Sandy North

The Access to Justice Lab has started a new study to learn whether text message communication between arrestees and their public defenders can reduce failure to appear (FTA) rates, improve attorney-client relationships, and avoid unnecessary incarceration. Failure to appear at trial is often a reason that policymakers give for incarcerating people before their trial date. If there are methods that help more people appear in court without keeping them in jail and without impacting public safety, there will be strong evidence to support reduction in pretrial detention.

Working with the New York State Office of Indigent Legal Services and the Wayne County, NY, Public Defender, the Access to Justice Lab is now evaluating whether or not using a text messaging reminder system will improve court appearance rates in Wayne County, New York. Existing research tells us that court date notifications provide as much as 30-50 percent increase in appearance rates. Our project seeks to expand on this work to learn more about the most effective method and timing of such notifications. We hope to add sites in the coming months to learn even more about the intervention.

In particular, we’re integrating an understudied step in the pretrial process: attendance at meetings with public defenders. Our study will assess whether the structure of a notification system can help arrestees solve a larger problem (their criminal case) by helping them take step one to solve it (attending their attorney appointments), thereby making it more likely that they will take the second key step (attending court).

Andrew Correia, Wayne County public defender, says, “The Wayne County Public Defender is excited to work with the Access to Justice Lab and the New York State Office of Indigent Legal Services to explore how improved communications can help us advocate for the best possible outcomes on behalf of our clients. It is our hope this study will provide information demonstrating to public defender offices and their funding sources that these types of innovations can improve both quality of representation and systemic efficiency simultaneously.”

The study is the first that we know of to examine the impact of text message reminders sent by public defender offices specifically. We are interested to discover whether there is value in messages from defenders, who should be working with their clients to build trusting relationships and defend them in court. It’s possible, for example, that better, earlier contact between arrestees and lawyers might improve the attorney-client relationship, enable quicker case investigation, and shorten the time to dispose cases.

Now randomizing in the field, the study seeks to answer these questions:

1) Does the inclusion of notifications earlier in the process, when defendants are meeting with their public defenders, have a greater impact on attendance at appointments and appearances?

2) With a focus on new technologies, what types of notification methods are most effective at improving attendance at appointments and appearances?

3) How effective are notifications at reducing non-attendance at appointments and appearances?

To examine all three research questions, there will be several treatment groups. The interventions will include: 1) notifications for public defender appointments only; 2) notifications for court appearances only; or 3) notifications for both. To examine the effectiveness of different technologies, interventions will include either notifications via text message or robocalls (as allowable). In the control group, the status quo will remain in place, such that communications regarding meetings and court hearings will be made in the usual way (paper or verbal format, not systematically implemented). Individuals will be randomly assigned to one of the behavioral change interventions and one of the notification technologies or to the control group.

We’ll share the results here when they’re available.

We’re live in Montana! Our collaborators at Montana Legal Services Association (MLSA) have worked hard with April Faith-Slaker over the past several months to design an evaluation of their AmeriCorps non-lawyer advocacy program.

This newest evaluation adds a lot of firsts for the A2J Lab: the first study focusing on a primarily rural location, the first official launch in its region, and the first to evaluate the use of this type of non-lawyer advocate. In this case, “non-lawyer advocate” means a trained AmeriCorps member. It could mean a variety of types of trained support short of a J.D.

Currently, there are few avenues for accessing trained support short of an attorney, and the cost of lawyers can be a serious hurdle. This particular study highlights another barrier to accessing counsel: geography. Residents in rural areas often face additional shortages and access obstacles when it comes to locating counsel.

Here’s how the study will work: Over an 18-month period, individuals who contact the Montana Legal Services Association requesting assistance with a parenting plan modification will be entered into a lottery to receive either self-help materials or to receive self-help materials plus assistance from an AmeriCorps member. After a participant has received services, whether materials or materials plus help from an AmeriCorps member, the study team will follow up with both the participants and with the courts to determine whether the participants have been successful in addressing their legal problem. Specifically, we are interested in knowing if and in what cases assistance from AmeriCorps members facilitates better legal and family outcomes.

This project will provide MLSA with rigorous research to inform their decisions about how to use non-lawyer advocates in future. Alison Paul, the Executive Director of MLSA, says, “We are thrilled to be working with the Harvard Access to Justice Lab to investigate what factors will indicate when non-lawyer advocates can make a difference in access to justice for our clients.”

If you’re interested in seeing the complete study design, you can access it on our Open Science Framework page. We’ll share the results here when they’re available.

We had a great turnout at our Coding for Lawyers session at this year’s Innovation in Technology Conference (ITC) held in New Orleans.

Taught by A2J Lab researcher Matthew Stubenberg and Harvard Law School’s Access to Justice/Technology Fellow William Palin, the session went into the details of what’s inside the software and platforms that lawyers now encounter in their work. Many attorneys and legal professionals have no idea how software works or is built, and the ever-evolving platforms can be hard to navigate. As technology becomes more and more integrated into legal practice, however, lawyers will be best poised to succeed if they have a grasp of the fundamentals. Many attorneys don’t know where to begin. This session was designed to be a starting point for absolute beginners to help demystify how software actually works.

During the session, Matthew and Bill converted a traffic statute, which designates how many points a driver receives on their license based on how fast they were driving, into a program that could be added to law firm’s website. The instructors wrote out the code using an online interpreter called repl.it while everyone coded along. This format allowed users to do the actual coding and experiment with how changing the code affected the program. The coding language chosen for this session was Python, a common and versatile coding language, perfect for beginners.

We don’t expect all legal professionals to become software engineers. Our goal is to show people that technology is not magic—everyone can understand it. As policymakers invoke the potential of new legal tech as a solution to access-to-justice challenges, it’s more important than ever for us to understand what the technology actually does so that we can evaluate whether or not it makes a difference.

If you’re looking for some good reading this week, we’ve got you covered.

The current issue of Dædalus, a publication of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is entirely focused on how the U.S. can address the access to justice gap. The first-ever open access issue of the journal, the publication includes twenty-four essays that cover a wide variety of A2J approaches.

The collection of essays as a whole represents a deep cross-section of ideas from leading experts in the field with three subsections: the meaning of access to justice, delivery models, and interests, constituencies, and stakeholders. A2J Lab Faculty Director Jim Greiner’s contribution, The New Legal Empiricism & Its Application to Access-to-Justice Inquiries, provides a great summary of the theory that drives the A2J Lab’s research.

All of the essays are freely available online at: https://www.amacad.org/daedalus/access-to-justice

Do any of the essays particularly resonate with you? Let us know what you think in the comments section.