In a room full of tech savvy lawyers, I had the privilege to present their Darwin talk at EvovleLaw’s “Social Media for Lawyers event last week at Avvo. The event focused mainly on how lawyers maintain their relationship with social media and the ethical issues associated when many lawyers are building and growing their practices. This program brought together a mix of legal marketing experts to help lawyers use social media ethically and effectively.
Evolve Law was founded by co-conspirators Mary Juetten of Traklight and Jules Miller as a catalyst for innovation for legal tech startups that fosters collaboration in the legal tech industry to accelerate growth.
The “Darwin Talk “ is usually a ten-minute; ignite style presentation given at the end of EvolveLaw events on a proactive legal topic of choice. My presentation was titled “Tech’s Peculiar Relationship with Legal Access” discussing how the use of technology has affected legal access in our country, a topic that I am truly passionate about speaking on. I started the presentation by discussing tech’s relationship with the legal industry as a whole and how over the last ten years, technology has revolutionized the legal industry in all aspects and in every area of the law. However, during the same time of rapid innovation in legal industry, technology has done little make the law more accessible for the majority of Americans. As the numbers currently reveal that as many as eighty percent of poor and two-thirds of the middle class legal needs are unmet according to the Legal Services Corporation.
I stated that the core of the problem were that legal aid providers not having the ability or capacity to properly implement the use technology in their respective organizations to most efficiently serve their clients with their legal needs. Most legal aid providers through their self-help legal portals currently employ the use of technology to serve clients’ legal needs. However, many of these self-help legal portals are not user friendly from a design perspective, and contain pages full of legalese; creating barriers for low income users, who in most cases do not have the education to fully comprehend and digest the information in a manner they can readily use to solve their legal problems. Most of the self-help legal portals also assume that every user’s legal needs are the same, and that with a little legal information provided, their problems can magically be solved. As a law student myself, who is familiar with the law, and how a person would obtain legal services found some of these sites to be very confusing and convoluted.
This result is largely because the funding of legal aid providers receive has not been able to keep pace with many of the new legal tech start ups who receive angel and VC funding and are able to rapidly improve their design and business processes around their intended user.
My solution was that use of technology should be implemented in a user-centered design fashion and should start at a place or page when they are trying to first understand the user’s legal journey.
I also stated that if use of technology were ever going to increase the access to legal services, there would need to be an ecosystem in place where law schools, legal aid providers, governments, and legal tech companies collaborated to create sustainable solutions with the end user in mind, instead of the current unilateral approach.
My closing statements were that
“I truly believe that we have an opportunity to something really great, and really employ the use of technology in a way that expands legal access.”
After, the crowd was very receptive to the presentation, and I have followed up with many of the attendees after presenting. I would like to thank the team at EvolveLaw for giving me the opportunity to present on this topic.
