Innovation Ideas Based on SJI Priority Investment Areas

Posted on December 9, 2011 by richardzorza

A few days ago I blogged on the excellent new State Justice Institute Priority Investment Areas, which now guides much of SJI’s grantmaking.

Today I am going to make some suggestions for innovative possible projects in each of those areas, linking to prior blog posts and articles that may be helpful as folks think about their own planning processes.  The next grant deadline is Febrary 1, 2012.  (Special thanks to guest blogger Claudia Johnson for contributing to this list).  Given this new set of priorities, it is particulalry inportant to nore the range of organizations to which SJI can make grants, including “Individuals, partnerships, firms, corporations (for-profit organizations must waive their fees)”.  See page 62568 of the Federal Register, here.

Here are some possibilities both for Project Grants (most directly impacted by fitting within priority areas) and and also Technical Assistance and Curriculum Adaption grants.

Of course, states and courts will carefully analyze their particular needs and environments, including particularly availability of partners, and make choices based on that analysis.  Here is a link to the SRLN Diagnostic Protocols that may be helpful in that process.  Here is a link to our Best Practices, that might also be useful as a source of ideas and resources.

Continue reading →

Posted in Court Management, Document Assembly, Funding, Judicial Ethics, Law Schools, LEP, Self-Help Services | Tagged , , | Comments Off on Innovation Ideas Based on SJI Priority Investment Areas

Very Important and Promising Leaderhip Appointment at Open Society Foundations

Posted on December 7, 2011 by richardzorza

The Open Society Foundations has announced its new head: Chris Stone.  While OSF and Chris will surely have an agenda that goes way beyond access to justice, it is promising that the Institute, vast in its international reach, will be headed by a person with a long history in, and deep understanding of the need, both for access to justice and for community grounding of access to justice institutions.

As head of the Vera Institute in the 90’s, Chris pushed for a wide variety of community-based justice initiatives, varying from community policing to, perhaps most critically, the creation of Neighborhood Defender of Harlem (NDS).  NDS pioneered community basing of defender services, including a team approach, social service and investigatory participation, integration of civil and defender services, and aggressive use of technology.  (Disclosure: I worked with Chris at NDS and Vera.)

In the most recent decade, while at the Kennedy School, Chris has worked extensively on leadership issues and with the Hauser Center on Nonprofit Organizations.  Before heading Vera, he ran that organization’s London Office, and indeed, while at Vera he created an international network of criminal justice innovation organizations.  He was way ahead of most of us on the globalization curve, and this may well offer a hint of his long term perspective.

In all these roles he has also been deeply committed to innovation, to the use of pilots to test new ideas, and to rigorous research to test the validity and effectiveness of those new ideas.

He is tireless and focused, and his selection augurs very well for the future, not only for OSF and access to justice, but both for a more just and equitable society and for the overall direction of the worldwide funder community, in which I am sure he will be an intellectual and programmatic leader.

New York Times story here.

Posted in Criminal Law, Funding, International Models, Research and Evalation, Systematic Change | Tagged | Comments Off on Very Important and Promising Leaderhip Appointment at Open Society Foundations

Good news on LSC Technology and Access to Justice Summit

Posted on December 6, 2011 by richardzorza

I have just heard that the LSC Technology and Access to Justice Summit is going forward.  LSC has contracted with John Greacen to manage it.  I understand that the hope is to be able to have the Summit in April of 2012.

I understand that the Summit will be following the ideas expressed in the RFP, which says in part (referencing the 1998 Summit):

LSC believes it is time to hold a Second Summit to take stock of the current use of technology and assess its effectiveness in the delivery of legal services to the poor, to plan for the next wave of innovations and advances that technology can bring to access to justice, and to reach out to a broader group of partners. LSC envisions assembling two groups to aid in organizing this event: a small committee to serve as the main planning group and a larger group to serve as informal, substantive advisers. These groups would draw from legal services organizations, the judiciary, access to justice commissions, libraries (law and public), federal agencies, social services agencies, law schools, foundations, other non-profits, private attorneys, and private enterprise and would include the expertise necessary to improve access to justice through technology.

I believe that this is a huge opportunity to re-launch access and technology in a new way, and hope to be able to keep readers of this blog up to date with the planning.

John is a long time leader with both technology and access to justice, has very great credibility in the court community, and has also worked significantly in the past with the legal aid community.

This is an exciting development with the potential to have as much impact as the first Summit, which led to the whole TIG program — and more.

 

Posted in Legal Aid, LSC, Technology | 1 Comment

Article on Justice Index in National Law Journal

Posted on December 6, 2011 by richardzorza

David Udell and Cara Anna of the National Center for Access to Justice have an article in the National Law Journal on their proposed National Justice Index.  The core idea:

Which states’ courts are in the worst condition? Which, despite the challenges, are making litigation simpler and less expensive? It’s hard to fix a problem when you can’t see clearly what’s going wrong. There’s no way to tell how one state’s legal system is performing or how it compares with others. It’s time to change that. We need a national Justice Index.

A Justice Index follows on the innovative idea by Yale law professor Heather Gerken of creating a Democracy Index to evaluate America’s election system. A national Justice Index would be a high-profile annual ranking of each state’s approach to legal assistance and the way each handles civil and criminal cases. That ranking would be supported by published data that could be mined by policymakers, the media and the courts themselves.

The article gives examples of the kinds of data that would be needed:

For example, do courts have sufficient resources for translators and to hold jury trials? For criminal cases, how many days are people held without counsel? How many clients does a lawyer represent at one time? How much does it cost to be caught up in a civil or criminal case? Are communities providing the resources needed by the justice system?

The article also highlights Utah’s success in some initial such steps:

The clearest attempt at transparency has been in Utah, which has adopted CourTools, a measurement system developed by the National Center for State Courts in 2005, and publishes results online. “They allow us to quantify, rather than speculate about, the impact of recent resource cuts, resource reallocation and system restructuring,” Utah Chief Justice Christine Durham said in her annual State of the Judiciary address this past year.

This is not going to be an easy project.  I suspect that some jurisdictions are nervous about the very idea of comparison, fearing a race to the bottom at budget time.  Others may be worried about looking bad in terms of specific measures.

But, in the long term, the courts are only going to be appropriately funded if they are seen as legitimate, and they are only going to be seen as legitimate if they are meeting the standards required by our constitutional vision.  We need a race to the top, and this is one way to build one.

I am sure that David Udell and the Center would be very happy to hear from states interested in participating in, or learning more about, this project.

Posted in Budget Issues, Court Management, Metrics, Research and Evalation, SRL Statistics | 1 Comment

Claudia Johnson Blogs on Cost Saving LEP Ideas

Posted on December 5, 2011 by richardzorza

In the latest MIE Journal, Jesus Salas, Monica Buckley, and Facundo Bouzat from ABLE, Ohio, publish an excellent article sharing how ABLE is developing the capacity to serve LEP clients and the methods and tools it uses to do so. For those of you not in the legal hotlines community, ABLE is part of Legal Aid of Western Ohio, one of the oldest, largest and and most respected large legal hotlines and programs in the country. http://www.lawolaw.org/. In Ohio, as many other states, they are seeing a growth in LEP residents that is dramatic.

As they write in the article, the provision of legal services to LEP communities has not been rapidly embraced by legal non profits or courts in a way that is proportional to the changes they are seeing in their service communities. Often perceived as a cost, rather than as a quality best practice, language access accommodations are perceived as an add on, not a necessity to provide quality legal servicer or quality and accurate court decision. http://www.m-i-e.org/PDF/current_partial.pdf (Link to table of contents, not this article)

They write:

Non-profits many times lack the incentives prevalent in the private sector to communicate with LEP populations. Private firms adjust very quickly—advertising and providing services in Spanish, for example, allowing private firms to obtain more LEP clients. Legal services programs face the challenge of finding the right incentives to provide the same access that seem apparent in several areas of the private sector. New technologies and negotiating on economies of scale may provide these incentives.

In the article they share all the different steps they are taken and plan to take in the near future to address the needs of the LEP residents served by the hotline. One of the most promising ones is centralization of interpreter services of all the legal services programs in their state. They argue that centralizing interpreter services for legal services creates economies of scale for all the programs.  They provide details on the cost savings they have achieved so far. For a cost of about $52,000 a year, they are providing qualified interpreters using various cost saving technologies, including video conference, professional level translation software, and competent staff to oversee the project.

Another legal aid model to look at, in terms of centralizing language services in legal non profits, is the Language Access Project at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia. LAP, as it is known ,started in 1999 and the centralized the interpreting and translation services provided to LEP clients of CLS—a statewide non LSC funded program. http://www.clsphila.org/Content.aspx?id=518  http://www.clsphila.org/Content.aspx?id=544

LAP has had great impact in Philadelphia because as Salas writes, often legal aid is advocating for LEP access outside of legal aid, but part of being a legal non profit is providing language access to all clients or applicants for services.  LAP has in effect improved the landscape of LEP access to courts in its advocacy, in 2006, seven years after inception, ACT 172 was enacted, clarifying how courts need to address language issues in the state. http://www.clsphila.org/Content.aspx?id=544.

Centralizing translation and interpreting services in the legal aid world, is another cost saving idea that impacts directly on access and costs of providing legal services in 2012 and beyond. Legal aid groups could work with their local funders to create centralized translation project in the legal aid domain. There are design, system tools, and administration overhead that have to be covered to design the right system at the right scale. Initial seed money may be needed for the ramp up time and to explore the best technology to leverage resources. The ABLE model may be the place to start.  Courts could also work jointly with legal aid to benefit from what legal aid groups may be doing, and help with defray their costs of using some of these systems (in this funding environment it is not rational to expect a free ride) and  marginal costs need to be covered to not bankrupt the system and allow it to scale to capacity.

If courts can not explore collaboration with legal aid in these type of projects then they could consider some minimal investments to experiment with such a shared platform. In some state this is already happening in the use of remote video interrpreters, like in Florida. http://www.ninthcircuit.org/programs-services/court-interpreter/centralized-interpreting/

Although court budgets are in the decline, their budgets are often much larger, sometimes orders of magnitude much larger than their local legal aid. It is likely that courts can garner more resources than can the legal aid community. Why not test this? Maybe other court funders could be interested in funding a pilot and doing a strong cost benefit analysis (which is always expensive).

The ABA House of Delegates will be voting on the SCLAID LEP recommendation for courts in early 2012. http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_aid_indigent_defendants/20110705_ls_sclaid_proposed_sclaid_hod_resolution.authcheckdam.pdf.

Anyone out there taking the ABLE or CLS model and collaborating with a court or self help center to reduce the cost and improve the quality of legal services by providing quality language accommodations?  Please share.

Posted in LEP, Technology | Comments Off on Claudia Johnson Blogs on Cost Saving LEP Ideas

A shift in Empahsis About Access Demonstrated by Retired Chief Justice Marshall of Massachusetts

Posted on December 5, 2011 by richardzorza

The retired Massachusetts Chief, in a Boston Globe op-ed, urging contributions to legal aid programs, shows an interesting shift in emphasis in terms of how we think about the access system.  It’s caught in these two paras:

While judges and courts have worked hard to establish programs assisting unrepresented civil litigants and making them aware of legal services, based on my experience much more is needed to secure for them the same access to justice that we afford those charged in criminal cases. Not surprisingly, this need has taken on more urgency during the nation’s economic downturn, as more low-income individuals and families seek legal help to avoid being deprived of the basic necessities of life.

Nonprofit legal aid organizations are the most effective supplement to our court-sponsored programs for civil litigants in need. The dedicated lawyers and other professionals of legal aid organizations provide legal counseling to help ensure that low-income citizens at tipping points in their lives are represented in legal proceedings that can determine whether they can stay in their homes or keep their families safe from violence and abuse. (Emphasis added).

The shift is from treating court self-help programs as a second-best alternative to legal aid, to seeing reformed structures and programs in the courts as the core of ensuring access, and robust legal aid as a necessary and critical supplement in certain cases.  We may not all like this change, but it reflects statistical and financial reality, and underlines the core fact — in the end the courts are fully responsible for access.  While they can and should call on a strong legal aid system to assist in providing that access, weaknesses in legal aid funding can not be an excuse of any failure in the courts to provide such access.  That’s the due process message of Turner.  Nor, of course, do good court programs lessen the urgency of need for effectively funded legal aid.

Thanks to Gerry Singsen for catching this in his work on an excellent article in MIE Journal (link to table of contents and other articles only; this thought may not be in version published in MIE).

Posted in Access to Counsel, Funding, Legal Aid, Legal Ethics, Self-Help Services, Systematic Change | Comments Off on A shift in Empahsis About Access Demonstrated by Retired Chief Justice Marshall of Massachusetts

Guest Blogger Claudia Johnston Reflecting on Public Interest Lawyers, Technology and Change

Posted on December 4, 2011 by richardzorza

We are living in revolutionary times. It is the first time, since 1968, when I was just a babe learning to talk by listening to the Beattles in El Salvador, that we see such amount of change and restructuring and social unrest not only in the US, but world wide. Occupy Wall Street in multiple US cities, Arab Spring, etc. are reminiscent of the social movements and energy that  galvanized  in Tlatelolco, Paris, Caracas in 1968.

The Economist had a great piece, Here Comes Anyware http://www.economist.com/node/21531113 about mobile technology. It covered the twitter revolution, and how technology is speeding up the cycle of social organizing and change.  They call technology an “accelerant”.

Grappling with the changes and economic restructuring that is taking place across the world and being accelerated by technology I came across the work of a professor in Kansas. I found him by looking at TED, as he had a video posted there as one of the TED lectures.  His class, from Knowledge to Knowleadble http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/knowledgable-knowledge-able, a synopsis that can be viewed in this TED presentation, is inspiring and forces me to ask me, what am I as a public interest lawyer doing to accelerate justice? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeaAHv4UTI8. As Wesh says, “the world is on fire” and we have students in law school learning about one of the most powerful tools for social change (law and advocacy tools (oral, written, analytical) in a world that is totally different? How do we use law as a body of knowledge and training to work on real problems and leverage their training to organize, collect, and share and help build access to justice work?

In March of this year I had the privilege of being invited to be a speaker for the Sparer Conference at Penn Law. http://www.law.upenn.edu/pic/students/PI-Week-Calendar-11.pdf A video of the sessions is here http://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/newsroom/videoaudio/publicInterestWeek2011.html

The Sparer Conference is a public interest conference organized by the Toll Center and the public interest scholars at the law school. I presented on LawHelp Interactive which I manage. From interacting with the students it was evident that there is a small and growing active group of law students, going into public interest law and looking at technology as one of the ways to use their skill, training, and talent.  This small emerging cadre of public interest minded students exists in other law schools.

One question for our readers, what Law Schools are teaching law school clinics centered around technology? For example, are there any other projects similar to Chicago Kent-Law School, where law students are matched with non-profit practitioners and are taught how to use online technology (outside of video)  to meet very concrete legal needs?

The ongoing work of CATJ  at Chicago Kent Law School to connect law students with legal non profits to create online forms is a model to encourage other law schools to study and emulate. It exemplies in the legal context the message of Michael Wesh.  With the ongoing funding crisis, and the shortage of jobs, and the change in technology exposure by age group, law schools need to more and more include technology as part of teaching and preparing the next generation of lawyers. A great paper to read on leveraging law students in law and technology from 2007 http://www.kentlaw.edu/cajt/WhitePaperLeveragingLawStudents&Technology.pdf. I think that projects like CATJ/A2J Author’s help law students create meaning for themselves and gives them an opportunity to work on real problems.

Please share any other technology base/public interest projects and clinics that are working with students. I would also love to hear about other projects that are helping law students go from “knowledgeable to knowledge-able” to bring out solutions.  For example, is anyone out there (court or legal aid group or bar association) working on virtual self help centers or advice clinics staffed by law students volunteers under supervision by an attorney using online tools? In the development of the tools? Pro Bono projects?

Since some of the social movements are now being accelerated by hand held devices, are there pro bono attorneys  or legal non profit firms supporting some of these movements with the same tools? I know that in legal aid, the use of mobile/handheld devices to serve clients or applicants is just starting.  On the law firm side they have been providing handheld devices for associates longer than legal aid has.  Are there pro bono models being developed around mobile technology? Is the use of handheld tools changing the ways law firms associates do pro bono work?

I hope others in the access to justice community get as excited as I do about the work of Michael Tesh. I welcome suggestions and concrete ideas on how to tackle the challenge he so clearly dissects in our field.

Posted in Access to Justice Generally, Document Assembly, Meetings, Mobile Technology, Technology | 3 Comments

Honoring Mike Genz and Remembering His Foundational Work

Posted on December 4, 2011 by richardzorza

Mike Genz has retired from LSC (although I understand he hopes to continue to do some consulting work).  Those who know him will not be surprised that this event passed without fanfare.  Mike is not the kind of person who feels that the world needs to hear of his achievements.  Yet, perhaps it should hear.

Mike being Mike, I am sure that I know of only a small segment of his contributions to access to justice for the poor.  But I can attest to his key role, while head of OPP at LSC in putting into place LSC’s field technology infrastructure, surely one of the great access to justice success stories of the last 15 years.

Least anyone doubt the clarity of his vision — long before it was commonly held, I am posting the paper he wrote for the 1998, yes 1998, LSC Technology Summit here.

Its full title is Technology and Client Community Access To Legal Services — Suggestive Scenarios on CLE, Intake and Referral and Pro Se.

The paper consists of a series of scenarios, and for each, Mike has identified the technology and other advances needed to be put in place.  Here is one of those scenarios.  I think it speaks for itself in terms of its intelligence, practicability, and insight.  While we have not built all of this system, to the extent we have, it is in large part thanks to Mike’s foresight and vision.  It should be noted that of all the scenarios in the paper, this one is the least implemented.  That is perhaps because it is the most farsighted.  Remember that when he wrote it there was no network of statewide websites, no document assembly system, little cooperation with the courts, and not even broad deployment of the Internet onto the desktop.

Scenario Five: Pro Se — The Computer Helps  

 The housing intake specialist determines that this case can proceed pro se.  While it is adversarial and there is a good deal at stake for Maria, it presents only the vary narrow legal issue that has already been decided — favorably to Maria — by the state’s Supreme Court.  Maria is interested in going pro se and appears to the intake specialist to be capable of doing so.  Since the system has the necessary information, the specialist produces the documents.  She reviews them with Maria during the teleconference and determines that Maria understands the documents and the proceedings.  The documents are downloaded to Maria’s telemonitor, complete with instructions on how to electronically file them (including how to “sign” them with her identifier) with the court and send a copy to the adverse party.  The specialist advises Maria to contact the legal services program if other issues arise in the case or if she is not certain how to proceed.  At Maria’s request, the case is put on “active monitoring.”   The program’s computer will automatically search daily for pleadings in the case that have been filed in the court.  It will alert Maria if she hasn’t filed her Answer and Motion for Summary Judgment and the deadline is approaching.  If other pleadings are filed by the adverse side, the pleading will be brought to the desktop of the housing specialist for her review and possible contact with Maria.  If the landlord amends its pleading, pursues discovery, or otherwise acts in a manner not anticipated, the case will be considered for full representation.  

 Deployment Prerequisites for Scenario Five

  • Document Assembly and Information Search and Analysis.  The software described in the scenario takes the intake information that is in the intake data base and merges it with the appropriate pleadings.  The ascertions of law that the pleadings make should be filed in a legal information data base search, so that if either case law or statutory law changes, there would be a trigger to indicate that the pleading has to change.  For example, in this case, if the decision that Maria is relying on was of an intermediate appellate court rather than of the state’s highest court, the search engine would be on the lookout for a case that overturns or modifies the decision being relied upon.
  • Reliable Identification of the Source of Filed Documents.   Automatic court filing is very helpful to pro se procedures because pro se litigants often find the process of actually filing the needed documents complex, intimidating or both.  But in order for this to be a practical way for courts to proceed, there has to be a secure and reliable way for the person submitting the document to be identified.
  • Resolution of Unauthorized Practice of Law Issues and Other Issues Surrounding Pro Se Representation.   In this case, there has to be a determination that the computer’s provision of pleadings does not constitute the unauthorized practice of law.  The decision may require the finding that both: there is an attorney (as opposed to a paralegal or a “smart computer program”) behind every aspect of the pleading production and that the filing is that of the client pro se, and not of the attorney.  There also has to be the finding that the centralized intake and delivery system is within the code of professional responsibility in producing pleadings and continuing to monitor the progress of the case without actually being responsible to the court or to the client as the attorney of record.  

Lets keep building this and similar systems.

And, please use the comments to remember this and other aspects of Mike’s work.

Posted in LSC, Systematic Change, Technology, Tools | Comments Off on Honoring Mike Genz and Remembering His Foundational Work

Non-Lawyer Assistance in the Courtroom — the UK Model

Posted on December 2, 2011 by richardzorza

Most of us in the US are unaware of a fascinating approach that the UK (and indeed most Commonwealth countries) use to assist in access to justice for those without lawyers.  It is an approach that permits non-lawyers to sit with the self-represented litigant and provide support in the presentation of the case.  Compensation for such assistance is not prohibited.  Perhaps the best way to give a flavor of what this means is to post, in its entirety, the recent proposal as part of a report to the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice by the Civil Justice Council of England and Wales for A Code of Conduct for those playing this role, called “McKenzie Friends.”  I have discussed this option with judges in the US and some anxiety has been expressed here about the potential for courtroom disruption.  I hope that the items in the proposed Code of Conduct will provide reassurance that these risks can be controlled by appropriate use of judicial discretion.

Continue reading →

Posted in Access to Counsel, Judicial Ethics, Self-Help Services | Tagged | 5 Comments

Wayne Moore Makes Suggestions for Legal Aid on “How to Cut Costs Without Cutting Services”

Posted on December 2, 2011 by richardzorza

Wayne Moore has responded to the legal aid budget crisis with this insightful and intensely practical memo on how legal aid programs can protect service delivery in a tough time.  I urge all, including those who have been somewhat critical of some of Wayne’s earlier writing, to read this memo for its myriad suggestions that are grounded in a lifetime of experimentation and innovation in the delivery system.   I am sure that there is no program in the country that would not benefit substantially from implementing several — or more — of these ideas.  I would ask everyone to please circulate it as widely as possible, including to those at all levels of legal aid programs and access groups.  I would also encourage discussion in the Comments on the appropriateness of these ideas in particular contexts, and how best to implement them.

How to Cut Costs Without Cutting Services 

By Wayne Moore

The recent tragic cuts in LSC funding for 2012 will force grantees to make difficult decisions to balance their budgets. This memo offers ideas for making these cuts in a way that preserves as many client services as possible. It is organized by service:

  • intake
  • referrals
  • legal advice
  • limited action
  • uncontested court cases
  • contested court cases suitable for unbundling
  • other contested cases
  • pro bono services
  • impact advocacy.

Continue reading →

Posted in Access to Justice Generally, Budget Issues, Document Assembly, Legal Aid, LSC, Pro Bono, Self-Help Services, Systematic Change, Technology, Unbundling | Comments Off on Wayne Moore Makes Suggestions for Legal Aid on “How to Cut Costs Without Cutting Services”

This Blog Named by ABA Journal as One of Top 100 Blogs — Opportunity to Vote for Best Blog in Twelve Caegories.

Posted on December 1, 2011 by richardzorza

I am more touched by this than I expected, particularly because of the nomination by Allison McDermot of Pro Bono Net.  Here is the description of the blog at the ABA Journal listing of the top 100 blogs:

Richard Zorza’s Access to Justice Blog
accesstojustice.net

While his blog is new (turning 1 this month), D.C. lawyer Richard Zorza is an access-to-justice veteran, which Allison McDermott of Pro Bono Net says makes his blog a “must-read.” She writes that Zorza’s “breadth of knowledge and contacts comes across in each post, and he is not shy about strongly recommending changes to the status quo, while always keeping his eye (and voice) on those who cannot afford justice in our country.”

Allison, the Deputy Director of Pro Bono Net, is just one of those people who always seem to be there making things happen when they need to happen.  I have spent many hours listening to her work (usually on the phone) and she is always facilitating, moving people forward, keeping a group focused on a vision and its real world implementation.  A few more like her and the struggle for access and justice would be much closer to being won.

I have decided not to be reticent about urging people to vote for this blog as a winner in its category, which is “Niche”.  I hope it does not seem ungrateful to suggest that Access to Justice should be a category rather than a niche (isn’t that why we have a legal system?).  Maybe it is just that the access community does not yet have enough blogs, or maybe we do not promote ourselves enough.  Anyway, please do your bit to promote the visibility of access to justice by voting here, and spreading the word about the blog and how to vote.  (There is a list of access-related blogs on the right side of the blog — feel free to suggest others.)

Posted in This Blog | Tagged | 3 Comments

SJI Announces Priority Areas

Posted on December 1, 2011 by richardzorza

Important news for innovation.  SJI has just (yesterday) announced their new priority areas.  I think most us will be both pleased and impressed.  Here is the list, now on their website, as well as in E-SJINews.

Priority Investment Areas

On November 30, 2011, the SJI Board of Directors announced SJI’s new Priority Investment Areas. SJI will allocate significant financial resources through grant-making for these following Priority Investment Areas (in no ranking order):

  • Self-Represented Litigation – e.g., self-help centers, online services, training.
  • Limited English Proficiency (LEP) – e.g., interpretation service plans, remote interpretation (outside the courtroom), interpreter certification, courtroom services (plain language forms, websites, etc.).
  • Reengineering in Response to Budget Reductions – e.g., the process of reengineering, regionalization or centralization of services, structural changes, the electronic record.
  • Immigration Issues in the State Courts – e.g., impact of federal and state immigration law and policies, juvenile and family issues, training.
  • Guardianship, Conservatorship, and Elder Issues – e.g., visitor programs, electronic reporting, reports, training.

The Priority Investment Areas replace the former Special Interest Categories for Project Grants in many ways – most importantly in that they apply to ALL grant types (with the exception of the Education Support Program). SJI strongly encourages potential grant applicants to consider projects addressing one or more of these Priority Investment Areas. More information about the Priority Investment Areas will be provided in the future.

Congratulations to the new Board and its staff for responding to changing times.  I suspect that I may look at this from the perspective of my areas of interest, but there seems to me to be a focus both on the areas of greatest challenge, and on the tools that offer the greatest opportunity to meet those challenges.

By the way, E-SJINews also carries the good (in these times) news that the 2012 FY budget is unchanged at $5,121,000, as well as a listing of new grants.

Posted in Funding, LEP, Self-Help Services, Systematic Change | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

I Love This: Law School Incubator Project Goes International

Posted on December 1, 2011 by richardzorza

Globalization cuts both ways!

I have just heard that the Law School Incubator, being pioneered by CUNY among others, is being adopted in India.

Here is the news from the Sakai Times, about the Symbiosis Law School in Pune.

PUNE: The Symbiosis Law School (SLS) and City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law together plan to start an incubation centre in the city to prepare law entrepreneurs committed to community service.

Aim of this programme is to help and encourage new lawyers to go into practice on their own in communities where there are few lawyers, and where people cannot afford hefty fees.

“Community service is not a very lucrative field. But this is an essential area nevertheless. We are adopting the incubator programme run by CUNY in New York and implement the same here,” director SLS, Shashikala Gurpur said. SLS and CUNY have been running a collaborative programme since last three years to provide legal help through their free legal aid centre.

One student has already been identified. Once he completes his education, he will be trained for entrepreneurial skills at the ‘innovation centre’ in SIU campus at Lavale.

I understand that NY Deputy Chief Administrative Judge Fern Fisher and CUNY Incubator honcho Fred Rooney are in India facilitating this now.  Maybe this will encourage more law schools in the US to follow the same path.  It is critically needed.  I do not think there is any hope for middle income access without innovations like this.

Please share around the world.

Posted in Access to Justice Generally, International Models, Law Schools, Middle Income | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Written Versus Oral Reporting — Implications for Forms Programs

Posted on December 1, 2011 by richardzorza

Question for readers of this post.

It is getting a lot of hits. Does anyone know what is listing/referring/using it?  My analytics are not telling me anything.  Please tell me by sending me an e-mail, richard(at)zorza.net.

Thanks:

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Richard Moorhead reports on his blog an interesting study of differences between oral and written reporting.  The abstract is as follows:

The aim of the current study was to test whether the modality of testing (written vs. spoken) matters when obtaining eyewitness statements. Writing puts higher demands on working memory than speaking because writing is slower, less practiced, and associated with the activation of graphemic representations for spelling words (Kellogg, 2007). Therefore, we hypothesized that witnesses’ spoken reports should elicit more details than written ones. Participants (N = 192) watched a staged crime video and then gave a spoken or written description of the course of action and the perpetrator. As expected, spoken crime and perpetrator descriptions contained more details than written ones, although there was no difference in accuracy. However, the most critical (central) crime and perpetrator information was both more extensive and more accurate when witnesses gave spoken descriptions. In addition to cognitive factors, social factors are considered which may drive the effect. (Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.)

Here’s the question: does this mean that document assembly software will collect less detail than would be the case from an attorney or paralegal human interview.  If so, (and it is a big if) then we need to think about asking extra questions to get at the detail required.  There might also be other strategies for ensuring the information, such as careful wording and testing of questions, use of sample answers, etc.)

It is not hard to imagine some research that would compare the product of traditional questioning with first an online document assembly program already in use, and then an enhanced version of that program using a standard protocol for the enhancement.

Posted in Document Assembly, Forms, Research and Evalation, Technology | 3 Comments

Maximizing the Impact of Turner v. Rogers — Judges’ Journal Article on Courtroom Best Practices

Posted on November 30, 2011 by richardzorza

My article A NEW DAY FOR JUDGES AND THE SELF-REPRESENTED
The Implications of Turner v. Rogers, has just been published in the Judges’ Journal.

I very much hope that it will be helpful in freeing judges to take engaged and neutral steps that help ensure access to justice for the self-represented.  Remember, before Turner there were those who thought that it was inappropriate for judges to ask questions and take other engaged steps.  After Turner we have both the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice saying that it some circumstances it may be demanded by due process.  As the article states:

The Supreme Court’s June 2011 decision in Turner v. Rogers1 will greatly influence the judicial handling of civil self-represented litigation. Before Turner, it was not yet fully settled for all whether judges can appropriately intervene in such civil cases. After Turner, the issues are when must they do so, and how they can most effectively do so in the situations in which they are either required or choose to intervene. Lurking behind this changed judicial environment is the Court’s effective endorsement of judicial engagement as helping ensure, and indeed sometimes required to ensure, fairness and accuracy, and to meet the requirements of due process.

It is important to note that while the Supreme Court has not previously visited the civil self-represented courtroom (except to address issues of right to counsel) the approach taken by the court will not be new to those engaged in real world innovaton in this area.  Indeed, the article explores twenty nine suggested Best Practices for such engagement, drawn from research and experimentation.  Please read the article, and if you find it valuable, share with those who may also find it helpful.

By the way, this article focuses mainly on the simpler situations; a follow-up article, to be published in a subsequent issue of the Judges’ Journal will focus on more challenging situations, such as those in which one side has counsel, or the case involves a full trial, including possibly before a jury.

Posted in Judicial Ethics, Self-Help Services, Supreme Court | 1 Comment