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…
If you work in legal aid, something that you have no control over and you may not even be aware of is impacting both the quality of advice your client base receives and the reputation of your organization. It has the innocuous name “Questions” and for most local businesses, it’s 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…
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…
I spent the week at Suffolk Law School’s Clinnnovation conference, followed by a great summit where we discussed how to train the next generation of lawyers to code. Imagining a group of excited new coders made me think about the risks and benefits of coding that we might not have Read more…
Quick post before the Vermont Law School legal technology conference: Rina Padua and I put together a comprehensive tutorial for Docassemble to help someone new get started with document assembly. It’s a great example that shows how a lawyer can use document assembly to mirror legal rules but it will Read more…
Here’s a task that I thought would be completely straightforward, but took me down a long rabbit hole of failed attempts: adding the 47 towns and cities Greater Boston Legal Services serves onto a custom Google Map that displays the border outlines of each city. The final method was simple, Read more…