Tag: Legal Services

This week I attended the second of two Legal Services Corporation (LSC) Technology Summits. The overall mission presented in these Summits was:

Use technology to provide some form of effective assistance to 100% of persons otherwise unable to afford an attorney for dealing with essential civil legal needs.

I want to share some of the progress of this Summit towards this goal because I believe virtual lawyers and elawyering from the private bar are key components in using technology to increase access. Keeping all the troops updated seems like a smart idea to me.

[Typical lawyer disclaimer: This is my own personal report from the meeting so it’s only my take-aways and not that of the collective.]

This second summit was a smaller gathering of individuals including state-based and national legal aid organizations, the private bar, technologists, administrators in the court, judges, law librarians, programmers, entrepreneurs, academics, and ethics experts. While the first summit was focused on Blue Sky thinking, this second one was for implementation of those ideas into a more concrete plan to move forward.

Prior to attending the Summit, we were all invited to use Marc Lauritsen’s choiceboxing tool to prioritize the issues we had identified during the first summit. This was a great way to narrow down the collective’s priorities so that we could break out into smaller groups to address these issues.

The five technologies chosen as the focus included 1) document assembly for self-represented litigants, 2) better triage, 3) mobile technologies, 4) expert systems and checklists, and 5) remote service delivery.

On the final day of the summit, John Gracean pulled together each of the break-out group’s reports into a single plan and we focused on strategy. My take-aways from this summit are listed below, most of which come from my Twitter stream:

1. Collaboration is going to be necessary between legal services, private practitioners, courts, and for-profit companies that provide online legal services to the public.
2. Unbundled legal services are going to be a key component because trying to achieve 100% full service access is not realistic.
3. Any solution should not focus solely on providing access to justice to the poor but be expanded to include all of those who cannot afford legal services. Opening up a system that would allow for practitioners to volunteer with the potential to make some money doing low-bono work would increase the incentive to volunteer.
4. A secure access portal for remote delivery is necessary. The expert systems for triage, the document assembly and automation tools, access to mobile resources, and other tools, such as web advisors for self-help representatives (A2J, for example) may be accessible from that secure space. Referrals to the appropriate legal assistance for the individual’s need would be made from that portal to legal aid, self-help resources, private bar members willing to do pro bono and/or reduced fee unbundling or full-service, and maybe even for-profit companies with networks of lawyers willing to deliver services online.
5. One idea we had in a break-out group was to have an X Prize. Lay out the mission statement and make it an open contest rather than limit the R&D to LSC or legal services resources. Put competition in the marketplace to work for the benefit of access. A legal hackathon as was mentioned in the first summit might also be a fun exercise and provide some different sets of eyes reviewing the issues at hand. A few people were squeamish with the work “hackathon” for lack of understanding so that may be something for someone else to organize for fun.
6. Here are my tweets and a few RTs from the event in order of last to first: (more…)