Goyal on Technology, Access to Justice, and MyLegalBriefcase

Monica Goyal, J.D., M.Sc., of MyLegalBriefcase gave a presentation on technology, access to justice, and MyLegalBriefcase at the “Startups in the Law” panel at NELIC 2011: The New and Emerging Legal Infrastructures Conference, held 15 April 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Boalt Hall, in Berkeley, California, USA.

In her presentation, Ms. Goyal discusses MyLegalBriefcase, an innovative interactive online service that provides customized forms and procedural instructions for self-represented litigants in Small Claims Court Ontario.

In the discussion following the presentation, Ms. Goyal discusses several topics, including legal education reform, ways to improve access to justice, and issues facing legal technology entrepreneurs.

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.]