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. Is this thing an unlawful …
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. People have life problems where legal aid might help We know more people are looking on the Internet for answers to their life problems. This includes …
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 especially for contracts), the focus …
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 be.
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 that they can give — the issues …
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 with. In the meantime, please …
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 ontology — so ideally our team can …
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 find and serve up their …
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 people turn to Google searches …
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 NYC taxis, that charges people …