Make legal help online more accessible, navigable, and engaging.
A Better Legal Internet helps those who provide legal help online, to connect better to their target audience.
Our vision is of a user-friendly web, that connects lay people with crucial information, forms, procedures, and services to help them deal with legal issues.
Who is this site for?
Webmasters of Court and Legal Help sites
If you maintain a website or app that is communicating legal help information to laypeople, this site is to help you better design the technology and the information.
We will help you understand best practices for your site, and give you free resources to improve its usability and user-engagement.
Social Entrepreneurs and Experimenters
If you are developing new types of legal services on digital platform, this site can help you think through good ways of laying out information, providing quality user experience, and imagining better ways of getting key information to people who need it.
How to use this site?
Review your existing online materials to see how they measure up to key usability, visual, and behavioral design standards.
Use our standardized design resources to make your sites and apps more visual, more intuitive, and more user-friendly.
Mark up your content with structured tags, that will make your content machine readable and more searchable.
Who are we?
We are a team from Stanford Law School/d.school’s Legal Design Lab. Our mission is to bring better design and technology to address the access to justice crisis. We believe in the power of the Internet to get people empowered and strategic when dealing with legal issues.
Our big goals
We hope to bring public legal help to where people are — search engine results pages, social media, online forums, and chat applications. We envision a near future of tools that can classify people’s problems based on their online posts and queries, and automatically connect them with rich, customized, specific resources for their jurisdiction and issue.
How we are working
To build this near-future, we are focusing on (1) getting ‘suppliers’ of legal help information, like courts and statewide legal portals, to better structure their data; and (2) making sense of how ‘consumers’ of this information talk about, make sense of, and indicate their legal help needs.
We are taking a hybrid approach, mixing design with artificial intelligence. In one stream of the project, we are focusing on the human-centered design of new interventions, to create experiences that are trustworthy and meaningful.
In another stream, we are using machine learning and natural language processing to identify a taxonomy model of suppliers’ classifications of legal issues, and another one of consumers’ expressions of these issues. This will help us to translate between these two groups, from legalese to lay people.
We are also analyzing patterns of legal issues, to help spot where there might be opportunities for earlier, preventative interventions. Read more about our project’s origins and future work, here.