2017 etl ignite_john_mayer
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John Mayer, Executive Director of CALI, discusses how experiential learning can help solve access to justice issues. Over 3.6 million guided interviews have been conducted on the Law Help Interactive platform between 2005-2016, generating over 2 million legal documents. Experiential learning provides students opportunities to gain deep knowledge in areas like legal procedures and ethics issues related to technology-enabled legal services, as well as skills like teamwork, project management, and empathy that are important for emerging legal practice areas like e-lawyering. CALI works with various organizations and developers to create cloud-based and mobile legal tools to expand access to justice.
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2017 etl ignite_john_mayer
- 1. John Mayer Executive Director CALI jmayer@cali.org @johnpmayer Can Experiential Learning Solve the Access to Justice Problem? 1
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- 10. 13 A2J Guided Interviews on LHI: 2005-2016 3,689,711 runs 2,079,410 docs created ? 10
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- 13. Deep dive into law, procedure & heuristics Policy/ethical issues raised by legal services delivery and technology Key competencies for emerging law practice (elawyering, software driven law practice, unbundling, web2.0 & “cloud practice”) Teamwork, project management and empathy & Legal Education? 13
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- 16. • Cloud-based authoring • Mobile viewer • Integrated document assembly 16
- 17. • Law Schools • Legal Aid • Courts and Other Governmental Entities • Non-profits • Probono developers • Incubators 17 www. .org
- 18. It’s not computers replacing lawyers … … It’s computers + lawyers 18
Editor's Notes
- Can experiential learning solve the access to justice problem? I guess that depends on what I mean by “experiential learning” and what I mean by the “access to justice problem” and also what I mean by “solve”.
- Not surprisingly, my answer is a resounding and exciting YES, so let me explain a particular aspect of the the access to justice problem that I can “solve” it and then talk about “experiential learning” courses that law students can take and benefit SRLs as well. .
- A lot has been written about the access to justice problem or gap. The primary deliverers of legal services are, of course, LSC, the Legal Services Corporation whose funding has been essentially flat for the past 30 years. Under the present climate, we aren’t going to see more funding for legal aid attorneys.
- The essential message is that 50% of the poor who are eligible for legal aid AND show up to ask for it are turned away because of lack of lawyers. It’s actually much worse that that. If you look at everyone who cannot afford lawyers – people that don’t show up, people that don’t know they have a legal problem and people of modest means that number is OVER 80%.
- Way back in 2001, Chicago-Kent College of Law and the Institute of Design and CALI studied this problem deeply and identified over 200 obstacles – and therefor opportunities to improve people’s use of the justice system.
- The key and perhaps obvious observation is that poor people have trouble filling out legal forms. As a group, SRLs are less educated, likely that English is their second language, stressed out and … not lawyers. They are in an unfamiliar and hostile place.
- Forms are the structured communications of the justice system. They are precision packages of information that are their own language of how courts, judges, lawyers, government bureacracy (especially) talks to itself and the outside world.
- So we designed and coded an application called A2J Author that makes it easier for SRLS to fill out legal forms. Kinda of like LegalZoom for poor people – LegalAidZoom! Lots of white space. One question at a time. Popup help. Small amounts of text per screen.
- More so, when we train legal aid lawyers to create “Guided Interviews” - that’s what we call these – they don’t need a programmer. The sequence of the Guided Interview puts disqualifying questions up front so if people are ineligible or filling out the wrong form, they are exited fast.
- This has been a HUGE success. Hundreds of forms in dozens of states have been automated. Temporary restraining orders, small claims, uncontested divorce, expungement, etc. That discrepancy between runs and docs created is a feature. Many times SRLs are filling out the wrong form and the program guided them out without too much wasted time. We have won awards and presented at the White House about this project.
- One example - the New York Family Court uses A2J Author for several dozen different forms. They solicit feedback from users and have received thousands of comments like this. Court staff love this system too.
- A2J Author is essentially an authoring system for decision trees. It captures the expertise of the lawyer-authors who know how to guide an SRL through a process to collect their data accurately. To create these Guided Interviews you have to understand the law and know how it works in the real world.
- Using A2J Author in law school courses exposes students to the law that underlies the legal processes being automated as well as policy issues, procedure and familiarity with how law is being practiced in the 21s century.
- We have run several pilot projects where faculty at over a dozen law schools integrated an A2J Author project into their course. We trained the students in how to use the software and hooked them up with legal aid organizations and non-profits that supplied the subject matter expertise.
- And it wasn’t just transactional courses. There are forms, documents and decision trees all over the place in law and legal practice. The possibilities are only limited by our imaginations, but the tool has to be freely available, responsive to the problem space – we are constantly adding new features - and part of a new community of practice – practicing law through software.
- Recently, we rewrote the software from scratch so it is entirely web-based so it works with PC and Macs. Many law students use Macs – over 50% of law students who visit the CALI website use Macs. It now has its own document assembly system too. It is now mobile friendly. Large numbers of poor people access the Internet only via mobile devices.
- Our goal is to launch a website in the next couple of months where law students, clinics, non-profits, courts and legal aid programs can create and deliver automated legal processes. We want to foster a community of innovation and shared investigation coupled with substantive legal education.
- It’s not computers replacing lawyers, it’s lawyers + computers accomplishing more for SRLs more efficiently for those who cannot afford lawyers. Filling out a form or producing a document is not a complete solution. It’s part of an unbundled solution where lawyers’ expertise can come in on specific tasks.
- I think there is a sweet spot at the intersection of legal ed, tech, practice and access to justice. I think CALI is uniquely poised to do this. I think we can make a big impact where there a virtuous cycle of benefit.
- Students learn about practice in the 21st century, Faculty get to teach with a cool tool, legal aid and the courts get much needed help and more people get access to justice. I hope I have made my case.