Reading List

This new report from Legal Link and the Lab profiles how community navigators can promote access to justice and reduce poverty by taking a human-centered approach.…

Here’s a highly recommended report, Poverty Lawgorithms, from Michele Gilman through Data & Society, on how lawyers working on poverty law areas can better advocate for mo…

The UN has a short article describing how they used human-centered design for complex policy-making: Prototyping Human-Centered Policies for Children in Nicaragua. The co-d…

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 servic…

Georgetown Law’s Technology Review published an article in December 2017,  Design Thinking: The Answer to the Impasse Between Innovation and Regulation,  by Alice Armitage, An…

Another article documenting new ways to improve people’s financial decision-making, from Junius Gunaratne, Jeremy Burke, and Oded Nov of NYU and the RAND Corporation: this one…

This article, Consumer-Centric Design: The Key to 100% Access, provides a great introduction to how legal design can impact access to justice. It is from 2014’s The Journal of…

There is a new Legal Design publication in the world! Whiteboard and Black-Letter: Visual Communication in Commercial Contracts by Stanford Law professor Jay A. Mitchell. It …

In anticipation for a later class this school year, we’ve been reading up on Participatory Design, and how it’s been used in other communities. This edited volume, Participato…

As our Lab prepares for a possible prototyping sprint on Blockchain for the legal system, we are taking a design approach to this technology. Meaning, we are trying to investi…

I have co-authored a piece, with my design professor colleague, Miso Kim, on the intersection of her work on interventions to enhance “perceived control” of a system, and my d…

The law professor Katrina Lee, of the Ohio State University, has published an article in the University of Toledo, on the links between empathy, mindfulness, and creativity al…

I just posted up a conference paper I wrote last year for the SOUPS conference on usable privacy and security. It’s called “User-Centered Privacy Communication Design.” It …

One of my academic articles has just been published in the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology. It’s called “The User Experience of the Internet as a Legal Help Service.” T…

This article, Self-Help Reimagined, from Jim Greiner, Dalie Jiminez, and Lois Lupica explores how better to present Self-Help materials to people going through court procedure…

The Design Management Institute has a sharp, succinct article on the value of design-driven innovation in a company. It is from a 2013 publication on how design can benefit st…

Mary Beth Beazley wrote an article in 2013, Ballot Design as Fail-Safe: An Ounce of Rotation Is Worth a Pound of Litigation that examines the importance of visual design to ho…

The ABA’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services has issued its final report on what the future will be for legal products and services in the US. It’s based on several ye…

The Financial Times has an article from Michael Skapnier, Technology: Breaking the Law, about the coming coming changes to the legal system — both in terms of professionals a…

Julie Sobowale has a new piece, as of April 2016, in the ABA Journal called ‘How artificial intelligence is transforming the legal profession’ Artificial intelligence is ch…

The White House’s Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable (with the DOJ’s National Institute of Justice and Office for Access to Justice, along with the National Science Foundation) …

The Legal Service Corporation’s Technology Initiative Grant program held a summit in 2012-13 about the future of legal services & the use of tech to get there. They issued…

  This 2014 article, The Great Disruption: How Machine Intelligence Will Transform the Role of Lawyers in the Delivery of Legal Services, from Fordham/Northwestern Law…

Future of legal services and the development of legal Knowledge Management/a> is an article on VoxPopuLII from Cornell Information Institute by Helena Hallgarn & Ann Bjork. …

Innovation, Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go is a 2007 article from two IDEO designers published in the Design Management Review. It is a great, short read on …

What can we in legal services learn from medical services, when it comes to imposing standardization and quality metrics on our work? One medical industry report — Crossin…

Making Futures: Marginal Notes on Innovation, Design, and Democracy: is a book edited by Pelle Ehn, Elisabet M. Nilsson, Richard Topgaard, all about how design can be used for…

As I’ve been thinking more about how to engage legal users with legal services, I’ve been reading more from behavioral economists & designers, all about behavior change st…

Here’s a wonderful post from Jordan Furlong on How I learned to stop worrying and love project management. He lays out some of the advantages of a process-based approach that …

A 2013 article from behavioral economist Richard Thaler & Will Tucker called Smarter Information, Smarter Consumers on Harvard Business Review profiles the need for better…

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper, is a book that focuses on how to develop tech tools tha…

Stephanie Kimbro authored a 2013 occasional paper for Harvard’s Journal of Law & Technology, on Using Technology to Unbundle Legal Services. From the introduction: This…

A reading about the future of legal practice in the US: From Big Law to Lean Law by William D. Henderson via SSRN. The abstract: In a provocative 2009 essay entitled The D…

Ron Dolin has a new article on his blog Think Outside the Bar, all about law firms & the possibility of innovation.  Here’s the intro — read the rest of the article here,…

Kristina Brousalis pointed me to this Summer 2014 report from Canada about how technology is being used in legal services. As information and communications technologies (I…

All the Wild Possibilities: Technology that Attacks Barriers to Access to Justice is a 2009 article from law professor Ronald W. Staudt of Chicago Kent College of Law about ho…

via Technology for Better Fact Finding | The IT Countrey Justice. A paper from Judge David Harvey: This is a paper that I presented to the 14th International Criminal Law Con…

12 Confused Men: Using Flowchart Verdict Sheets To Mitigate Inconsistent Civil Verdicts Jerry J. Fang Abstract The finality of jury verdicts reflects an implicit societ…

Embracing Disruption: How Technological Change in the Delivery of Legal Services Can Improve Access to Justice by Raymond H. Brescia, Walter Alan McCarthy, Kellan Burton Potts…

Law professors Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel published the book Law on Display in 2011. They make the argument that visuals are becoming increasingly powerful in legal …

This 2011 report of a legal design undertaking — how might we redesign courts to improve the user experience and increase the presence of efficient, usable technology in cour…

IDEO CEO & President Tim Brown has a great piece in the Harvard Business Review back in 2008, an introduction to Design Thinking, particularly for managers & businessp…

Earlier this year, Abhijeet Chavan of Urban Insight published a fascinating report of Best Practice Benchmarking for Legal Services Sites. It was originally presented earlier …

Rethinking Regulation and Innovation in the U.S. Legal Services Market is an article from Ray Worthy Campbell of Peking University School of Transnational Law, from March 2012…

Three computer scientists from Chalmers Univ. of Technology & the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have released a short paper presenting a possible diagramming scheme fo…

Law firm & business consultant David Maister wrote a wonderful article, “Are Law Firms Manageable?”, in 2006 about organizational culture in law firms. Maister had been w…

“Access to Legal Services: Organizing Better Self-help Systems” is a 2007 design-oriented paper on how Self-Help systems could be made more user-friendly.  The authors Gina Ma…

I am compiling a bibliography of research on how different types of lay people use the Internet & other tech tools to address their legal problems.  A great deal of work i…

Here is another research article from the UK about how tech-based legal services perform in delivering Access to Justice. The article, “Just a Phone Call Away: Is Telephone…

Here is a law article from last year, by lawyer Adam L. Rosman, about how visual design can be integrated into legal documents. He offers several different examples o…

Here is an excerpt from Verganti’s website, Design-Driven Innovation about the book: The Strategy of Design-Driven Innovation Two major findings have characterized managem…

Law As Engineering: Thinking About What Lawyers Do: David Howarth: 9780857933775: Amazon.com: Books. ‘David Howarth’s Law as Engineering is a profound contribution to the law…

On Visual Law: Visual Legal Communication Practices and Their Scholarly Exploration by Colette R. Brunschwig :: SSRN. Digital visual media have implications for the law. Also…

Reinventing the Practice of Law: Emerging Models to Enhance Affordable Legal Services. We all want to make things better. We want to improve our law practices. We want to…

This article discusses the potential for making usable, user-friendly courts. It highlights this approach to refocus how court staff tackle the challenge of being overburdened…

  Helena Haapio’s new volume Next Generation Contracts: A Paradigm Shift, collecting her writings (and sketchnotes of her work) on how lawyers may better design contra…

In December 2013, the LSC released a report on their past meetings on how to use technology to expand access to justice.  It outlines their vision of providing an Integrated S…

Cisco & the RSA held a workshop in 2011 on using design thinking to reimagine how legal services are delivered in Courthouses. They published a short paper, 11 pages, call…

via Designing the delivery of legislative measures | Australian Taxation Office. Here is another article on the Australian Taxation Office project — how they took design p…

DESIGNING THE AUSTRALIAN TAX SYSTEM, by Dr Alan Preston, formerly Second Commissioner of Taxation, The Australian Taxation Office included in Managing as Designing, ed. by …

Mitchell, Jay A., Putting Some Product into Work-Product: Corporate Lawyers Learning from Designers (September 22, 2013). Stanford Law Professor Jay Mitchell, director of t…

This paper is a nice small introduction to how legal information systems can be possibly made more usable, and to diverse populations when it comes to education and ability. S…

InfoDesign: Understanding by Design | Special on Karen A. Schriver. This piece from InfoDesign presents an enormously useful discussion about how good document and informat…

This paper from Carnegie Mellon design researchers, Soojin Jun, Miso Kim, and Joonhwan Lee Rethinking Systems Diagrams presents the legal designer with a wealth of potential r…

Richard Zorza’s Access to Justice Blog provides regular updates on new technology & services that aim to increase people’s access to court systems & legal pathways. Zorza al…

Lexician is a blog on how legal practice management can evolve. It discusses the changes in Big Law, its pricing strategies, and organizational behavior & management issues in…

Don’t Make Me Think! A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability: Steve Krug, Roger Black: 0029236723101: Amazon.com: Books. This book gives very practical advice to anyone who …

Clayton Christensen writes about disruptive technologies, that break open new markets and transform industries. Anyone who is interested in the future of law must read this.…

Marc Lauritsen explores how we make legal decisions — particularly in an online environment — and how we can make them better in this article for the Harvard Journal of Law …

Design for Democracy: Ballot & Election Design is a wonderful look at how visual and information design can make for clearer ballots, forms and other interfaces that citiz…

Orbiting the Giant Hairball may look silly, but it is a genius quick-read on how to be unorthodox within a bureaucratic setting — and how to push change through a large organ…

Dynamics in Document Design is a thick & useful book on how to write clearly & technically. It is a nice companion to legal writing texts.  Schriver focuses the writer…

This book does a great job in delineating what kind of professions should be developing in the legal sector — with some amount of particular focus on the UK, but it can easil…