Legal innovation and legal hacking involve applying a fresh perspective to law and the practice of law by thinking about what could be rather than what is. Case 1 discusses how Margaret Hagan founded the Open Law Lab and Legal Design Jams to bring together students, lawyers, and professionals to redesign legal services. Case 2 highlights projects like Court Listener and State Decoded that make court opinions and laws freely available online. Case 3 examines the privatization of California's court docketing systems and the issues of private companies charging fees to access legal documents that were created using public funds. The document concludes by asking where else legal innovation could improve connecting clients to attorneys or researching case law.

1. LA Legal Innovation
Meetup #2:
Opportunities Abound
11-13-13

2. What the heck is legal
innovation/legal hacking
anyway?
Answer: whatever you want it to be.
Just apply a fresh lens to any aspect of law or the
law practice. Instead of “what is” think of what it
“could be”

3. Case 1: Legal Design
Jams Law student
Margaret Hagan, former Stanford
From doodling during class  Open Law Lab, Legal
Design Jams
How can students, lawyers, researchers, and
professionals build products and services to redesign law?

4. And this is what she came up with. Legal Design
Jams 2013.
Click here.

5. Who Owns the Law?

6. Case 2: Free the Law!
Court Listener/ Free Law Project
collects and freely distributes online all United States
court opinions, both state and federal, both historical and
current through the Juriscraper project and CourtListener
project
State Decoded
open source software project that puts the law online in a
nice, understandable way, with pretty typography,
embedded definitions, and robust API.
OpenGovFoundation
Working to open government. That means making it easier for
people to access and use as much government information as
possible
Madison Project

7. Case 3: Open Docketing?
10 years ago: Someone thought up the brilliant idea of having a statewide standardized court docketing system with everything built in.
CCMS is created.
2012: California gives up on CCMS (the California Case Management
System), after 10 years and $520 million in taxpayer money (with a
project price tag of $1.9 billion).
Now: It’s free-for-all. Private vendors are having a hay day with “land
grabs” in the counties and regions of CA. Private companies get to
charge attorneys for e-filing, and then turning around to sell those
same documents back to lawyers, effectively creating a “tollroad” of
legal information.
Privatization of government work product means that citizens will need
to pay for what their tax dollars created. They will have to pay to read
the laws, and interpretation of the laws, that affect them.
http://onward.justia.com/2013/11/01/california-privatize-courtdocketing-systems/
http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/10/23/62302.htm
http://www.courts.ca.gov/partners/1609.htm

8. Where else?
Connecting clients to GOOD attorneys?
How’s it done now?
What’s a better way?
Researching case law?
How’s it done now?
What’s a better way?
...

9. What do you want to learn
about?
Design thinking
Legal automation
Open source software
Access to justice
Disruptive startups
Bots, droids, privacy, and tech
Internet of things meets world of law
Issue spotting happy hour
Legal hackathons
Legal tech demo night
Lawyers/legal professionals learn to code