Thought Leaders Series: Apps 4 Justice

In the Thought Leaders series, College Fellows address the challenges—and innovations—on the horizon for the profession. The future-focused essays originally appeared in the inaugural Inside Legal Thought Leader Digest. 

The profession is endangered. Law schools are in trouble. New lawyers are unprepared for economic and technological reality. There’s vast unmet need for legal services. Apps 4 Justice attacks these four related problems. The basic idea is to greatly expand programs in which law students create software as part of their education.

Courses that engage students in creating ‘apps for justice’—software applications that do useful legal work—can take many forms. They can focus on tools practitioners can use to ‘work smarter’ and assist others; they can focus on empowering self helpers to address their own problems and opportunities.

Students can build document templates,guided interviews, dynamic checklists, calculators,interactive advisers, instructional modules, games,and decision support systems. Embedded with rich intellectual contexts of doctrine, ethics, history, and theory, such courses can:

• enrich student learning, professional development, and career positioning
• help lawyers serve clients better and live more satisfying lives
• advance access to justice and the rule of law
• help law schools resuscitate their value proposition

The Project

Today, law school clinics deliver important education in the skills and values critical to lawyer competency, while also contributing significant resources to help meet the needs of low-income people for legal services. But this is a relatively recent development. The 5th Biennial Report 1977-78 from the Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility (CLEPR) states that in 1969 there were only a handful of law school clinics for credit. Yet by 1978 nearly every law school in the country had such a program. CLEPR in ten years with $12 million triggered a sea change in law school structure: from a handful of clinical professors in 1969 to 1400 clinicians by 2000; from mere hundreds of hours of law student work on legal aid in the ‘60s to millions of such hours in 2000 and every year since.

CLEPR had narrow and focused objectives. Its grants stimulated law schools to establish courses granting law school credit for student work in live client clinics, almost always located in or near the law school building. CLEPR’s financial and programmatic support helped to create a self-sustaining process that has survived long after CLEPR closed its doors and stopped making grants. Withoutany continuing CLEPR stimulus, law schools now employ more than 1,400 clinical professors whose students deliver legal services to low-income people. In his 2002 essay “Taking Out the Adversary: The Assault on Progressive Public-InterestLawyers,” legal ethicist David Luban calculate that students in U.S. clinical courses produced three million hours of legal services for the poor each year.

New solutions to an old problem

Recent developments provide ideal circumstances for a new law school initiative directed explicitly at delivering more extensive access to justice for low-income people. Using Technology Initiative Grants, the Legal Services Corporation has established state-wide legal aid web sites in every state and a national server for distributing HotDocs automated documents and A2J Guided Interviews via all of those websites. Law students can be taught to write and deploy these advanced technologies, using statewide websites as platforms for 24/7 legal service delivery to low income people. While learning these tools, law students can contribute to legal aid as authors, programmers and editors.

The best setting for this new kind of ‘learning by doing’ is within a law school clinic under the supervision of an experienced educator. Skills learned by students in such ‘apps for justice’ clinics are critically important for a variety of careers, including fee based practices aimed at moderate income clients and emerging large firm practices triggered by fixed fee billing models now demanded by corporate clients. By constructing useful applications, students not only (1) learn about substance (doctrine, procedure) in a given area and (2) learn how technology can be used creatively to assist in legal work (and some of the policy and ethical aspects of doing so), but (3) produce tools that they or others can bring to bear to improve access to justice. Students also gain credentials for current and future employment.

The goal is to recreate the CLEPR successes of thirty years ago by establishing a permanent teaching cadre in U.S. law schools that can offer course credit for practical instruction in system building,aimed at real client problems. It is self-consciously focused on institutionalizing an organic engine for growth of new resources to support education in new skills that are now critical for lawyer competency while, at the same time, supporting legal services to the poor. The plan is to create an engine fueled by law professor and law student energy to build hundreds of A2J Guided Interviews, document templates and public education web pages that enhance access to justice.

The Bigger Context

While this initiative is focused on specific forms of student work to expand access to justice for low-income Americans that build on established academic successes and an existing national infrastructure,it should be seen as the opening phase of a larger process to exploit dramatic new opportunities to enrich legal education. Courses and clinics that engage students in creating ‘apps for justice’—essentially, things that do useful legal work—can take on many forms. All of these agendas and system types can be embedded in courses that provide rich intellectual contexts of doctrine, ethics, history, and theory. And all can potentially provide a meaningful ‘quadruple bottom line’:

• For students: learning, professional development, career positioning
• For society: advancing justice and otherwise improving the world
• For the profession: supplying new knowledge and resources with which lawyers can serve clients better, live more satisfying and prosperous lives, and outperform new entrants, like online legal assistance services
• For schools: strengthening law schools as institutions by visibly delivering the above results(improving public relations, contacts with court and bar, student and faculty recruitment, alumni sentiment, etc.)

A more detailed account of this project will be published as a chapter entitled “Apps 4 Justice: Law Schools, Technology and Access to Justice” in an upcoming book “Educating the Digital Lawyer,” Oliver Goodenough and Marc Lauritsen, editors, Berkman Center at Harvard University, 2011.

Ronald W. Staudt is the associate vice president of law, business and technology and professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law. Ron is the director of the Center for Access to Justice & Technology (CAJT)-a law school center using Internet resources to improve access to justice with special emphasis on building web tools to support legal services advocates, pro bono volunteers and pro se litigants. He is a Fellow and Vice President of the College of Law Practice Management. He can be reached at rstaudt@kentlaw.edu.

Marc Lauritsen, author of The Lawyer’s Guide to Working Smarter with Knowledge Tools, is president of Capstone Practice Systems and of Legal Systematics. Marc has served as a poverty lawyer, directed the clinical program at Harvard Law School, and done path-breaking work on document drafting and decision support systems. He is a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and co-chairs the American Bar Association’s eLawyering Task Force. He can be reached at marc@capstonepractice.com or @marclauritsen.

This  article is reprinted with permission from the inaugural InsideLegal Thought Leaders Digest: COLPM Issue. View the entire publication at InsideLegal.com.

Additional Thought Leader Series Essays

• Diversity Trends—The Individual as Change Agent by Kendal Tyre
• New World of E-Discovery by Ronald Friedmann
• Impact of the Legal Services Act by Tony Williams