A Potentially Major Lifeline For Low-Income Legal Tech And A2J

The Pew Charitable Trusts will tackle the use of technology to modernize the civil legal justice system.

By now, we all get it: We have a major problem in this country with access to justice. Studies say 80 percent of the legal needs of low-income people and 60 percent of the legal needs of moderate-income people go unmet. Even those who qualify for free legal aid are often turned away due to providers’ lack of capacity.

In this column, I’ve written several times about barriers to bridging this justice gap. In one recent column, I mapped out what I see as the obstacles to innovation that inhibit the legal system’s ability to serve all who need us. In an earlier two-part article on “the innovation gap,” I outlined six barriers to broader adoption of innovative technologies in law, and then offered 10 suggestions for how we “reboot” the legal system.

This week, there was news that could have a significant impact on helping to overcome some of the obstacles I outlined in those posts. The Pew Charitable Trusts, an independent nonprofit with over $6 billion in assets, announced that it will now tackle the use of technology to modernize the civil legal justice system, meet unmet legal needs, and make courts more efficient.

The news came in an article published in Governing magazine by Susan K. Urahn, Pew’s executive vice president and chief program officer.

The Pew Charitable Trusts has launched an initiative to explore and evaluate these technologies. Our goal, in partnership with technology companies, state court officials and organizations including the National Center for State Courts, Legal Services Corp. and the American Bar Association, is to modernize key aspects of the nation’s civil legal system and make it more accessible to the public.

In her article, Urahn specifically spoke to several of the key obstacles I’d outlined. With regard to courts, I’d said they are stuck in a vicious cycle of underfunding and overwork that inhibits innovation, and that they adhere to outmoded models of dispensing “justice” that are inherently inefficient. On this, Urahn writes:

It is difficult to achieve these goals when legal conflicts cannot be resolved efficiently. And the high volume of people spending significant time trying to handle court proceedings has a ripple effect on the business community: Employers lose money for time that workers must be in court, and businesses that seek to resolve disputes are stuck in the same courts and face costly delays to resolution.

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With regard to making courts more efficient and enabling them to better serve the underserved, I’ve argued that they need to make better use of modern tools such as online dispute resolution. Urahn makes this very point:

Courts in Utah and at least 15 other states are beginning to use or explore another technology, online dispute resolution, to move the court process entirely online. On a computer or mobile device, people can take every step in the court process — learn about their legal rights, provide materials and evidence, complete other procedural steps, avail themselves of negotiation and mediation tools, and obtain court-enforced resolution of their disputes — without ever going to a courthouse.

Another obstacle I’ve discussed is the legal profession’s stubborn adherence to the unfounded idea that lawyers, alone, can solve the justice gap — that if only we could get lawyers to donate more pro bono time or get more funding for legal aid, then all these problems would go away. On this, Urahn writes:

Traditionally, government officials have sought to improve access to the courts by increasing funding for legal aid and encouraging private attorneys to provide pro bono services. While both approaches are necessary to improve access to legal services, neither has been sufficient. The number of free legal services will never be enough to meet the need, and adding more lawyers does not itself modernize the antiquated civil legal system.

Finally, a major obstacle I’ve outlined is the lack of evidence-based research into what works and what does not in the delivery of legal services. In a previous column, I quoted Jim Greiner, director of Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab, who said, “In no field is resistance to evidence-based thinking more ferocious than in United States legal practice.”

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Here is what Urahn says:

We will work to increase access to free online legal tools, develop new platforms to help people interact with the courts and conduct data-driven evaluations of how these tools perform.

In fact, using evidence-based analysis to solve modern challenges is how Pew describes its core mission. Notably, to lead its civil justice innovation project, Pew has hired Erika Rickard, who was formerly associate director of that very same Access to Justice Lab and, earlier, access to justice coordinator for the Massachusetts trial courts.

Pew’s decision to tackle the issue of enhancing access to justice and its identification of several of the specific obstacles that stand in the way of that goal is significant. One final obstacle I’ve discussed is the paucity of funding available to develop legal technology targeted at serving the underserved. Pew’s express commitment to increase access to free online legal tools and to develop new platforms to help people interact with the courts is a lifeline the justice system badly needs.


Robert Ambrogi Bob AmbrogiRobert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).

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