Glassmeyer: CALI partners with law schools to build online tools for low-income litigants

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI has posted Law Schools Team Up with CALI to Harness Skills of Law Students, Develop Online Tools for Low-Income Litigants, at the CALI Blog.

The post contains a press release, which begins:

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI®) will announce at the annual meeting of the American Association of Law Schools in New Orleans on January 6, 2013 that they have reached agreements with faculty members from six law schools to develop course kits as part of the Access to Justice Clinical Course Project (A2J Clinic Project). Participating law schools include Columbia Law School, Concordia University School of Law, CUNY School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, UNC School of Law, and University of Miami School of Law.

Each participating faculty member will develop and document a course model that uses A2J Author® to teach law students how technology tools can be used to lower barriers to justice for low-income, self-represented litigants. CALI will use those course models to assist other law schools in establishing A2J Clinical Courses as a permanent part of their law school curriculum.

A2J Author is a software tool developed by CALI and the Center for Access to Justice & Technology at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law to deliver greater access to justice for self-represented litigants by enabling lawyers and law students to rapidly build user-friendly web-based document assembly tools called A2J Guided Interviews®. These A2J Guided Interviews allow users to complete court documents by presenting a series of easy-to-understand questions while graphics virtually lead users along the path to the courthouse, where these documents can be filed. [...]

HT @caliorg

Legal Services Corporation Technology Initiative Grants Conference

LSC TIG 2012: The Legal Services Corporation Technology Initiative Grants Conference, is being held 11-13 January 2012 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.

The conference features presentations about innovative applications of technology to improve access to justice.

Click here for the complete conference program.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #lsctig.

Legal Technology and Information Systems at NLADA 2011

Slides and materials have been posted for several presentations on legal technology or legal information systems, given at NLADA 2011: The National Legal Aid and Defender Association Annual Conference, held 7-10 December 2011 in Washington, DC, USA.

The conference theme was “Innovations in Civil Legal Services.”

Here are the legal technologies or information systems I’ve identified in the slides or materials:

• Illinois Legal Aid app, which provides “[p]lain language legal information includ[ing] FAQs, step-by-step instructions and referrals to helpful organizations,” by Illinois Legal Aid;
• Illinois Pro Bono app, which offers “primers on Illinois law, volunteer opportunity search, and calendar of upcoming legal events, including MCLE trainings,” for lawyers who want to provide pro bono legal services, by Illinois Legal Aid;
• “[A]n interactive online decision tree, using the A2J [Author] software… to help litigants, practitioners and judges parse” the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act, by the DC Family Court Self Help Center;
• Electronic document management system and mobile access to documents and data, by Memphis Area Legal Services, Inc.;
• Data analysis to “identify unmet” client needs, … “gauge the effectiveness of specific legal strategies,” and “measure our progress toward achieving our existing strategic goals,” by Legal Aid Society of Cleveland;
• Client intake decision guides, by Legal Assistance Foundation of Metropolitan Chicago;
• Online county-based legal self-help centers [such as the center for Will County], by Illinois Legal Aid Online;
• LiveHelp (e.g., go to http://www.illinoislegalaid.org/, and click on “LiveHelp”), “an instant messaging service that provides remote navigation assistance to website users seeking legal information,” by Illinois Legal Aid Online.
• AyudaLegalIL.org, an online Spanish-language legal aid service, which “integrate[s] an automatic translation component into the website’s content management system with Google Translate API,” with translations reviewed and correction by a human “native Spanish-speaker”, by Illinois Legal Aid Online.

Many of these technologies or systems were developed in part with funds from the Legal Services Corporation‘s Technology Initiative Grants (TIG) program.

Apps for Justice Project Recognized

The “Apps for Justice” proposal — created by a team including Marc Lauritsen, Esq., of Capstone Practice Systems; Professor Ronald W. Staudt of the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law; and John P. Mayer, Executive Director of CALI: The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction — to “expand programs in which [law] students write software as part of their [legal] education,” was recognized at this weekend’s Future Ed 3 Conference with an award of a virtual dollar venture capital investment.

The proposal includes further development of law-school clinical programs that use the A2J Author software created by CALI and the Center for Access to Justice and Technology.

Click here for more information about A2J Author.

HT @sglassmeyer and @johnpmayer.

Bladow on Opening the Courts: Using Technology to Empower the Unrepresented

A video is available of a presentation by Kate Bladow of Pro Bono Net, entitled Opening the Courts: Using Technology to Empower the Unrepresented, given 25 May 2010 at Gov 2.0 Expo 2010 in Washington, DC, USA.

The presentation concerns “courts’ use of technology to help those without lawyers, including Pro Bono Net‘s LawHelp Interactive service.” LawHelp Interactive incorporates HotDocs and A2J Author.

A2J Author is an innovative, Drupal-based online interviewing and document assembly system co-developed by The Center for Access to Justice & Technology (CAJT) at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI).

Click here for more information on A2J Author.

Pro Se Assistance Tool Being Developed at Universiteit Twente & Universiteit van Tilburg

A new online service designed to help self-represented individuals decide whether to pursue litigation, is being developed by Dr. Ellen Giebels and colleagues at the Universiteit Twente Research Centre for Conflict, Risk and Safety Perception (iCRiSP), and researchers at the Universiteit van Tilburg Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies of Civil Law and Conflict Resolution Systems (TISCO), according to an announcement on the blog of Jurix, The Foundation for Legal Knowledge Based Systems, and a press release from Universiteit Twente.

According to the press release, the new application will address consumer law and divorce, and may later also address employment law. The system is intended to help pro ses assess their likelihood of success should they pursue legal remedies.

A noteworthy aspect of the project is the cooperation of psychology researchers, lawyers, alternative dispute resolution experts, and computer scientists from the very beginning of the project, to ensure that issues respecting users’ attributes as well as legal and ADR substantive and procedural issues, are addressed in the system from the start.

This project accords with a number of other recent efforts to develop online tools to assist self-represented individuals, including A2J Author — developed by CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, and the Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for Access to Justice and Technology — and its implementation in the U.S. federal courts, E Pro Se.

For more information please see the Jurix post and the press release.

Staudt on A2J Author: Technology that Attacks Barriers to Access to Justice

Professor Ronald W. Staudt of the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law, has published All the Wild Possibilities: Technology that Attacks Barriers to Access to Justice, forthcoming in Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review. Here is the abstract:

Predicting how technology will affect the future of the legal profession is difficult and unreliable work. I have made my share of such predictions in the past thirty years, including foretelling the death of the paper casebook in law schools and vast improvements in law practice that would be triggered by computers and document assembly software. Neither of these two prophesies has yet been fulfilled. Yet a real success story has emerged based in part on my persistent optimism that technology can improve the delivery of legal services. A2J Author, a modest software tool that allows lawyers to build guided Internet interviews for prospective clients, has been adopted across the United States and in several foreign countries as an interface for public access to legal processes. This Article describes the origin of A2J Author as a collaboration by courts, legal aid agencies, and funding sources. The Article explores the combination of factors that produced this technology, which successfully attacks barriers to access to justice. Finally, the Article speculates on whether A2J Author can begin to transform the delivery of legal aid and government services to low income people.

[Update 11 February 2010: A2J Author was co-developed by "The Center for Access to Justice & Technology (CAJT), [and] the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI).” HT @johnpmayer.]