The ABA publication Dialogue published Margaret Hagan’s piece, Justice Innovation with Law School Design Labs about the role of universities in creating and scaling new services and tech for improving people’s ability to use the legal system.
Legal design is a new approach to justice system innovation. It offers a powerful way to understand the human experience of courts, legal aid, and solving life crises, and then to use this understanding to generate and vet promising new products, services, and policies.
More law schools are developing labs and classes, in which students are trained in legal design through project-based classes. This growing roster of design-driven legal innovation programs include:
- Stanford Legal Design Lab
- Northeastern University’s NuLaw Lab
- Chicago Kent Law Lab
- Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice Lab
- University of Arizona’s Innovation for Justice program
- Suffolk Law School’s LIT Lab
- Georgetown’s Iron Tech Lawyer program
- Brigham Young’s LawX program
- Michigan State’s Legal RnD
- Vanderbilt’s Law and Innovation program
These programs offer a rich resource for organizations working on access to justice innovation, including legal aid groups, funders, and strategists. These classes all involve partnerships with legal organizations, to scope discrete opportunities for innovation and to create working prototypes of new tools, services, and policies. Students often come from interdisciplinary backgrounds, including law, engineering, policy, medical school, design, architecture, and beyond, so that they are able to create more holistic, robust solutions.
Read the rest at the Dialogue site.
