Naomi Creutzfeldt, University of Kent
This is a project about how ordinary people navigate the (online) justice system. People are required to possess a degree of digital capability to navigate their digital justice journey. By looking behind the veil of the digitalisation of justice and exploring how real people are experiencing their digital justice journeys, this study offers a timely and innovative effort to answer these questions. It will contribute to pressing socio-legal debates about the impact and operationality of the digitalisation of justice processes. The study will further develop theoretically innovative and empirically tested answers to questions of access to justice, digital legal consciousness, and legitimacy.
Context
The commitment to a more efficient, accessible, and straightforward justice system was officially marked in 2016 by the HMCTS reform programme. The ambition was to modernise, to upgrade and to make justice more accessible. Scholars have interrogated the use of legal technology (Donoghue 2017, Hynes et al 2020, Mulcahy et al 2021, Rabinovich- Einy and Katch 2017; Susskind 2019) and how the new system might work for vulnerable users (Newman et al 2021).
Questions this study explores are:
- How are ordinary people managing their digital journey?
- What are the benefits and the obstacles they face?
- What are the personal stories behind the promises of efficiency and speed of online systems?
Conceptualising digital justice journeys
This is a study of how people make sense of, and think about the law, through the online process. It explores the role of the advice sector in assisting people to access the online system. Further, it questions whether online processes and procedures limit or enhance access to justice. This is done by testing empirically attitudes of people who engage /disengage with the online justice system (digital legal consciousness, Creutzfeldt 2021). Finally, I will draw conclusions about the legitimacy of the online system through multi-method data collection and analysis (documents, observations, interviews and field notes).
Erik Bornmann, CLEO (Community Legal Education Ontario / Éducation juridique communautaire Ontario)
CLEO is embarking on an applied research and development project to investigate the power of GenAI to increase access to justice, especially for self-represented litigants (SRLs). The project is described in our new discussion paper: Generative AI: Opportunities to enhance CLEO’s Guided Pathways.
We are currently testing the use of ChatGPT4 to help users of our Guided Pathways write more compelling narratives for court forms and other legal documents. One of the most significant challenges faced by SRLs is the need to tell their stories in court documents, such as pleadings and affidavits. The clarity and persuasiveness of these stories are often critical to determining legal outcomes.
To illustrate the concept, CLEO has released a narrative generator prototype that helps hypothetical users of the new Guided Pathway for making an emergency motion explain to the court why they need an emergency motion and describe their evidence, such as a history of family violence. Early tests are promising.
In developing the prototype and in our continuing research, CLEO has partnered with McGill Law and the Montreal Cyberjustice Laboratory to experiment with inputs and evaluate outputs to get the best results for users. Our research seeks to reliably create better legal narratives using information collected by our Guided Pathways’ decision-tree technology in combination with GenAI.
Our goal is to learn whether GenAI can provide people, particularly SRLs, with better online legal tools, if the technology is implemented carefully and with appropriate safeguards. People from marginalized communities may face greater challenges in accessing justice without the benefit of these tools—tools that will increasingly serve more privileged litigants.
In our presentation, we will do the following four key things:
- Introduce CLEO’s Guided Pathways and the challenge of helping people compose legal narratives;
- Share our thoughts on the opportunities that GenAI presents for addressing this challenge;
- Discuss our process for assessing the feasibility of GenAI-enhanced Guided Pathways for the public, including early observations; and
- Invite your participation and input.
Bonnie Hough, Self-Represented Litigation Network
Many states in the U.S. have invested in kiosks to enhance access to justice for low-income individuals with limited or no internet access. All too often, these kiosks are underutilized. This presentation will describe recent research regarding kiosk usage including barriers that the public faces using kiosks, and suggests how user-testing might effectively identify and potentially mitigate some of these challenges. It will further review the importance of collaborating with sites hosting the kiosks, identifying the challenges those sites face. It will review potential approaches to encourage kiosk usage in the US. The presentation will also suggest that user-feedback from kiosk users and host sites may be used to enhance websites, chat systems, document assembly tools, and other technological resources tailored for self-represented litigants.
Objectives of the workshop:
1) Identify challenges faced by the public in using kiosks and simple user-testing tools to help address some of those challenges
2) List a variety of potential uses for legal kiosks
3) Describe strategies for increasing usage of the kiosks
Jennifer Leitch, NSRLP
Virtual processes have brought about remarkable change in the Canadian justice system. However, the “modernization” of the justice system through the use of new technologies is often taken as a given, without enough consideration paid to the practical experiences of stakeholders. Few studies to-date have undertaken efforts to gather data and feedback from self-represented litigants (SRLs). The research project that will be discussed in this presentation was undertaken by the National Self-Represented Litigants Project (NSRLP). It consisted of two methodological approaches: surveys and focus groups aimed at gathering a quantifiably measurable sense of SRLs’ engagement with virtual hearings, and qualitative exploration of SRLs’ experiences with these hearings. The results of the survey reflect the fact that SRLs’ experiences with virtual hearings were quite varied. In terms of positive experiences, all research participants reported that taking part virtually allowed for the removal of certain barriers that tend to disproportionately impact SRLs. However, the research also highlighted SRLs’ negative experiences. Certain of these factors were generally reflective of ongoing barriers that SRLs face in attempting to access justice, as well as new barriers raised in the virtual sphere that need to be accounted for in access to justice discourse moving forward. The NSRLP’s presentation would canvass the factors that impacted SRLs’ positive and negative experiences with virtual proceedings and how virtual proceedings can add to, compound, or replace existing barriers.
Based on the findings, the researchers will also discuss the need for both immediate as well as longer terms steps that would strengthen SRLs’ abilities to participate in virtual settings. Additionally, the data gathered in this project serves to highlight the need to develop a further research agenda that continues to investigate certain questions related to the development of virtual hearings. The NSRLP will discuss how pursuing these lines of inquiry would contribute to a more robust and innovative set of insights that ensure that a brave new virtual world is not serving to replicate the challenges of existing forums but rather contributing to access to justice in meaningful ways.
Overall, virtual hearings, as with all new technologies, have evidenced a great capacity to increase access to justice for many people. This is particularly when they are implemented thoughtfully, and when care is taken to gather and act on input from end users. But the potential for and evidence of very serious barriers experienced by the most vulnerable litigants must be carefully considered by all those with power in the justice system. The NSRLP intends to discuss how virtual hearings are very evidently not a one-size-fits-all panacea to issues of access to justice, and therefore ought to be considered as one of a range of potential options and solutions, carefully employed, and thoroughly studied.
Tania McKenna, Northern Community Legal Centre
While technological advancements have the potential to deliver significant efficiencies across legal practice and systems pathways, this presentation will explore the extent to which systems reform also has the potential to marginalise and exclude members of the community who are often most in need of access to justice.
Northern Community Legal Centre (NCLC) provides free legal services to communities that experience some of the greatest structural and systemic disadvantages in Victoria, Australia. Working across Melbourne’s Northwest, NCLC prioritises the legal needs of people living with multiple forms of
disadvantage and marginalisation, including people experiencing family violence, refugee and migrant people, and other community cohorts.
In this presentation, NCLC will provide an overview of findings from their recent research projects exploring the benefits and barriers experienced by community members in response to technological systems reform across the justice system, state courts, and services access pathways. The areas of
reform explored in this research include:
- The introduction of online forms for victims/survivors seeking family violence legal protections, with a particular focus on the experiences of migrant and refugee women;
- The introduction of video conferencing software for remote participation of victims/survivors in family violence proceedings;
- The pilot of an online automated triage process at Northern Community Legal Centre.
Across all research areas, NCLC identified that while technological reform can improve access to justice for some community members, it can also exclude people who experience barriers to engaging with technology, particularly where alternative access arrangements have not been sufficiently resourced. NCLC also found that when automated processes replace human‐to‐human contact, there is the potential for information and referral pathways to become less targeted, and the quality of service provision is compromised.
This presentation aims to illuminate the voices of community members who have found justice and service systems inaccessible and/or obtained poorer legal outcomes due to technological reform. The session will highlight the importance of including community voices in the design of reforms and monitoring their effectiveness by engaging with the community to determine on‐the‐ground impact.
Remote hearings and the use of technology in Arizona state courts and access to justice. Although I touched on these issues in Irvine last year, the focus in 2024 is the forward looking effort, as reflected in our forthcoming article Remote Court Hearings (Past, Present, and Future): Arizona’s Next Steps for a New World to Enhance Access to Justice, accepted for publication in the SMU Law Review Forum. This new article is a sequel to Post-pandemic Recommendations: COVID-19 Continuity of Court Operations During a Public Health Emergency Workgroup, published in January 2022 in the SMU Law Review Forum. https://scholar.smu.edu/smulrforum/vol75/iss1/1/ Building on the implementation and adoption of the Arizona Plan B Workgroup’s February 2022 Recommended Remote and In-Person Hearings in the Arizona State Courts in the Post-Pandemic World, the presentation will report on that effort as well as surveys, nationally and in Arizona in 2023 both of members of the State Bar of Arizona and Arizona’s State Courts, comparing responses to similar Arizona surveys in 2021. These survey results and related statistical data show that remote appearances are significantly improving appearance rates. These survey results show a broad acceptance and appreciation of the advantages of allowing for remote appearances for client and lawyer efficiency and access, as well as reduced cost to litigants. These survey results also evidence a need for training, education, access to technology, the need to bridge the “Digital Divide” and continuing concerns about how to continue to further effective access to justice, given an enhanced role of technology in the courts.