Human-centred Design for Legal Help

Watch the video from this event

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Millions of people try to use the legal system to solve life problems — like getting divorced, dealing with a landlord, managing credit card debt, or getting restraining orders. More people are doing this without lawyers, and struggle to navigate its complicated processes, jargons, and requirements. This is leading to an ‘access to justice crisis’, in which people who cannot afford lawyers are not able to use the public court system effectively to resolve their problems.

In this talk, Dr Margaret Hagan (Legal Design Lab, Stanford Law School) will present the work that her team has been doing over the past three years in partnership with state civil courts and legal aid groups, in taking a design-driven approach to create innovations in how the legal system operates and how it can better serve the public. Through case studies, she will detail how her team moved from exploratory, user- and system-research about how courts can be improved for self-represented litigants; then towards prototyping and testing new designs and technology; and finally, towards pilots and randomized control trials.

Dr Hagan will conclude with a description of the current artificial intelligence projects which has grown out of her collaborative research combining design with machine learning development, which are scoping more intelligent interventions that can scale access to justice resources in ways that prioritise people’s trust, dignity, and control.

This lecture is co-hosted with King & Wood Mallesons and the Melbourne Law School.

Lecture: 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Post-lecture refreshments: 7:00pm – 7:30pm