Digital Curb Cuts: Towards an Inclusive Open Forms Ecosystem

Akron Law Review, Dec 2021

In this paper, we focus on digital curb cuts created during the pandemic: improvements designed to increase accessibility that benefit people beyond the population that they are intended to help. As much as 86% of civil legal needs are unmet, according to a 2017 study by the Legal Services Corporation. Courts and third parties designed many innovations to meet the emergency needs of the pandemic: we argue that these innovations should be extended and enhanced to address this ongoing access to justice crisis. Specifically, we use the Suffolk University Law School's Document Assembly Line as a case study. The Document Assembly Line rapidly automated more than two dozen court processes, providing pro se litigants remote, user-friendly, step-by-step guidance in areas such as domestic violence protection orders and emergency housing needs and made them available at courtformsonline.org. The successes of this project can extend beyond the pandemic with the adoption of an open-source, open-standards ecosystem centered on document and form automation. We give special attention to the value of integrated electronic filing in serving the needs of litigants, a tool that has been underutilized in the non-profit form automation space because of complexities and the difficulty in obtaining court cooperation.

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Digital Curb Cuts: Towards an Inclusive Open Forms Ecosystem

Akron Law Review Volume 54 Issue 4 Symposium Edition: COVID & The Practice of Law: Impacts of Legal Technology Article 2 2021 Digital Curb Cuts: Towards an Inclusive Open Forms Ecosystem Quinten Steenhuis David Colarusso Follow this and additional works at: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview Part of the Intellectual Property Law Commons Please take a moment to share how this work helps you through this survey. Your feedback will be important as we plan further development of our repository. Recommended Citation Steenhuis, Quinten and Colarusso, David (2021) "Digital Curb Cuts: Towards an Inclusive Open Forms Ecosystem," Akron Law Review: Vol. 54 : Iss. 4 , Article 2. Available at: https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview/vol54/iss4/2 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Akron Law Journals at IdeaExchange@UAkron, the institutional repository of The University of Akron in Akron, Ohio, USA. It has been accepted for inclusion in Akron Law Review by an authorized administrator of IdeaExchange@UAkron. For more information, please contact , . Steenhuis and Colarusso: Digital Curb Cuts DIGITAL CURB CUTS: TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE OPEN FORMS ECOSYSTEM * Quinten Steenhuis † & David Colarusso ‡§** ª I. II. III. Introduction ...................................................................... 774 Closing the Access to Justice Gap .................................... 775 A. Technological solutions: online forms, guided interviews, and the birth of the interactive legal app . 778 B. Platforms for automating justice ................................ 779 1. HotDocs ................................................................ 779 2. A2J Author ........................................................... 780 3. Docassemble ......................................................... 781 4. Afterpattern and Documate .................................. 782 5. Examples of interactive legal apps ....................... 783 a. LegalZoom...................................................... 783 b. Hello, Divorce ................................................ 784 c. Upsolve ........................................................... 784 C. Why the existing approaches are not enough ............ 785 Suffolk Law School’s Document Assembly Line Project & Court Forms Online ...................................................... 786 A. A call to action ........................................................... 787 B. An assembly line for automated legal help ................ 789 C. Dividing up work ....................................................... 790 D. How the interactive legal apps work .......................... 791 * This paper is dedicated to the memory of the Honorable Ralph Gants, Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Not only was his example an inspiration, but the work described here would not have been possible without his leadership. He is sorely missed. † Clinical Fellow, Suffolk University Law School, J.D., Cornell Law School (2008); B.S. Logic and Computation, B.S. Political Science, Carnegie Mellon University (2004). Before joining Suffolk Law School in March 2020, Quinten Steenhuis was a legal aid attorney for 12 years at Greater Boston Legal Services. ‡ Director, Legal Innovation and Technology Lab and Practitioner-in-Residence, Suffolk University Law School, J.D., Boston University School of Law (2011); M.Ed., Harvard Graduate School of Education (2002). § This ordering of authors was determined by coin flip. 773 Published by IdeaExchange@UAkron, 2021 1 Akron Law Review, Vol. 54 [2021], Iss. 4, Art. 2 774 IV. V. AKRON LAW REVIEW [54:773 E. How email-based filing works—and does not work.. 793 F. A maturity model for interactive legal apps .............. 794 G. How the project has changed the lab and strengthened our pedagogy ........................................ 796 H. The impact of the work .............................................. 798 A Vision for an Open-source Open-Standards Forms Ecosystem ......................................................................... 799 A. How standards are born ............................................. 801 B. On the shoulders of giants.......................................... 802 C. The value of agile development ................................. 805 D. How e-filing standards could change the world ........ 809 E. The attorney’s role in a world of legal software ........ 810 Conclusion ........................................................................ 812 I. INTRODUCTION Our country has an access to justice crisis. As much as 86% of civil legal needs are unmet by the legal system.1 In this paper, we explore (1) the adoption of digital curb cuts, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic; (2) how such interventions can mitigate the access to justice crisis; and (3) the effects the broad adoption of such interventions could have on legal practice post-pandemic. The online equivalent of their physical cousin, digital curb cuts are interventions that appear aimed to improve access for a specific population, but upon further examination, clearly have broader benefits. 2 Cities install physical curb cuts for wheelchair users, but they benefit parents pushing strollers and pedestrians of all abilities.3 In the same way, digital curb cuts have proliferated during the pandemic to allow remote participation in court but would remain valuable post-pandemic, especially for those with disabilities, childcare needs, or inflexible work schedules. When intentional, these curb cuts are the product of universal design, an approach that aims to produce built environments and systems that provide access to the greatest number of individuals regardless of 1. LEGAL SERVS. CORP THE JUSTICE GAP: MEASURING THE UNMET CIVIL LEGAL NEEDS OF LOW-INCOME AMERICANS 28 (2017), https://www.lsc.gov/sites/default/files/images/TheJusticeGapFullReport.pdf [https://perma.cc/9FC3-PS8X]. This number has been persistent across decades. Ronald W Staudt, All the Wild Possibilities: Technology Attacks Barriers to Access to Justice, 42 L.A. L. REV. 1117 (2009). 2. Elizabeth Petrick, Curb Cuts and Computers: Advocating for Design Equality in the 1980s, 35 DESIGN ISSUES 23–32 (2019) (documenting the history of the curb cut metaphor in 1980s computing). 3. Id. https://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/akronlawreview/vol54/iss4/2 2 Steenhuis and Colarusso: Digital Curb Cuts 2021] DIGITAL CURB CUTS 773 their ability, disability, age, income, and other unique needs.4 For many, court accessibility has always been a barrier. COVID-19 has, however, exposed for many the universal benefit of addressing this need. 5 The legal community should take heed. In this paper, we describe a vision for a more inclusive ecosystem of technology solutions aimed at improving access to the courts and justice. We will focus on a case study of Suffolk Law School’s Document Assembly Line project and its Massachusetts imple (...truncated)


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Quinten Steenhuis, David Colarusso. Digital Curb Cuts: Towards an Inclusive Open Forms Ecosystem, Akron Law Review, 2021, pp. 2, Volume 54, Issue 4,