Better Legal Internet projects

Our Stanford Legal Design team has been working on this initiative since 2015. Please find the specific projects that we have launched as part of this wider initiative. We will update this list of projects as new efforts arise.

Our Research on Better Legal Internet

Our team at Stanford Legal Design Lab has been researching how people use the Internet to deal with their legal problems, what search engines and social media show them, and what interventions can improve the provision of legal help online.

Here are some of our recent publications on our work. Also find a bibliography of others’ research on access to justice online here.

Does Googling Justice Work? Auditing Search Engines’ Effectiveness as Intermediaries of Legal Information

Margaret D. Hagan and Nora al-Haider, “Does Googling Justice Work? Auditing Search Engines’ Effectiveness as Intermediaries of Legal Information,” UCLA Journal of Law and Technology, Forthcoming.

Online search engines are key providers of legal information. Their responses to people’s search queries can influence whether and how people make use of the legal system to deal with problems like evictions, domestic violence, debt collection, and natural disasters. This article presents a new research protocol to understand and evaluate what search engines are showing to people who are seeking out legal help.

Using this novel search audit protocol, the article identifies concerning trends in search engines’ responses to people’s legal queries, including low-quality help information, incorrect jurisdiction, and an absence of governmental or legal aid links. The article then proposes technical and policy strategies that may improve search engines’ role in people’s attempts to access to the justice system online.

The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet

Margaret D. Hagan, “The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet,” Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice, edited by David Freeman Engstrom. Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming.

Faith in technology as a way to narrow the civil justice gap has steadily grown alongside an expanding menu of websites offering legal guides, document assembly tools, and case management systems. Yet little is known about the supply and demand of legal help on the internet.

This chapter mounts a first-of-its-kind effort to fill that gap by measuring website traffic across the mix of commercial, court-linked, and public interest websites that vie for eyeballs online. Commercial sites, it turns out, dominate over the more limited ecosystem of court-linked and public interest online resources, and yet commercial sites often engage in questionable practices, including the baiting of users with incomplete information and then charging for more. Search engine algorithms likely bolster that dominance. Policy implications abound for a new generation of A2J technologies focused on making people’s legal journeys less burdensome and more effective.

What role should search engines play to promote access to quality legal information? Could they, or should they, privilege trustworthy sources? Might there be scope for public-private partnerships, or even a regulatory role, to ensure that online searches return trustworthy and actionable legal information?

Digital Inequalities and Access to Justice: Dialing into Zoom Court Unrepresented

Victor D. Quintanilla, Kurt Hugenberg, Margaret Hagan, Amy Gonzales, Ryan Hutchings, and Nedim Yel. “Digital Inequalities and Access to Justice: Dialing into Zoom Court Unrepresented,” Legal Tech and the Future of Civil Justice, edited by David Freeman Engstrom. Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming.

This chapter explores how virtual proceedings actually unfold for low-income persons in the everyday and serve to construct their status as pro se litigants. To date, much of the conversation has lauded Zoom court proceedings as the future of access to justice, often centering this praise on idealized and optimistic forms of online proceedings, despite persistent and pressing digital divides.

In a marked departure, this chapter will examine how these new technologies actually affect the experiences of low-income unrepresented persons. We do so by presenting worrying findings from an ongoing empirical project examining the experience of pro se litigants in Indiana’s courts.

We then link those findings to new theories of psychology about how pro se litigants perform their pro se status. The chapter closes by crafting a path forward for virtual court proceedings that can capture some of the efficiency and other benefits of the online migration without harming the very demographic remote proceedings purport to serve.

The User Experience of the Internet as a Legal Help Service

Hagan, Margaret, The User Experience of the Internet as a Legal Help Service: Defining Standards for the Next Generation of User-Friendly Online Legal Services.” Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, Vol. 20, No. 394, 2016, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2942478

This Article presents empirical research about how the Internet is currently failing laypeople who are searching online for legal help to their life problems and what a future agenda of user-centered standards and practices for better legal help on the Internet could be.

It first examines the existing literature about how the Internet can best be used as legal resource and the status quo of legal help sites. Then it surveys and examines negative consumer reports and reviews of legal help websites. Finally, it presents the first study of how laypeople search for resources to resolve a legal issue, how they scout and assess legal help services online, and their feedback on which existing legal help sites they consider to be the most usable, the most trustworthy, and the most valuable.

This data is useful to propose new best practices about how these tech-based services can best serve laypeople, in terms of usability, quality of service, and protection of the users’ interests. It also confirms the importance of the Internet as a legal help service and highlights the need for more research and development on better online legal help sites that fit laypeople’s needs and preferences.

Redesigning Justice Innovation: A Standardized Methodology

Bernal, Daniel W, and Margaret D Hagan. “Redesigning Justice Innovation: A Standardized Methodology.” Stanford Journal of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties XVI, no. 2 (June 2020): 335–84. https://law.stanford.edu/publications/redesigning-justice-innovation-a-standardized-methodology/

Post Turner v. Rogers, courts, advocates, and academics are increasingly investing in access to justice research and development. However, despite many descriptions of how past justice interventions developed, and established methodologies for rigorous evaluation of outcomes, no consensus has yet emerged on which design methodologies produce the best justice innovations. Without an intentional, replicable approach to developing usable and useful justice interventions, interventionists are more likely to create products that few people use, or to waste time and money on expensive randomized trials.

To address this need, this Article integrates existing expert-oriented and user- centered approaches and presents a first attempt at establishing a standard methodology for creating and vetting new justice interventions. In addition, to demonstrate the dangers of designing without a comprehensive framework and the difficulties of applying an ideal framework in the real world, we offer a detailed case study of the initial version of Arizona Eviction Help.

Ultimately, we argue that just as randomized field experiments have become the status quo in evaluation of justice interventions, a human-centered, participatory approach should become the standard in their design.

A Human-Centered Design Approach to Access to Justice

Hagan, Margaret D. (2018) “A Human-Centered Design Approach to Access to Justice: Generating New Prototypes and Hypotheses for Intervention to Make Courts User-Friendly,” Indiana Journal of Law and Social Equality: Vol. 6 : Iss. 2 , Article 2, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3186101

How can the court system be made more navigable and comprehensible to unrepresented laypeople trying to use it to solve their family, housing, debt, employment, or other life problems? This Article chronicles human-centered design work to generate solutions to this fundamental challenge of access to justice. It presents a new methodology: human-centered design research that can identify key opportunity areas for interventions, user requirements for interventions, and a shortlist of vetted ideas for interventions.

This research presents both the methodology and these “design deliverables” based on work with California state courts’ Self Help Centers. It identifies seven key areas for courts to improve their usability, and, in each area, proposes a range of new interventions that emerged from the class’s design work.

This research lays the groundwork for pilots and randomized control trials, with its proposed hypotheses and prototypes for new interventions, that can be piloted, evaluated, and — ideally — have a practical effect on how comprehensible, navigable, and efficient the civil court system is.