LSC's 2020 Innovations in Technology Conference

The American legal system is designed for use by highly trained professionals, but most people who engage with the system do so on their own behalf without formal legal training. Numerous examples of legal self-help materials have grown out of this reality. What experience has shown, however, that while there is wide-spread access to legal self-help information and materials, users have difficulty deploying such information. In order to be effectively used by those who need them, self-help materials must acknowledge and address the barriers to deployment in the context in which they are faced. These barriers include users’ overtaxed bandwidth, their anxiety and feelings of threat, their unfamiliarity with the details of the legal system, and self-help materials’ excessive focus on conceptual understanding and well as the materials’ lack of analogies and visual imagery. This session will discuss the development of an ongoing randomized control trial in which we are testing the effectiveness of re-imagined self-help materials. This field trial has the potential to transform the experience of self-represented users of the legal system.