I’m pretty excited to reach this milestone. After almost a year of building new features and enhancements to UpToCode, the free Massachusetts Tenant’s rights tool I’ve been developing at Lemma Legal, we’re ready for a soft launch! The soft launch is for our new website, https://getuptocode.org, along with some major Read more…
I just finished reading Forms that Work -Designing Web Forms for Usability by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney. Wow! I’ve been thinking a lot about forms over the last 5 or so years. Typically, I take court forms (many of which are challenging to use on paper) and try to Read more…
If you have to deal with legacy XFA forms in your workflow, read on for a complex but scalable method to convert all of them into ordinary PDFs in one go. In the beginning Adobe LiveCycle was created. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded Read more…
I want my students to submit weekly reflections, but it also needs to be easy for me to collect those. My solution is a Microsoft Form for each week, an Excel Workbook in OneDrive, and Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) to glue the two together. First, I created a Microsoft Read more…
If we want to meet our society’s need for legal help at their most vulnerable times, and not only the needs of our wealthiest or largest corporations, we need to apply technology to the problem. One of the technologies that deserves more investment is the humble expert system. Expert systems, Read more…
When Jonathan Pyle created Docassemble, he chose to use the YAML file format as the main way to represent the contents of an interview. When writing a Docassemble interview, it can be helpful to understand what YAML is, which conventions are Docassemble standards that overlay YAML, and how the different Read more…
Periodically, I go into the analytics of MADE and see where people get stuck. As of December 2019, the pages that our users most commonly stop at include the expected: the various intro screens, where someone who is just curious about MADE is likely to stop before entering any real Read more…
Legal aid agencies have been building apps for decades. More law firms are getting in on it, with apps like UpSolve for bankruptcy and Wilson Sonsini’s app to help firms comply with California privacy laws gaining news and attention. Should you build your own guided interview or interactive legal app? Read more…
So, you want to create your first interactive legal application (sometimes also called guided interview or wizard). Congratulations! Whether your app is the next TurboTax for drafting wills or an access to justice app for pro se debtors, it helps to understand the components of your app. That’s true whether Read more…
MADE is a wizard-like online interview that helps tenants who are being evicted. It can be completed on a smartphone or desktop computer completely without the help of a lawyer. It covers 300 questions and it educates tenants about their rights, helps tenants file paperwork, and sends tenants automated text-message Read more…