When one court system in the U.S. clashed internally over the best medium to hear family law cases, they sought out a randomized control trial for the answer. That A2J Lab study, initiated in 2021, is nearing the end of its evaluation of online versus in-person family law hearings, focusing on self-represented litigants.
Can we do anything about failure to appear in criminal cases? According to Alissa Fishbane, we can, and for once, what we can do is cheap and easy. Her research has shown that low-cost interventions such as redesigning summons and traffic tickets have been highly effective at reducing missed dates, resulting in fewer penalties for defendants, more efficient adjudication, and savings for the justice system as a whole.
The OpenJustice project, now just a year since inception, has gained interest due in part to its hot topic: combining access to justice and artificial intelligence. The project addresses whether AI allows volunteer pro bono attorneys and staff to provide legal information and advice (without a traditional attorney-client relationship) more effectively and efficiently than status quo operations, which do not use AI assistance.
Conducting randomized control trials in the law can be a decade-long (or longer) process. Our “Child Welfare” project evaluates whether families with children who face poverty-related legal and social challenges can avoid unnecessary entries into the child welfare system with the assistance of holistic legal services – a combination of social worker services and a traditional attorney-client relationship. The study is five years in the making and still just half-way through completion, but we’re sharing its origin and process anyway.
