Please find periodic updates and short announcements from our team at Stanford Legal Design Lab, as we work on improving how Internet platforms respond to people with legal help problems.
Have questions or want to work with us? Write to us at legaldesignlab [at] law.stanford.edu
ABA Free Legal Answers website review & redesign
This report is from our student group in the Spring 2023 class 806y, Justice By Design. American Bar Association’sFree Legal Answers: User Experiences and Recommendations by Sonya Googins, Justin Iannacone, Kelsea Jeon, Shannon Lee, Ana Ribadeneira, Kevin Wang, June 9, 2023 Table of ContentsIntroductionOverview: User Experience with FLA Touchpoint: Arriving on the Home PageUpdated Home Page Cover Image…
Journalists’ Trust Project as parallel for legal domain
A group of journalists and news publications have established an initiative, called the Trust Project, to establish standards about what makes for a ‘good’ website for news. This initiative offers a parallel to how justice system professionals might establish common indicators for what makes a ‘good’ website for legal help information. The Trust Project has…
Website Design & Discovery review for Virginia Eviction Legal Helpline
How can legal help websites perform better for the public? This design review & tech strategy report on the Virginia Eviction Legal Helpline walks through specific strategies a legal aid team can implement.
Leveraging Search Engines to Improve the Visibility of Court Information Online
By Brian Guayante of The Turnout In the past decade, an average of around twelve million civil cases per year were filed in state courts in the United States. Many of the individuals involved in civil cases, such as eviction proceedings, do not regularly interact with the justice system and are unaware of the resources…
Legal Help Searches in the Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) framework
Google Search has training guidelines for people who evaluate legal help websites and results. These are called Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. And one of the central principles they teach people rating websites is YMYL, or Your Money or Your Life. Concerns and sites that concern high-YMYL matters. YMYL is framed around financial stability, health, safety,…
Data on people’s reliance on the Internet for legal problems
This recent study profiles how people use the Internet to find help & get legal information.
Government sites aren’t always .gov sites
Election government websites often aren’t .gov websites. Many of them have TLD (top-level domains) that are .coms, .orgs, or other domains. That means a search engine, social media platform, or other ‘broker’ of online information can’t automatically just send people to a government site. It’s hard to easily sort authoritative information from low-quality information. See…
National legal help sites from the government
One of the problems with legal help online is the lack of national nonprofits that offer legal help. Legal aid in the US is very local, with county or state legal aid groups providing information and services to people. And most legal help websites have been created at the state level, to provide that state’s…
Legal Help (and Harms) on Social Media
Our team is starting to do preliminary explorations of how we may audit social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to see how legal help is (or could be) delivered on them. What is happening with evictions, debt, and other civil justice issues on Tiktok and elsewhere? Based on our research assistant Carolina Nazario’s…
Data-Driven Legal Help
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, originally published on Legal Design and Innovation What can we learn from people’s legal questions online? Especially, how can we use this data to serve people in better ways? Stanford Legal Design Lab…
Standards, Standards, Standards to advance Justice Innovation
LIST problem codes are standard ways to describe legal issues. How can you use them to make legal help better? by Margaert Hagan, this piece was originally published on Legal Design and Innovation 1. We need standard codes for legal problems. There’s lots of different words we can use to describe the same legal problem….
Can we get legal aid websites to actually show up when people search for help?
by Margaret Hagan, originally published on Legal Design and Innovation Our Better Legal Internet project at Stanford is all about one thing: making it easier for people to get free legal help, especially online. Search matters for legal help People have life problems where legal aid might help We know more people are looking on…
Ontologies for lawyers
by Margaret Hagan, orignally published on Legal Design & Innovation At recent lawyer-focused hackathons and design sprints, there is a definite trend in the projects being proposed: Make ‘it’ machine-readable! Build a standardized markup or markdown language! Convert natural language to computable language! Whether it is for legislation, legal help information, or for contracts (and…
Legal Help on the Internet: an agenda for search platforms
Last month, I had the privilege of presenting my work and proposed agenda for a Better Legal Internet to technology leaders and computer science professors. Here are my slides from a five minute lightning talk on how the Internet is currently failing people seeking out civil legal help and what a better search experience could…
Every legal help problem that exists
This short report catches up where the earlier post on a Human-Centered Taxonomy of Legal Help started. I have been reading thousands of Reddit and legal forum posts every week, to see what people are asking for legal help on. At the same time, I have been reading thousands of entries into lawyers’ lists of the help…
Making an inventory of self-help websites
For our summer project around machine learning and legal help, we are in the process of looking at every state court self-help website and each states’ free legal help portal website. We are scraping these websites for legal guides and tools, and then we will be labelling them regarding what legal issues they could help…
A Human Centered Taxonomy of Legal Problems
Sussing out our main Parents in the Taxonomy. Where to put the elusive but huge world of Benefits? I’ve kicked off this taxonomy creation/refinement by gathering three existing legal issue taxonomies, from very kind legal aid groups and — at the largest scale — the National Subject Matter Index. (The NSMI was the most deliberately funded and well-hosted legal issue…
Better Legal Internet working group meeting
This past July, our Legal Design Lab held a 2-day workshop with about 20 participants, to rethink how legal help sites present their content online. It’s part of our going Better Legal Internet initiative. In particular, we looked at how help sites can use Schema.org metadata on their sites might allow search engines to better…
The UX of the Internet as a Legal Help Service law review article
One of my academic articles has just been published in the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology. It’s called “The User Experience of the Internet as a Legal Help Service.” The article presents findings from my research into how people experience the Internet when they try to use it to solve legal problems. As more…
What would better legal help searches look like?
— This post was originally published on Medium, in our publication Legal Design and Innovation– One of my favorite podcasts, Reply All, has an episode out about fake-official Internet sites, that dupe people in a desperate situation with seemingly-official sites that charge people for services that should be free. For example, there’s a Lost-and-Found site for…
A Better Legal Internet working group: scoping meeting
The Internet is not a good place to find legal services. Even as more people search the Internet to figure out how to respond to a problem in their life, they can’t find clear answers or paths to get things done easily. With this project, we aim to begin addressing this problem by establishing (1)…