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 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…
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…
Updated 4/1/2019 Do you have a legal tech hackathon coming up? Here’s something that might help you get started. Four small (under 200 lines) Docassemble skeleton projects that you can adapt for your use. A simple chatbot with branching logic that gives advice to the user. Run this interview A demonstration Read more…
Updated August 2, 2019 Are you a legal aid user who was inspired by the great Docassemble projects on display at the Legal Services Corporation’s Innovations in Technology Conference? Florida Justice Technology Center, Community.Lawyer, HelpSelf Legal, myself, and Upsolve all participated in the conference and showed off some great projects, Read more…
I’m going to share a little technique I have used to keep some of my guided interview logic externally. It’s something I designed just for myself to save time, so the implementation I’m sharing is quite rough around the edges. I have done this in both HotDocs and Docassemble, (I Read more…
After working on the Massachusetts Eviction Defense Tool with Rina Padua for the last 10 months, I learned a lot. Some of it was from helpful mentors like Marc Lauritsen and Caroline Robinson, who have been building interviews like this for years; some from presentations at other conferences I’ve attended Read more…