Reimagining Justice

This episode no. 36 is with Program Manager of LawHelp Interactive at Pro Bono Net, Claudia Johnson. When in some states of America there are 27 forms to file for a simple divorce, we discuss where responsibility lies to make the law relating to housing, health, and family issues, more understandable for lay people, which is particularly important given the global rise in numbers of self-represented litigants. There’s been a theme going for the past few episodes around the use of document automation to make legal service delivery more efficient, but more importantly effective and scalable when it’s based on human centred design principles. Again in this episode we cover smart forms, use cases they’re best suited for and some they’re not - and importantly, how to decide. As Claudia says, “there are easy ways to use tech to magnify the goodness of law and show respect to your clients”. We also talked about Claudia’s project with Bay area legal aid which centralised intake for a large number of clients over a l