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…
Although I understood the underlying datastructures, Docassemble groups are a concept that took me some time to wrap my head around. I hope you can use this as a guide that will help you understand the why and how of groups and get started using them in practice. I hope Read more…
A common computer science concept, the Class, is a key benefit of Docassemble over other document assembly platforms. But when I work with a new Docassemble learner, or evangelize Docassemble to users of other platforms, Classes and Objects are the concept most likely to draw a blank look or create 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…
I had the pleasure of spending Friday at Docacon presenting to and learning from 30 Docassemble users from around the country—and I learned so much from all of them. It was exciting to see so many people building amazing projects. In October 2017 I made a comparison of the options Read more…