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…
I am working on a project to develop a guided interview for tenants who are facing eviction. Briefly, a guided interview is a TurboTax-like interface that asks a user questions and drafts a letter, form, or pleading that might be printed out or electronically filed with a court. This is Read more…
The HotDocs Component Generator for Google Sheets is now available in the Chrome Web Store. This is an evolution of a few techniques I’ve discussed on this blog that is more user friendly than PowerShell and doesn’t require you to learn JavaScript. Read more about it here: http://nonprofittechy.com/projects/hotdocs-computation-generator/.
Without true automation, guided interviews that produce legal forms are too difficult to justify the learning curve. As I have stated on this blog before, I am working on updating the Greater Boston Legal Services Eviction Defense System, a tool that helps lawyers and nonlawyer advocates complete legal forms for Read more…
The maximum amount a single person can earn and still qualify for free legal help is just over $15,000 a year, and for a family of four that increases to only $30,000 a year. With a few exceptions, someone making $16,000 is on their own. Even if you do earn Read more…
For small law firms or legal services programs, Office 365’s SharePoint Online just might be the perfect litigation support platform. My legal services program recently has started to use SharePoint Online to store, index, and markup discovery for easy retrieval. It doesn’t do everything tools used by the big law Read more…