Improving Legal Hotlines with SMS
User-friendly legal information is crucial to help people navigate the forthcoming legal crisis.
Just like hospitals in the peak of infections, legal services will be overwhelmed in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, as legal problems in many areas are on the rise. In fact, online crime groups are targeting confined individuals and domestic abuse is increasing. In housing, despite the moratoriums in over 30 states, tenants are still being kicked out from their homes. Moreover, in a dilemma between eating or paying the rent people are starting rent strikes, and while halted evictions means tenants can remain at home, jointly with landlords they see their expenses piling up.
This will generate an unprecedented burden on legal systems in the coming months. City leaders, community-based organizations, and law schools must act to flatten the injustice curve, by promoting smart working and taking measures to reduce demand on legal systems.
SMS tools are a promising — and, right now, mostly underused — way to tackle this legal services gap. They can connect people with the right legal information, and offer ways for legal aid groups to effectively triage clients’ needs. They also have great potential to take over parts of intake processes, and increase accessibility for people without an internet connection.
In this Medium series, Stanford’s Legal Design Lab will highlight how SMS assistants can provide parts of the intake process to deploy effective and user-friendly legal help, showing how projects can be easily replicated to manage the forthcoming legal crisis.
Building from a Current Legal Hotline
Tenants Together is a San Francisco-based organization that operates a hotline to provide legal orientation to dozens of California tenants daily. They use a call-back system, in which people call to a number, leave a voicemail, and then wait to be called by an organization’s volunteer. Yet the hotline has important congestion problems, and sometimes people have to wait long before receiving a call.
Between January and March, a team of two Stanford master’s students interested in legal services innovation, Sandra Escamilla and Juan Martinez Layuno, contacted the organization to explore a partnership as part of the Stanford Law/d.school class Justice By Design. The driving question was whether there was a way to design a better hotline system. By conducting research with the volunteers and with tenants, they analyzed the hotline and detected three pain points that needed to be addressed to improve the service.
The Existing Pain Points for the Hotline
1. Difficulty in Spotting the Key Needs. People sometimes leave incomplete messages, with no number, or too general descriptions of their problems, so it’s not easy to identify their needs.
2. Inefficiencies of Voicemail Input. Volunteers spend too much time hearing the voicemails, transcribing and then classifying the information on them, something that produces a heavy reliance on unstructured data.
3. Triaging Cases for Importance. Volunteers can’t easily assign priority to cases, and they spend an important amount of time — that otherwise could be used in talking to tenants — in manually populating a SalesForce client’s database.
Improving intake with SMS-hotlines
The team created a chatbot that can automate the first crucial step of the intake process: initial data collection. Using their phones, tenants text the word ‘Helpline’, and they immediately get in contact with an automated assistant that asks several questions and walks them through a triaging process. As a result, people get the right questions asked and volunteers get the information they need already processed to call them back.
In the background, a bot creates a case, assigns a priority, and feeds a database directly with the information provided by the tenant. As a consequence, volunteers don’t have to fill the database manually and can be focused on what matters most: calling people.
Improving background procedures for better legal services
This system is not meant to replace humans, but to help them in two core tasks. First, on triaging individuals according to the urgency of their legal need. The system can flag “critical” and “low priority” clients, differentiating between cases that can remain in the SMS track and cases for which a call is needed. Secondly, the tool helps legal aid providers to organize their dockets, as the assistant can be programmed to populate databases using people’s responses.
Currently being implemented, this tool will hopefully be deployed in the coming weeks with Tenants Together, featuring a specific set of COVID-19 Q&A.
Set up an SMS legal services hotline in 2 weeks
Cities, legal providers, and law schools can start programming their intake-assistants to address the legal needs of their communities. SMS-Helpline is an easy-to-set-up conversational tool that with no coding abilities can be programmed to provide basic legal help.
The first step may take approximately three days. It involves careful planning of a “decision tree” that will guide the conversation with legal help seekers. The Lab currently has templates that can be used and adapted to the reality of different cities and organizations.
Furthermore, a crucial question to be addressed in this stage is related to the final expected outcome. For instance, the organization can set a goal like “the response time for urgent cases was reduced by 50%”.
Finally, it’s important to start mapping the resources that people can be connected with.
The second step may take three more days and includes setting up the conversation tree on a platform like WiseMessenger, a tool for lawyers, courts and legal professionals to use SMS for legal purposes. A third step should take no more than four days, and implies testing the product to refine it. Here, legal help organizations and people working in fields unrelated to law, are best allies to debug the tool and be sure the conversation is not in Legalese, but in standard language.
In terms of staffing, setting up this tool in a city should take groups of no more than four volunteers. It would be good to have the support of at least one person with legal knowledge in the relevant field to create the messages flow. Based on our experience, the best people to help in this sense are community based organizations. Lastly, as translating the messages in relatively easy, people proficient in languages other than English should also be considered.
More on the Project’s Evolution
Created under the umbrella of the Justice by Design: Eviction class, the project grew out of the key, wicked challenge: how can we provide at-risk tenants with timely and accurate legal information to help them navigate the current California’s housing crisis?
What was the design journey, from this broad challenge to the hotline project?
During the 2019 Fall and 2020 Winter’s quarter, Stanford students were researching around the current eviction crisis in California and talking to more than 30 tenants who experienced evictions. They told stories about a broken legal system, in which usually they feel vulnerable, lost, and without the basic knowledge to even distinguish what they need to do after receiving a legal complaint.
In this context, the team working on SMS solutions (Sandra Escamilla and Juan Martinez Layuno) partnered with Tenants Togethers to improve their hotline that, as mentioned above, was having some congestion issues.
After six user testing sessions and working hand in hand with volunteers from the organization, the team developed a plan guided by one overarching goal: enhancing simultaneously two experiences. They wanted to improve the experience of clients who call the hotline while also the experience of volunteers who work hard to help people. After eight weeks the team created a system to mediate a seamless conversation between legal help seekers and legal aid organizations, whose value is constituted by four elements:
- Providing user-friendly legal information to clients.
- Triage client needs.
- Optimize data quality by structuring and categorizing user responses.
- Improve both sides’ experience. People get a better service and staff can focus on the most rewarding part of their task: helping people instead of doing paperwork.
Towards a second stage: Using SMS to support litigation and claims
The experience just described inspired the creation of new tools that are currently being developed by the Lab, like the SMS-Filler that automates the process of form filling. In California, there are only 5 business days to answer an Unlawful Detainer complaint, and 40% of tenants are subject to a default judgment, so they end up being evicted even when they are not at fault, without any chance of defending themselves. Therefore, new ways of answering legal complaints deserve to be tested.
During the week of April 27 jointly with colleagues from Code for San Jose, the lab will be testing a prototype that allows users to complete the answer to an Unlawful Detainer complaint by talking to an SMS assistant. After the conversation, the assistant populates the complaint form and brings it back to the user ready to be printed and served in court.
The potential of Text Messages
The two projects described in this report demonstrate the potential of text messages for improving legal aid sector operations. They are scalable and can be used by cities, law schools, libraries and community-based organizations to prototype their own tools at a minimum cost.
Taking further steps to improve remote justice solutions is urgent to mitigate the forthcoming crisis. As legal researchers across the world are calling, local leaders must promote remote legal aid and litigation, align financing priorities, and bring together the diversity of actors working in the justice system.
This is the only way to #Flatten the Injustice Curve, and use the legal system to mitigate the effects of the crisis.
