Reflecting back on all of our legal design work over the past 10 years, I’ve spotted a common pattern happening: Momentum builds around a justice reform policy that intends to address a fundamental problem in people’s ability to access the justice system. This could be around giving people facing traffic…

Building a network that’s researching, designing, and evaluating what works to increase access to justice — Earlier this summer I was lucky to spend a Saturday in conversation with Professor Monica Palmirani & her research group CIRSFID at the University of Bologna. It was a pleasant afternoon talking about projects & giving feedback on early-stage initiatives. Especially because of COVID, it has been hard to build…

(Even if we should be moving away from forms altogether…) — I am thinking a lot about forms these days! At the Stanford Filing Fairness Project, our team is working on a near future in which PDF forms no longer are key to people’s access to the court system. In that vision, it’s all about moving from populating PDFs to gathering…

A design research report from Stanford’s Justice By Design: Eviction class in Winter 2022 — This report is by the class team Trevor Byrne, Emma Dolan, Jordan Payne, Alexandra Reeves, Amy Zhai — along with the teaching team Nora Al Haider, and Margaret Hagan As the eviction crisis spreads throughout the United States, there is an access to justice paradox that has emerged. More and…

Digital Legal Needs analysis of an online legal clinic to predict seasonal trends in people’s legal needs by Nóra Al Haider and Margaret Hagan Stanford Legal Design Lab collaborated with the American Bar Association to analyze ABA Free Legal Answers. Free Legal Answers is an online legal clinic through which low-income individuals get answers to civil legal questions from lawyers, completely free of charge.

How can more legal help providers get more of their information & guidance into more languages? There is a giant language access problem in legal services. So many people who need help have issues with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). Ideally, people with LEP would have equal access to legal help…

How could computable contracts improve people’s health insurance contracting? — by Nora al-Haider, Luz Daniel, Shobha Dasari, Margaret Hagan, Arianne Marcellin-Little, Alistair Murray, Michael Perlmutter, Roland Vogl, and Annie Zhu In Winter 2022, our team at the Legal Design Lab worked with our Stanford Law Colleagues at CodeX to teach the class “Human-Centered Computable Contracts”. This is part of ongoing…

We have been talking and working on the importance of the justice system’s user experience — as have many others in other public interest sectors. These civic services should be usable, useful, and engaging. It should be easy for all different types of people to find their options for courts…

Greetings from the Legal Design Lab! Our team has been busy throughout this year on both emergency projects and long-standing research & development work. We wanted to say hello, send our holiday wishes, and give you a few updates on what we have been working on. …