentations by designer Sebastian Deterding which help explain what is going wrong currently with gamification efforts in the business world.)

    Again, that’s not what I’m doing with my game. Although concepts of internal and external motivation discussed in Drive hang around when we think about the game design and what will motivate better and recurring game play, but those concepts were around in game design long before Pink’s book. In fact, he references the same American psychologist and creator of the concept of “flow”, Mihaly Csikszentmialyi, that Jane McGonigal (of the “games” camp) writes about in her book, Reality is Broken.  Here is Csikszentmialyi’s TED Talk on flow. Really worth your time. There is overlap here.

    When games cross over into the area of “games for social good” they get classified as “serious games” and that throws them into this semantics debate. If you are trying to do good with your game, such as educate people about their rights, then is it a game if there is an agenda built into it? It seems to come down to the design goal and the game mechanics.

    If you are taking existing process, such as the business of delivering legal services, law firm operations, the judicial process, rules of civil procedure, the process for a criminal or tort case, and adding game elements to those processes to help people learn about them or to encourage them to be handled in a different way, then that is gamification.

    Most of the existing “games” around the law or legal services fall into this camp. They tend to be card games, simulations, text-based walkthroughs or quizzes. Most of them have the goal of teaching civics, legal procedures and basic law practice skills to citizens and law students. Here are a few of the better known ones: (more…)

  • Game On!

    DiceI’m making a game and it involves legal services.

    For the past six months, I’ve researched the idea of creating a game that would engage and empower the public to learn legal issues surrounding personal legal services.

    Why am I doing this? When I was ten years old, I didn’t dream of being a lawyer, I dreamed of being this woman, a well-known computer game designer. When I went to college, computer science as a major was in its infancy and a class in game design was unheard of. Life happens. About six months ago, a friend pulled me back into gaming as a hobby – something I had sacrificed to give attention to my children when they were babies. Now back into gaming full force, I remembered how powerful it is as a tool of engagement. That made me start thinking about how cool it would be if we could use games to engage the public to learn about their rights and the law in a way that would help them prevent legal needs before they occur.

    I starting researching the use of games for social good. Yes. There is a small segment of the game industry that develops games that will have an impact on society. It’s not all about first person shooters and role playing games. There is even a Games for Change Festival that showcases these games and those who work to create them. I read Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better nad How They Can Change the World. Watch her impressive TED talk video if you don’t have time to read the book.

    I also have immersed myself in game design and theory, exploring a “playcentric” approach to design which emphasizes playtesting and user experience before hard core development even begins. I also started exploring the tutorials on different game engines, including Unity, LiveCode (big thanks to the brilliant David Johnson for this one and for the brainstorming sessions), and MIT’s Scratch and using Code.org to start learning JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I also started researching and understanding the marketplace for games (the legal services marketplace I think I know pretty well by now) and the different platforms for publication.

    What has been done so far surrounding legal services is focused more on educating school children on the legal process or it is geared towards law students. There are a few others that are focused on educating the public, but they tend to be heavily text-based, and frankly, I got pretty bored playing them.

    Here is an example of a game for social good. In March, a game called Half the Sky Movement was launched as a Facebook game to help end world hunger. The game play is a compelling story about empowering women, and allows the user to donate to a variety of causes as he or she plays through. The game allows the user to unlock free rewards. For example, one of these might be that a real world book would be mailed to a girl in India from a foundation which donated to the nonprofit, Room to Read Foundation. While learning about a social situation, the player is rewarded by connecting with real-world individuals. There is a sharing component and multiple layers of engagement throughout the game.

    This, and games like it, inspired me to think that what we really need for legal services is increased ENGAGEMENT – before a legal need arises. That is exactly what games provide when they are done right. The game we are creating isn’t going to be an iCivics or any courtroom-based legal education game. It isn’t going to be preachy or overly full of text. It is going to be a game you would want to play and it will have an unique connection between the legal services marketplace and the players. That’s teasing. I’ll reveal more as I go along. (more…)

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