Last week the student teams had their first meeting of the semester for the Financial Distress Research Project. And they’re pushing ahead on self-help materials! In addition to tackling the Lab’s mission to bring empirical thinking to the legal profession, students are trying their hand at understanding the alphabet soup of bankruptcy forms in order to craft the best self-help materials. It turns out, this can involve a lot of math (sometimes more math than law). Whether it’s calculating home costs, income and benefits to figure out how to apply for fee waivers, or determining what exemptions to claim, students are trying to navigate how best to represent these tasks, concisely and clearly, in self-help materials. Throughout the semester we’ll be continuing this series of student blog posts where students will talk about their work on A2J Lab projects.
Our fourth student blogger is 2L Zain Rifat, who works on the Bankruptcy team of the Financial Distress Research Project.