Digital exclusion is real but not entirely disabling.
It is the age of Aquarius: innovation is everywhere.
Law is national but technology is global: we can learn from other countries.
There is convergence - both in technologies and providers.
The future is interactive and mobile.
The internet opens the possibility of end to end provision from diagnosis to resolution.
The internet opens new opportunities for advancing skills
NGOs can have a leading role in development.
We need to re-engineer legal aid.
Could the internet transform legal services for people on low incomes? Innovation in the Delivery of Legal Services, 8 December 2014
1. Could the internet transform legal
services for people on low incomes?
Innovation in the Delivery of Legal
Services, 8 December 2014
ROGER SMITH
2. Basis of assessment
❖ Face to face Legal Services
and their Alternatives,
January 2014:
http://www.strath.ac.uk/media/faculties/ha
ss/law/cpls/Face_to_Face.pdf
❖ Digital Delivery and
Legal Services to
People on Low
Incomes:(thelef.org)
❖ Visits to the US,
Netherlands and British
Columbia
3. The internet and access to justice: nine propositions
1. Digital exclusion is real but not entirely disabling.
2. It is the age of Aquarius: innovation is everywhere.
3. Law is national but technology is global: we can learn from other countries.
4. There is convergence - both in technologies and providers.
5. The future is interactive and mobile.
6. The internet opens the possibility of end to end provision from diagnosis to
resolution.
7. The internet opens new opportunities for advancing skills
8. NGOs can have a leading role in development.
9. We need to re-engineer legal aid.
4. Digital inclusion and exclusion
❖ Digital exclusion can relate to physical access, lack of skills or cultural
inhibition. It will change over time.
❖ The growth of mobile adds to the challenge.
❖ Exclusion more likely to be lack of skills (IT, language, cognitive) than
physical
❖ Pockets of exclusion will remain in some communities in population -
elderly, immigrant, for UK those with a disability.
❖ Research reports 14 per cent of UK users would prefer not to use the
internet (Oxford Internet Survey) though 80 per cent of households have
access.
❖ Cannot assume in UK more than 50 per cent access in lowest income
groups. Digital needs integration with face to face - both internally and
externally.
❖ Digital delivery offers the possibility of universal delivery.
5. The age of Aquarius: diversity and
experiment
A range of examples
A. Private practice
B. Advice Portals
C. Interactive information
D. Parental support - developing skills
E. Online communities
F. Developing avatars
G. Remembering basics - content remains king.
H. Challenges for government
6.
7. Professional Legal Advice Online.
Slater & Gordon Lawyers offers expert legal advice for all your legal matters – on- and off-line.
8. http://www.advicenow.org.uk/
Search our site
A to Z index
England home
Benefits
Work
Debt and money
Consumer
Relationships
Housing
Law and rights
Discrimination
Tax
Healthcare
Education
Advice from Citizens Advice
Brings you the self-help information you need to
solve your problem
13. The importance
of the practical
A reminder from
Connecticut. This is
brilliantly practical.
14.
15. End to end services at the cutting edge: Rechtwijzer 2.0
and BC’s Civil Resolution Tribunal
1. Diagnosis and Information (intended to be free);
2. Intake (intended as fee-based);
3. Dialogue between the parties (free);
4. ‘Trialogue’ - an opportunity for online mediation (fee-based);
5. External online review (fee based).
6. Online adjudication if required (fee based also and conceived as part of the ‘trialogue’);
7 ‘After care’
16. What are the new frontiers for
websites?
❖ Moving from information to advice
❖ Incorporating personalised assistance
❖ Moving from static information to dynamic interaction.
❖ Learning how best to incorporate video
❖ Taking a user from information to resolution (and dealing
with the resulting change(s) of paradigm)
❖ Designing an holistic approach incorporating law, education,
skills and emotion.
17. The role of NGOs
NGOs need resources but can show the creativity.
Imagination may be as important as money.
NGOs have advantages as the ‘front end’ of provision.
At this stage, creativity and competition may be better than
centralisation e.g. British Columbia/ adviceguide.org.uk and
advicenow.org.uk.
NGOs may provide a good way of integrating face to face services with
those based on the web.
18. An Example of Planning and national priorities -
the US
1. Creating in each state a unified “legal portal” which, by an automated triage process, directs persons
needing legal assistance to the most appropriate form of assistance and guides self-represented litigants
through the entire legal process
2. Deploying sophisticated document assembly applications to support the creation of legal documents by
service providers and by litigants themselves and linking the document creation process to the delivery of legal
information and limited scope legal representation
3. Taking advantage of mobile technologies to reach more persons more effectively
4. Applying business process/analysis to all access-to-justice activities to make them as efficient as practicable
5. Developing “expert systems” to assist lawyers and other services providers
19. What should our national priorities
be and from whom can we learn?
• Overall hard analysis: Legal aid cuts will not be restored - technology can help fill gaps but cannot
replace what has gone (see BC).
• Technology offers the possibility of seeing legal aid as a universal service (see New South Wales,
BC, elsewhere).
• Technology allows re-conception of legal aid as an end to end process in which lawyers are a
crucial but not sole - part of a continuum from diagnosis to resolution (see BC, The Netherlands).
• Private practitioners can reach a ‘latent legal market’ and this should be part of the pattern of
provision (look around in England and Wales).
• Courts and Tribunals can adapt to more self representation with more than personal support
centres (look at New South Wales, California, BC).
• Should we create an innovation fund with 1 per cent of the budget? (see the US)
• Should we incorporate an NGO led digital front end with telephone and face to face support? (see
most other jurisdictions)
• How do we foster leadership and creativity? Do we need the return of some form of intermediate
lead legal aid organisation? (see US)
Editor's Notes
These notes are to help someone present my material if (when?) the technology breaks down and I cannot do this myself. It is easiest if they just speak in the first person. The presenter will, thus, become my avatar.
I am in the midst of the second of two reports on digital delivery of legal services to low income people. The first was published in January. The second will be launched in December. I am in Canada better to understand the work done - which, I think, is among the best in the world - in British Columbia. My initial focus was the UK but the subject - and my interest - has led me to look at international developments. I began with an interest in telephone hotlines - because that is what our government has proposed to replace face to face advice - but moved on to the use of the internet.
Speaks for itself.
So does this.
This introduces the following slides which illustrate particular issues.
Note that this site expressly talks about legal advice being given the ‘old way’ or ‘our way’. It gives automated advice on likely sentences for free, ‘winnowing’ out cases that can be taken further through representation.
In England and Wales, use of the internet is combining with other factors to change delivery of legal services. This is taken from the site of Quality Solicitors. They are a consortium of private practices with a shared ‘front end’ into which private equity funding has been put and which offers a range of different products depending on the degree of ‘unbundling’ or self help the client is willing to undertake. The transparency and reach of the net is set to transform how legal services are delivered.
This is just a collage of various sites of the same kind - giving legal information in Australia, England and Wales, British Columbia and the US. They are a combination of sole source and ‘aggregators’ pulling together the provider’s view of the best available in the jurisdiction.
OK. It is in Dutch but look it up and put up with google translator as long as you can bear it. Follow the first bottom for divorce. You are asked how you like to settle disputes; how your partner does; what are the issues in dispute; and guided on how you might resolve them. This is a legal information site funded by the Dutch Legal Aid Board in its first and current version. It is, in my view, a world leader. Version 2.0 is in late planning (see later). Version 1 is a world beater in terms of guided pathways.
I was knocked out by this site and, in particular, the interactive Changeville part of it which seeks both to explain to children what might be going on in a divorce between their parents but also helps them to deal with it emotionally - all in a visual way. I was impressed to by the Parenting After Separation course available on line (and in person) which concentrates not so much on the separation itself (a common focus of self help divorce sites) but on what happens afterwards.
You may not be able to see the detail of this but it is interesting and I dont know quite what to make of it. The site does not reveal that it is, so far as I can see, set up by a solicitors’ firm to which you may be referred but it is a separate social enterprise and sets up various communities of those going through divorce.
One of the features of some of the most interactive sites is the use of avatars to ask questions. We can see the advance of technology. On the left is the figure from the widely used A2J software from the US. A cartoon figure will guid you down a road to the courthouse and guide you through a document assembly process. On the right is Jes from JES’s interactive sites on BC’s small claims and Supreme Court. On the websites, she is clearer.
Read a lot of websites and you get a wash of generalised information. This is a reminder of the importance of being practical. It is really good advice from a Connecticut court site because it is so practical and specific.
You may not be able to see the detail but this is a government site designed to encourage mediation in family breakup. It is beautifully designed; has excellent videos and, in my view, fails because its recurring premise is that with mediation all will be well and it simplifies the kinds of real problems that people have. Its own official review was highly critical.
The Dutch Rectwijzer site is being developed in a second very ambitious edition which will incorporate these stages. It is designed to take a user through from query to after care - beginning with divorce. BC’s Civil Resolution Tribunal will follow much process and the Dutch rechtwijzer team have been involved with it. This is a world beater, if it works. Civil legal aid will be re-engineered.
Speaks for itself.
It is interesting just to see what the Legal Services Corporation identified at the end of 2013 as its priorities in the technology field.