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

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.]