An R&D Lab for a better, people-centered justice system.

Stanford Legal Design Lab team researches, designs, and develops new interventions to ensure equal access to justice for all.

We build and study new technologies, services, and policies that can empower people who are dealing with legal problems. We coordinate people, ideas, infrastructure, and data that can scale justice innovations.

We are working towards a future where courts, legal services, Internet platforms, community groups, government agencies, and other justice institutions better help people resolve their justice problems, protect their rights, and improve their communities with dignity and empowerment.

Our Mission

We train students and professionals in human-centered civic innovation and public interest technology.

We develop & test new models of user-friendly, accessible, and engaging legal services, technologies, and policies.

We coordinate leaders, infrastructure, and policies to scale promising practices that can make the justice system more accessible and equitable.

Our Current Tracks

The Legal Design Lab has four strategic tracks in 2023-24: AI & Access to Justice, Eviction Prevention, Justice System Innovation, and Better Legal Internet.

Past strategic tracks have included Virtual Legal Systems, Smart Legal Communication, Public Interest Technology, Regulatory Reform, Contract Design, Privacy by Design, Legal Design Methodology, and Law Firm Innovation.

Please explore our current four tracks in detail.

AI and Access to Justice

On this new track, the Legal Design Lab researches how people use AI to deal with their legal problems, what better systems they want, and how to improve the quality and accountability of AI platforms as they operate in the legal domain.

See our main page on AI & Access to Justice here.

Policy Lab class on AI for Legal Help: We have a 2-quarter class in the Autumn and Winter 2023-24 in which students will work with our team to conduct community interviews, run workshops, do research, and set about an agenda for AI platforms’ role in access to justice & strategies for quality improvement and accountability.

See more about the Policy Lab class here.

Stakeholder workshops on AI for & Access to Justice risks and opportunities. We are holding a series of interactive design workshops with court leaders, legal aid lawyers, access to justice coordinators, and technologists to discuss how AI can be deployed for Access to Justice, and what risks need to be planned for. Read more about these networking events. Read more about them here.

Learned Hands: Our Lab collaborated with the Suffolk LIT Lab to develop a data-labeling game platform, Learned Hands. On this game, laws students and others can read people’s anonymized legal problems, spot legal issues, and vote whether a certain kind of issue is present or not. This game play creates a labeled data set, that is used to do data analysis about legal needs trends, and to build an issue-spotting NLP bot, Spot.

We partner with national non-profits, local and federal government agencies, and justice system professionals to identify & spread the most promising initiatives to prevent evictions & forced displacement.

Eviction Prevention work at Legal Design Lab

On this track, the Legal Design Lab builds strategic networks, identifies the most promising pilots to prevent evictions, and evaluates what works.

Within the broader category of access to justice innovation, our Lab has spent the past 5 years focused on eviction prevention and housing justice in particular. We have a range of eviction-specific innovation projects.

Eviction Prevention Learning Lab cohort: The Lab works with the National League of Cities to run the multi-city peer cohort the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab. It brings city governments, courts, legal aid, and social service providers from over 30 cities together to identify and spread best practices in stopping evictions and promoting access to justice.

Eviction Innovations site: We have documented promising practices in the space on our Eviction Innovations platform. This website has case studies, guides, and repositories of resources to help policy-makers and service providers develop better strategies and interventions for preventing evictions.

Legal Help FAQs: The Lab runs a national question and answer website, Legal Help FAQs, for COVID-19-related eviction questions. It built the site in Spring 2020 to provide a clear, authoritative source on local laws protecting people from eviction.

NAACP Housing Navigators: Through our series of classes on Justice By Design: Eviction, our Lab team and our Stanford students have partnered with the NAACP to refine and scale their Housing Navigator program. We helped them design their website, social media campaign, and service design & strategy.

ABA Eviction, Housing Stability, and Equity Task Force: Lab Executive Director Margaret Hagan is the chair of the American Bar Association’s SCLAID Task Force working on eviction prevention and housing justice. This group sets national standards on housing law and promotes innovative new services and policies across the country.

Eviction Summons Redesign: We have worked with courts in Ohio, Montana, and more to redesign the notices they send out to tenants who have been sued for eviction. We have worked with them to make these official court documents more engaging, comprehensible, and user-friendly. We are studying if they can reduce default rates at eviction hearings.

We partner with legal aid groups, courts, and non-profits to design, pilot, and scale innovative new access to justice initiatives.

Justice Innovation work at Legal Design Lab

On this track, the Legal Design Lab creates new services, tech, and policies that can improve people’s access to the civil justice system.

The Legal Design Lab’s main mission is to promote access to justice through innovative methods and projects. Our Justice Innovation track includes classes, user research, software & AI development, and peer cohorts focused on improving people’s access to the civil justice system.

Main website: Find our Justice Innovation website that profiles methods, projects, and principles to use when developing new efforts to improve the justice system.

Forms and Efiling: With the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession, the Lab has launched the Filing Fairness Project to ease people’s ability to participate in court processes.

Text Messaging for Justice: We built Wise Messenger to make it easy for courts and legal aid groups to text reminders, hotlines, procedural coaches, and online intake with the public. Read more about our texting work here.

Natural Disaster Legal Help: The Lab build a natural disaster legal help app, Flood Proof, to help people in Louisiana to clear titles to their homes so they could get disaster relief and find legal help.

Language Access: Our Lab has partnered with state courts and legal aid groups to study how people want language access support through technology and human services. Read the report from our 2019 class to the California Judicial Council.

The Lab has taught classes and run workshops on innovations in the eviction system, expungement and clearing records, guardianships and conservatorship, debt and money problems, and estate planning.

We make the Internet a better place to find legal help.

Better Legal Internet work at Legal Design Lab

The Legal Design Lab has focused for the past five years on improving how people find legal help on the Internet. We have built key data infrastructure for R&D, contributed to cutting-edge AI and digital analysis initiatives, and led cohorts of practitioners through crucial improvements to their court and legal aid websites.

In this track, our work aims for a near-future when people can go online, ask search engines or social media about their life problem, and get local, authoritative, user-friendly legal help.

Main website: Visit our Better Legal Internet website to find more detailed descriptions of the projects mentioned below, on improving search, social media, website design, and data analysis.

Legal Help Dashboard: This webpage from the Lab guides legal help website administrators through the main steps to improving their website. Check up on your tech, design, content, and search rank. Follow our guides to improve on all four areas. This page provides tools, guides, and ranks to make legal aid and court websites better able to serve the public.

LIST Taxonomy: Our Lab has established a master taxonomy, Legal Issues Taxonomy (LIST), of all the main legal issues that people in the US face. These standardized codes can be used by organizations, tech providers, and others who are trying to better map, categorize, and develop tech about legal needs.

Schema Markup SEO Tool: How do legal aid and court websites show up when people search Google for help? We built a tool to help these websites show up higher and to the right audiences. The Schema Markup tool lets legal service groups create code that tells search bots from Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines exactly what is on their website, what jurisdictions it applies to, what legal issues it can help people with, and how people can contact them.

Past Years’ Tracks

The Legal Design Lab has had many different projects since it began in 2013. Please explore some of our past work below.

New virtual and hybrid justice systems should work better for litigants, and allow for equal, dignified access.

Virtual Legal Systems work at Legal Design Lab

What do the new normal of online courts, virtual legal aid clinics, and digital legal help look like?

Our team is teaching classes, building resources, and testing new prototypes to help create accessible, fair, and empowering virtual legal systems.

Visit our Court Observation Hub, that provides a national database of court watch and observation groups active in seeing what happens on the ground in courts.

Learn more about our classes here, including collaborations with Harvard Graduate School of Design, MIT, Massachusetts Housing Court, designer Virgil Abloh, and architect Oana Stanescu.

Legal communications should be accessible, intelligent, and empowering

Smart Legal Tools & Communication work at Legal Design Lab

We are designing and testing new ways to communicate complex legal information.

This includes creating new graphic design and tech tools for improved legal forms notices, policies, contracts, process guides, and beyond.

Our goal is to create standard templates, metrics, and examples for visual designs that best engage and empower people with legal information.

Read more here at our Legal Communication Design page, which has resources, examples, guides, and tools.

Explore the Legal Innovations our Lab is working on

AI+A2J Initiative

What are the opportunities & risks for AI in the justice system?

In our AI & Access to Justice initiative, our Lab is conducting user research, AI evaluation, and project development to advance responsible AI that can help the public with legal problems.

Filing Fairness Project

When a person is sued for an eviction or debt, when they need to file a restraining order, or they need to figure out child support, they need to find, fill out, and file court forms.

The Filing Fairness Project is modernizing the court user’s form and efiling journey through an ambitious multi-jurisdiction cohort.

Eviction Legal Help FAQs platform

In Spring 2020, we built a national Legal Help FAQ platform, with 50-state coverage, of renters’ rights and protections during the COVID-19 emergency.

Our team did extensive legal research and assembled a national network of housing law experts to be able to present, in plain language, if renters could be evicted, how much time they had to pay rent, and what new protections they might have in court. It also has a national database of local legal aid groups, court self-help sites, emergency rental programs, and other services that we could connect renters to in each state.

We designed the site to be expandable in coming months, to include more guides and FAQs on how a renter can navigate the eviction process and raise defenses to protect themselves. This site is unique in providing national coverage and detailed legal information for renters.

The Legal Help FAQ platform was built with the support of The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Eviction Prevention Learning Lab

Since February 2020, Stanford Legal Design Lab and the National League of Cities are leading the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab.

This is a multi-city cohort in which city leaders (from government agencies, legal aid, courts, nonprofits, and private industries) learn about innovative eviction prevention strategies, share peer learnings, and design new interventions.

The current cohort has 30 cities and is an 18-month program focused on emergency rental relief, eviction diversion programs, court activation, effective community outreach, smart use of data, and other topics that have arisen during COVID-19 and the eviction crisis.

Eviction Innovation

We are researching and building promising ways to address the eviction crisis are, and we are building a network of local city leaders to coordinate the development and evaluation of these new interventions. These include new policies, technologies, and service models, that we are profiling on our Eviction Innovations platform.

The platform is in coordination with our Eviction Prevention Learning Lab with the National League of Cities. The website presents case studies and strategies that have emerged from the cohort, and that can help guide them.

LIST: Legal issues taxonomy

Our team has been building LIST, a user-centered taxonomy of legal problems that people might have in the U.S. It’s called LIST, the Legal Issues Taxonomy, (formerly National Subject Matter Index version 2), since it is an iteration of a taxonomy originally developed by legal aid technologists fifteen years ago.

This taxonomy is an essential tool for classifying people’s issues and the legal help resources available to them online. The taxonomy provides standard problem codes, definitions, and examples of the legal scenarios that people might find themselves in.

It is useful for app and bot developers, machine learning projects, legal needs analysis, legal help webmasters, and others who are interested in building more interoperable, AI-powered legal tools.

Read more about how you can use it here at our article on LIST use cases and deployment.

Learned Hands

Learned Hands is a machine learning project to use interactive games to build tools that can automatically spot people’s legal issues. We built this game for law students and lawyers to play, by reading people’s legal stories from Reddit and elsewhere, and then labelling the stories with standard legal issue labels.

With this labeled data, we can then train machine learning models to automatically spot people’s issues and potentially connect them with resources, find patterns of needs, and integrate more AI into access to justice tools.

As more people play Learned Hands, it contributes to the SPOT classifier, which can then be used by our bots and other groups’ tools to spot people’s legal issues in their posts and tweets.

The goal is to be able to help people find the local, public interest help — even if they don’t know that their problem around debt, family, housing, work, or traffic actually has a legal solution.

Learned Hands was built with Suffolk LIT Lab and the support of the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Court Observation Hub

Our team has built a central tool for teams to observe online courts. The Court Observation Hub has a master list of online court links, and groups that already do court watching.

Do you want to start a Court Watch program?

Do you want to find the programs that already exist in different jurisdictions?

The Court Observation Hub has the links and resources to help you do virtual court watching.

Our team, working with university, court, and foundation partners in Arizona, built the Arizona Eviction Self-Help website for tenants in Pima County to understand their rights, prepare documents, and get court hearing information for their upcoming eviction hearing.

Our team helped build a Public Interest Technology case study platform with the PIT-UN network, Georgetown, Howard, and New America. We also have work on legal regulatory sandboxes in Utah and elsewhere.

Flood Proof is a mobile app to help people after a natural disaster to start the process of ‘clearing title’ to their house. We built it with the ABA Center for Innovation, and local legal aid groups in Louisiana and Texas.

Wise Messenger is a web application that allows courts, legal aid groups, and others to send automatic text messages (or other messenger application messages) to their users. It lets groups create interactive templates of hearing reminders, intake screeners, procedural coaches to people going through the legal system.

Navocado is a web platform to create and publish better guides to legal processes, with visual and interactive step-by-step triage and process guides.

We create Court Visual Guides, which are print and digital visual guides to complex legal processes, that explain how a person can navigate systems like traffic court or eviction lawsuits.

Our Latest Posts

Read our latest long-form essays and reports on our Medium publication Legal Design and Innovation.

We post our team’s work and reports here, as well as guest essays from professors, designers, technologists, students, and others working on legal design efforts.

If you’re interested in contributing a piece to Legal Design & Innovation, please be in touch!