I just ran across another legal tech startup that is going to automate a common legal problem space and sell access to their web-based questionnaire for $29.95 or some such. It’s potentially a huge market because millions of people must deal with this legal situation every year. There are hundreds of possible startups like this – each centered around a single vertical that can be automated with a little javascript and a some marketing.

TurboTax was the first way back in 1987 (that’s when I first bought it) when it was a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet with a ton of macros made by a company called Chipsoft. Now the 1040 and accompanying forms were and are hard to automate, but the market is huge (100 million potential uers) every year. There is a lot of law to keep up to date and it changes every year. Intuit bought Chipsoft for $223 million back in 1993.

Here’s my prediction. Every single “simple” legal problem that is process definable or form-oriented will go this way, but for much much less money. My thinking when we started working on A2J Author over 12 years ago is that courts and legal aid should do this for themselves and law students could help them by taking courses that include an experiential component.  This would give law students the ability to be smart users, builders, and purchasers in the new normal of the automated process marketplace.

Even complicated legal matters can be broken down into steps – some that can be automated and some that shouldn’t. This could either make law practice more efficient or it could result in smaller, chunkier work for lawyers doing unbundled, limited license work.

This won’t put lawyers out of business either. When I started my first programming job in 1983 coding COBOL on an IBM mainframe, I read about a new code generator in ComputerWorld that was going to replace programmers. Instead, every new advance in coding has just meant that programmers had to change their development environment and upgrade their skills. This too shall happen to lawyers. It seems like it’s happening rapidly, but it’s actually going to take some time.  Law moves slowly.  Very slowly.

If this becomes a “race to the bottom”, then cutthroat competition will lower prices and maybe quality. This will make it very hard for companies to find sustainable income. There will be winners and losers and this might not be all good for the quality of legal service delivery.  Even so, the market is not very good at measuring the quality of legal service delivery.  Why is that?

Court forms are a kind of domain-specific language that courts and lawyers use to communicate with each other about legal matters. Courts have a monopoly on how the forms are formatted, but not on the guidance that is given in filling them out.

That is where lawyers add value and can differentiate themselves. Maybe automation and explanation is proof that the lawyer you are thinking of hiring actually understands what you are hiring her for.

John Mayer
Executive Director, CALI
@johnpmayer
jmayer@cali.org

Recently the inimitable Roger Smith wrote a pair of articles referencing conversations we had during the LSC Innovations in Technology Conference that was held in New Orleans in January of 2018. I apologize for the frank, but malapropos expression “sleeping with Google”. Let me expand on my thinking a little more.

According to a 2017 LSC report, 86% of low income people with a legal problem receive inadequate or no professional legal help. That’s a justice gap!

These “non-seekers” either don’t know they have a legal problem, don’t know their problem has a legal solution or don’t trust lawyers. They also might be inhibited by despair, depression, language or disability.

When people do seek legal assistance, one study shows that they do so only 13% of the time. In contrast, they talk to family or friends more than a third of the time. Since some do both (8%), we might say 21% are looking online for assistance. Where do they go?

Search engine market share (visited 1/24/18) shows 3/4 go to Google.

You may have noticed that when you search certain categories of information on Google, you not only get a list of results, you get a special interface that is relevant to the category of information being searched. For example, searching a current movie title will result in movie theatres where it is playing. Searching an unusual word will result in a dictionary definition. Searching historical facts will result in a Wikipedia link in the sidebar. Searching a medical condition will often yield links to WebMD, Mayo Clinic or other relevant and authoritative source.

What if you search a legal problem?

You will often find articles or links to a legal aid website, law firm or court self-help article. The results most often look like what you expect from Google – a list of results. There is no special sidebar or treatment for legal problems. Why not? Can we change this?

Many times I have heard about excellent, innovative legal self-help websites and tools that languish for lack of use. They all struggle to find their online audience. If you have the budget, you resort to IRL advertising on billboards, public transportation, brochures, etc. We are all trying to find the eyeballs anywhere we can. Most legal self-help seekers eyeballs start with Google. The biggest legal-assistance-finding system in the world is Google, so we should start there.

The efforts to create a single source website that triages self-help seekers – whether through AI, expert system or whatever, seems like a rational approach, though it suffers from the same problem that all brand new websites do – finding its audience. Theoretically, if we all shout as loud as possible about this single point of finding everything to do with legal self-help, that will create enough noise to direct SRLs or it will create a large enough presence for Google to rank it high in its search results.  The efficacy (and admittedly, the fallacy) of Google is that you get a exactly one empty box to type in some words and then you get a list of answers. Scan, click, happiness! A triage system intercedes to get clarification on just exactly what you are looking for – even if you don’t know yourself. The challenge is whether we can do this in the face of the expectation of the click-and-done culture of the web.

Why should we feed the Google beast? Google is a commercial entity who will doubtless want to monetize the searches and profiles of the very SRLs we are trying to serve. The short answer is the same as when a reporter asked Willie Sutton why he robs banks. His reply was “Because that’s where the money is.” Google (and all of the online media giants) use personalized information like location, socio-economic status and browsing history to categorize us for advertisers.

We can help this along by getting very smart about SEO, using Google Sitemaps and developing our own user-centric vocabulary (I almost said taxonomy) that Google and others can adopt as a way to provide up-to-date information. A good analogy here is how Google came to create the General Transit Feed Specification (formerly Google Transit Feed Specification) so that they could include timings for buses and trains in Google Maps. We need a similar spec for legal aid that improves on previous attempts like the Legal Services National Subject Matter Index.

Maybe the Microsoft-LSC-Probono.net Triage Project is covering this ground. They will certainly need some kind of taxonomy to organize the myriad legal problems that people will expect it to address. It’is also an opportunity for Bing (7.92% search engine market share) to close the gap on Google. I don’t know if anyone from the Bing team is on this project, but it would be a really good idea.

The goal here is to get SRLs to the best possible resource for their legal problem, location, economics, and ability to manage it. If triage is a giant tree with branches, these are the leaves. There need to be tens of thousands possible endpoints that are useful to 100% of the searchers as mandated by the Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice. These could be articles, checklists, A2J Author Guided Interviews, HotDocs templates, agency referrals, legal aid intake portals, videos, etc.

There is still a lot of work to be done creating these resources that a national triage system will deliver up. Under an LSC TIG grant, CALI and Chicago-Kent College of Law examined the landscape of automated forms and found that less than 20% of the most requested or popular forms have been automated.

Everything has been automated somewhere, nothing has been automated everywhere across all 50 states.

We know that automating forms are a successful and popular action from the thousands of user testimonials at the New York Family Court’s DIY forms website. Over 100,000 people a year use A2J Author Guided Interviews and are surveyed about their experience. Thousands have responded positively. Go ahead and read some these, they will warm your heart.

Maybe we don’t have to sleep with Google or Bing/Microsoft but we should certainly swipe right and see if they want to get coffee sometime. Search engines are the primary way that the public seeks legal information. Every single website or service we build will have to fight to get the attention of very distracted eyeballs. Why not find those eyeballs where they start searching?

John Mayer
Executive Director 
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction / CALI
jmayer@cali.org
@johnpmayer

Links in this Article
‘Let’s Sleep with Google’: an interview with John Mayer
https://law-tech-a2j.org/odr/lets-sleep-with-google-an-interview-with-john-mayer/

Sleeping with Google: what might that mean?
https://law-tech-a2j.org/legal-market/sleeping-with-google-what-might-that-mean/

The Justice Gap: Measuring the Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-income Americans https://www.lsc.gov/sites/default/files/images/TheJusticeGap-FullReport.pdf

Legal Marketing Stats Lawyers Need to Know – Thursday, October 1, 2015 – https://www.natlawreview.com/article/legal-marketing-stats-lawyers-need-to-know

The Justice Gap: Measuring the Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-income Americans – https://www.lsc.gov/sites/default/files/images/TheJusticeGap-FullReport.pdf

NetMarketShare.com – https://netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx

IRL definition – http://www.dictionary.com/browse/irl

I Rob Banks Because That’s Where the Money Is
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/02/10/where-money-is/

The Legal Services Corporation Announces Pilot States for Innovative Program to Increase Access to Justice – LSC, Microsoft, and Pro Bono Net to Partner with Alaska and Hawaii to Create Statewide Legal Access Portals
https://www.lsc.gov/media-center/press-releases/2017/legal-services-corporation-announces-pilot-states-innovative

Report of The Summit on the Use of Technology to Expand Access to Justice
https://www.lsc.gov/media-center/publications/report-summit-use-technology-expand-access-justice

New York State Courts Access to Justice Program – User Testimonials
https://www.nycourts.gov/ip/nya2j/diytestimonials.shtml

Definition of “swipe right”
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/swipe_right_%28or_left%29

Learn About Google Sitemaps
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en

Google Transit: How (and Why) the Search Giant is Remapping Public Transportation
https://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2012/02/21/google-transit-a-search-giant-remaps-public-transportation/?single_page=true

The National Subject Matter Index: Categorizing Information for Poverty Law
https://lsntap.org/LSXML_NSMI