Scaling Access to Justice: How Technology and Partnerships Expand Legal Impact, with Zach Zarnow

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett:

Hi, I’m Stephanie.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m Zack, and this is episode 613 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today, I talk with Zach Zarnow, the executive director of Scale Justice, which used to be pro bono.net, about access to justice and how their approach to bringing partners and technology together can make their footprint, I guess, kind of exponential.

Stephanie Everett:

I like that. Sounds interesting. Can’t wait to listen.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, it’s a nice one. Zack knows a lot about what he’s doing. So yeah.

Stephanie Everett:

Zach with an H.

Zack Glaser:

Zach with an H. We don’t get into that too much, but yeah, Zach with an H and it’s a double Z, which means obviously he is last in line no matter how you slice it. I only did it when we were going by first names when I was younger.

Stephanie Everett:

Right. Well, I was thinking that it’s mid-April. I guess we just got survived tax season, so hopefully everyone’s coming out of that unscathed. Yeah. Which means summer is right around the corner and I’m feeling it. And I think normally when we think of summer, we think of vacation. And I hope even our solo small firm lawyers that are listening have planned vacations on their schedule where they can really unplug. Not just, “I’m going to take a laptop to the beach.”

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, I like that. And I think that I really want to encourage that. Again, I want to hang on that for a second. Not just I’m going to take a laptop to the beach. I remember when my father and I were running our firm, we would both go on vacation together, but one of us was essentially working or at least kind of quote unquote on call at all times because even we didn’t have our processes fully together to do that. And it wasn’t just unfair to us. It was unfair to our family that we had gone on vacation with. Their little adventures got put on pause or both of us weren’t at places. And then also for ourselves, we’re just not really getting a break.

Stephanie Everett:

Right. And I know we’ve talked about this before, but it feels like it needs to be talked about when we see it universally. So we’re going to keep beating this horse, guys, but you need unplugged time away. It’s when you get great ideas. There’s a reason that you usually get cool ideas when you’re running or in the shower, your brain is … I mean, there’s science behind it, but you really do need that time and that space to think and to think differently and maybe to move your body or maybe just to not move your body and to relax. And it’s not just about you, it’s for your team too. Make sure if your team’s taking vacation, and they should be, that you’re allowing them to be unplugged and to fully check out and make sure you’ve put some systems in place and that you enforce that.

I know at times the team has gotten on to me. If I’ve checked in from a cruise, may have happened or wherever I am. Wherever it was. Yeah, I don’t know. But the team’s like, “Wait, what are you doing? You’re supposed to be on vacation. Stop thinking about us or we’ve got it handled. We’re

Zack Glaser:

Good.”That is something I really, really love about this team is that we actually are not only allowed, but are encouraged to push back on that and say like, “Hey, you’re not supposed to be here. We’ve got it. We’ve got it taken care of. ” But also if you can’t do that as a firm with enough notice, we’re not talking about just walking out tomorrow. We’re talking about having enough notice. If you can’t do that, then you almost by definition don’t have proper systems in place.

Stephanie Everett:

I know. And I know for some of you, you’re like, “Oh, that sounds so great, but it feels so hard.” And it might be, and it can be done. Lots of firms have do this. You don’t have to be on call the whole time and you can create this expectation both with your clients, with your team and for yourself, for your family, and you should.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Stephanie Everett:

Bottom line, do it.

Zack Glaser:

That’s it. And we’ll end on that. Let’s go into my conversation with Zach Zarno.

Zach Zarnow:

Hi, I’m Zach Zarnow, Executive Director of Scale Justice, which some of you might know formerly as pro bono net. Scale Justice is a national nonprofit organization that works in partnership with legal aid, community organizations, courts, and others to build technology tools that empower and increase access to justice.

Zack Glaser:

Zach, thanks for being with me. It’s always weird to refer to somebody else as Zach. So thank you for being here and thanks for messing with my head. I appreciate your time. I will let everybody know out there in podcast land, we both spell it differently. True. So Zack, I am Zach with a K. Zach Zarno is Zach with an H. We have all decided collectively not to fight each other about it anymore because it’s just not worth our time, or at least from my perspective, I have.

Zach Zarnow:

I was ready to go full bore on it, but.

Zack Glaser:

That’s how I always lead into any conversation with another Zack, just so I don’t get attacked. Right. But in all seriousness, I appreciate you being here and we’re talking access to justice today. And you and I were discussing before we hit the record button that there are a lot of different ways obviously to approach access to justice, to approach bringing the law, Big L, to the masses. I mean, honestly, one way is to just practice law at the end of the day. Another way is to do pro bono work individually, but scale justice, as the name implies, has a little bit different approach. Would you mind giving us a little bit of background and what scale justice does?

Zach Zarnow:

Yeah. So we’ve been around for about 27 or so years and over the years we’ve evolved and this new name Scale Justice speaks to that. As you pointed out, it’s really about how can we scale up our efforts and increase access to justice, but it’s also about balancing the scales of justice and thinking about the huge amount of need out there and what we can do as an organization to meet that demand. And I think we approach it by trying to build in partnership with community, whether that’s a court or a legal aid or a community-based organization or an immigration focused agency, how can we leverage technology, scale up efforts by working in cohort with you to co-design and build things that allow for huge impact? And we get about eight to nine million people a year using our tools in a given year. And so I think it’s safe to say that we’re reaching a lot of people, but the impact also comes from what those people experience and how those organizations can do their work differently and perhaps better.

Zack Glaser:

So I just want to kind of clarify here, scale justice, I know y’all are helping to build tools and connecting with other pro bono organizations, other just courts and law firms. Are you building actual public, I wanted to say human facing tools, public facing tools yourselves or building them for other companies or a mix of both?

Zach Zarnow:

A little bit of both. I think a lot of what we do is typically a more behind the scenes and that we’re supporting a legal aid group or a court by building something with them that then the public sees as theirs. But we also do stuff like lawhelpnewyork.org. We built that, we manage it. We work in collaboration with legal aid from across the state to supply content, but the platform and what we did there is our effort, and that reaches 600,000 people a year. In some places like New York or DC, we work with the court system directly and build online guided interviews and smart document assembly operations that allow for about 1.2 million people a year to complete these forms and navigate that system really easily. So a lot of it’s public facing. It sort of depends on where you find it. If you go to lawhelpnewyork.org, you might not recognize it as ours necessarily, but that’s one where we got our hands really in it.

If you go to a guided interview type situation, you’re probably meeting it through a court website or something. And so it feels much more like the courts, which is great because the court is offering you this service and you see that happening and you think, well, this court really is trying to meet me where I am. And there’s that level of trust and confidence that comes with that. But we do all of the above. We’ve also built tools that are more public facing like Reclamo, which is a wage theft and worker empowerment tool. We do it with partnerships with the New York Legal Assistance Group and immigration groups, but it’s public facing. And what we want is for people to go and find it. We might just have a human in the loop or an organization in the loop to help kind of fill the full promise of what that tool can do.

Zack Glaser:

How do you make that connection with the other organizations? Is it something that scale justice goes out and says, okay, we want to do something, therefore we’re going to go see who can help us do it or who we can help leverage do this. Or is it something where maybe a court would say, “We would like to do blank, let’s go find scale justice.”

Zach Zarnow:

Right, right. A lot of groups find us. I mean, we’ve been doing it for over 25 years, 27-ish years, right? So there’s just relationships that have built over time. And a lot of people on staff have been here for many of those years. So there’s great deep relationships, which is wonderful. I think the model is really a co-design one. So it’s pretty rare that we’re out there pushing a court to try to do something. It’s more likely that a court knows of our reputation, reached out to us, and then together we help design what a right intervention or tool or product might be. But we’re not a vendor either. We’re a

Stephanie Everett:

Missionary

Zach Zarnow:

Profit, which is sort of the stranger distinction compared to some other groups where you might think, “Well, I want to build something. I’m going to go hire the people to build it. ” You can do that with us, but we’ll probably still want to talk with you about why you’re wanting to build it and how you’re trying to build it and what your goals are and really making sure that it’s human-centered and building this stuff for the ultimate goal of increasing access to justice.

Zack Glaser:

That’s the thing that I wanted to kind of hang on and that is a big differentiator here is that scale justice isn’t, like you said, a vendor that is going out selling their product. And a vendor like somebody that might do a court database system, let’s say, or helping the courts take their filing system online. Well, yes, you might do that, but you’re not courtdatabasesystem.com and a for- profit organization to do that. Do you find that you’re able to have either deeper, broader, or more partnerships in that way?

Zach Zarnow:

I think so. And that’s not a knock on the vendors. I’ve worked with men-

Zack Glaser:

Right,

Zach Zarnow:

Right. They serve a really valuable function here, so it’s not them, only us. It’s a yes and kind of situation where we’re working with these groups because

They have identified us as a potential partner and we mean that in the truest sense. It’s really, let’s explore this together. I mean, not infrequently, we’re sending our partners, “Hey, we were looking for some fundraising on our own, found this grant application. It actually might be better for you. You all take it. ” Or, “This one is a real nice opportunity to build something with some funding. Maybe we should collaborate on that proposal together.” Or, “Hey, we just finished a project with this group over there, and you and all and I have been talking off and on over the last couple months, and it turns out we learned something over there that might be really helpful to you. Let’s just share it and let’s talk because we’re fellow travelers. We’re all rowing in the same direction. We’re an organization, which means we have a budget and we need to make money to stay alive and keep the doors open, the lights on and pay salaries, but our goal is beyond just making money.

It’s mission

Zack Glaser:

Driven.” Okay. Well, so you’re the executive director over there at Scale Justice. Give me a little bit of your background. How did you get into, I guess, the A to J world? Have you been in A to J for a while? Is this a new focus for you or is this something that’s been brewing for a while or all of that?

Zach Zarnow:

For better or worse, this is it. This is what I do.

Zack Glaser:

I love it. I love it.

Zach Zarnow:

That for a long time, trying to think. The shortest way of saying this is I did the Peace Corps in Ukraine and when I was there, I knew I would probably go to law school when I got back. And while I was there, I kept running into these kind of legal issues that were the final solution to the problem we were looking at.What’s the next step? It was like a law thing. So I went to law school thinking I’ll be an international human rights lawyer. And then I started learning about legal empowerment and this notion that you could build ground up power using the law and empowering people with the law. And it was, at that point in time, pretty much an international concept. There was paralegals and community justice workers didn’t really exist in the US in the same way they did overseas. And the Open Society Foundations and others were working on this.

And then I ended up getting some fellowships and opportunities to see some of that up close and then came back to the US and thought, “I really just want to do that. ” I wrote my student note about access to justice and legal empowerment and stratification of service provision and thinking outside the lawyer monopoly. And that’s where I’ve been for however long that’s been now, over 20 years, thinking about this stuff that way. And so I’ve had a really wonderful career at the Illinois Equal Justice Foundation, which was like a legal aid funder, got to build a legal aid network for veterans there. And then right before this job, I was with the National Center for State Courts working on their access to justice consulting work around the country, working with courts on all sorts of different things that touch on this topic. So great learning experience, a really, really wonderful place to be.

Zack Glaser:

The job that you had right before this, the working with the courts, that seems like a really good primer or at least entryway into what you’re doing now because a lot of the stuff that scale justice is a lot of the places that I see, I don’t want to call it low-hanging fruit, but the difficult places to navigate the law a lot of times are actually interaction with the court. Do you find that you have, I guess, better experiences, specific knowledge that comes from that, that helps you? Or is it just, Zach, I’m doing my thing and I’d be doing it one way or the other?

Zach Zarnow:

No, I think it informs a lot of what I do. And the courts are, in many ways, the kind of locusts for a lot of this. It’s where this all happens and occurs and legal aid usually ends up there and people usually end up there and they’re a downstream actor in many ways. What’s been great about scale justice is that we have an opportunity to still work with courts and we do, but we can also move upstream a little bit more as well. We can get to some of those community groups or even frankly, groups that aren’t focused on the legal, but work with them to help identify legal issues and needs within their communities or populations so that you can identify them earlier and get help earlier and connect to resources earlier. Courts are wonderful, but they’re situated where they are on purpose. And that means that to a degree, you only have so much control over what you can do within that sphere.

And there’s a lot you can do, don’t get me wrong. And I’ve tried and I think others have done a lot of really great work, but being able to more fully embrace that spectrum, I think at scale justice with legal aid and community groups and courts to me feels like the place to be when you want to make a huge impact when it comes to increasing access to justice.

Zack Glaser:

That makes sense. The place that I ran into pro bono.net, Scale Justice now, was in connection with Legal Aid, was in connection with Legal Aid Societies in Tennessee actually. And talking about building things, I think Help4TN was one of the things that y’all had done in connection with one of the Legal Aid Societies or maybe even the administrative office of the courts in Tennessee. And that always struck me was the integration between that, like you said, being able to go upstream. So y’all been able to do a lot. What is something that you think has had either a large impact that you really like or just a project that you’ve particularly enjoyed or particularly liked the impact of?

Zach Zarnow:

I mean, some of these, the numbers are just astonishing when you have over a million people completing forms. It’s hard to say that’s nothing other than the most exciting thing you’re doing.

Zack Glaser:

You got 16 things at 100%, Zack. They’re all awesome. Yeah.

Zach Zarnow:

There’s a tool that we’ve had for a while. And I should also know, I’m relatively new at Scale Justice, so I don’t want to be appearing to take credit for things that had nothing to do with. And I also know that a lot of people worked on this. So I’m here, but lots of people deserve credit and thanks for all this. So we have a program called Risk Detector, and right now it’s pretty active in New York State and Minnesota and some other places. And over the years, it’s waxed and waned. But the idea thinking about that upstream movement is you can work with people who are going to see a social worker or going to go see someone for a benefit screening with Center on Aging and Aid and the elderly or something, and you can meet them there and also do a little health checkup, but a legal health checkup, figure out what’s going on.

And if you can catch it early, then maybe we can make that referral early to legal aid or to another group. And you can be co-located, if you will, in a place where people are already going because they like or know or trust those people and you’re just augmenting those services and finding out some of the things that they might not have known to ask prior and being able to identify it like you would with a diagnosis a doctor would do. You find risk factors early, you can put treatment plans in place before it metastasizes into something really, really dangerous. So the ability to move that way, I love that program. I want to do more with it, but we only have so many hours in a day.

Zack Glaser:

Right, right. There’s only so many things you can do. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, okay. So on the topic of upstream and self-help and people kind of taking their own steps, right now especially, there is, I think, an increased potential at the very least or interest in people being able to get online and do whatever the heck they want when we’re talking about artificial intelligence, we’re talking about spinning things up. Does that, see how to phrase this, does the ability of people to go to ChatGPT and potentially say, “Hi, here’s my legal problem,” scare you or excite you? Because you and I also have the ability to potentially build things more quickly using these products as well.

Zach Zarnow:

Yeah. So maybe it’s yes and yes. There’s something upsetting and a little concerning about people freelancing to a degree where they’re not in a position to assess usefulness or the accuracy of the answer they’re given. I guess I think about it as if you’re designing an intervention, you want to map stuff out on a couple different spectrums. So one would be like legal knowledge. Some people just know more about some of these areas of law than others and amongst lawyers even, right? A lawyer that does family law all day knows a lot about that, but a lawyer that does transactional law would not rate their legal knowledge very high when it came to family law cases. Certainly if that’s a pro bono case, then you’ve got capability is another spectrum to measure people across. Not about intelligence, just about ability to navigate a given process.

You’re a fit guy, I’m sure, but you’re probably not a gymnast, so your capability on the parallel bar is

Zack Glaser:

Lower. Pretty low, pretty low. Yeah. Yeah.

Zach Zarnow:

Right. And then you’ve got complexity of the legal issue, and then related to that is the risk of harm. And so I think if you’re designing an intervention, I would try to map all those out per your users

Stephanie Everett:

And

Zach Zarnow:

Think about them. And if you do that, you would see some of these chatbots or other tools probably aren’t right in some of those circumstances. But if you’re powering up experts and giving them the ability to do their work differently or better or faster, and they have the wherewithal, the capability and the knowledge to assess the outputs, that’s a different story because they have that capacity to look at that and say, “This one actually does work for me or this one isn’t working, and I can use this to do my stuff better and faster.” Whereas for people who are just given stuff and there’s no thought process behind it, it’s a little risky. And I don’t say that because I’m denigrating the abilities of those folks. I’m saying that the tools need to be designed appropriately to meet those people where they are vis-a-vis those spectrums, their capability, their knowledge, all that stuff.

Zack Glaser:

Well, so kind of talking about the other side of that, the potentially exciting part of this, because in what you’re saying there is like, okay, well, we can potentially empower lawyers to do more or we can have lawyers reach more or something like that. What would you say to an attorney that’s thinking, “Okay, well, maybe I could do my own bot or product or tool or something like that that would then reach more people. ” How do you think they should go about that? Or that may be too broad of a question.

Zach Zarnow:

Well, staying broad, I mean, there’s some broad basic principles I think they should adhere to. And one of them is if you’re doing an experiment, you should be honest with yourself about the fact that it is an experiment, and then you also need to be incredibly thoughtful about who you’re experimenting on and what protections you put in place. Because I think that the ability now we have to iterate and ideate and stand up quick prototypes is really, really, really exciting,

But those need to be treated like what they are, which are experiments or one-offs or little tools or proof of concepts. And where I get a little concerned is when people do something like that, think that they’ve made something really real and then make it public. You can make it public as an experiment if you’re honest about the fact that it’s experiment and experiment, but that means you have to put all the protections in place for the people that are going to get experimented on. You can’t just launch it out to the world and let anybody use it because you can really harm some people. I mean, you can give them bad advice that’s incredibly consequential. So I’d say first, be realistic and honest about what it is you’re doing. If you’re making an experiment happen, call it that and treat it like one.

Zack Glaser:

I like that. I like that. I mean, be thoughtful about it. Definitely do … I mean, be comfortable experimenting, but make sure that you’re seeing it for what it is. Well, so kind of wrapping up here, thinking about the future, the near future, the far out future of scale justice, we just went from pro bono net to scale justice. What does the future look like for you guys?

Zach Zarnow:

Well, we are embracing some of those new tools for sure. I mean, internally, we’re working with how we can use it for our own internal coding and developing and speeding up some of those processes and trying out new things, but we’re also looking at through our innovation work, what are the features or elements of what we’ve tried or played with in those experiments that are worth rolling into the bigger, more public facing tools and ready for prime time? The ability to have someone take their phone and be able to take a picture of a court document or a form and be able to get some information back about what that thing is and what it means. There’s a lot of opportunity there. The ability to communicate with court documents or forms or legal help websites by talking and getting information returned to you. There’s a lot of opportunity there.

Those are just two small examples, but the ability to take those features and those tools and those other things we’ve been working on in other more experimental spaces, proving out their value and proving out their safety, and then rolling them into our main kind of core offerings, like those form filling tools, like those self-help websites, those are really exciting opportunities to go from reaching a lot of people to reaching a lot of people

Stephanie Everett:

At

Zach Zarnow:

Scale, but also with more impact because we’re even further meeting them where they are. If someone wants to talk, we give them the ability to talk. And that’s, I mean, as a user experience, you’re just hard to beat that.

Zack Glaser:

I like that a lot because a lot of times my advice, or at least my advice or my caveat or whatever is it relates to bringing artificial intelligence into your practice or bringing automations into your practice or office is that if you don’t have the fundamentals downright, then you’re just going to automate crap. And so I really like the taking those types of things and putting them on these very solid tools that scale justice already has. Right. I think that’s great.

Zach Zarnow:

And testing them. Make sure they actually work. A lot of

Zack Glaser:

Testing. Come on. Come on. Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right. Okay. Well, so if people that are listening to this hear this and think two things. “Hey, I have a ton of time and I’d love to go connect with scale justice and do something. How would I do that? “Or other times, and I think this happens with attorneys a lot, I have some time, I have some time and yes, I couldn’t be of service on a huge project or I couldn’t do a huge project on my own, but I imagine that y’all would be happy to connect with anybody that was hoping to be of service in that way. Absolutely. Where can they connect with y’all?

Zach Zarnow:

Yeah, you can go to scaleJustice.org. You can find me pretty easily. There’s only one Zach Zarno. Sorry, Zack Glaser, but there’s only one very Googleable.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, that’s true. There are two Zack Glaser attorneys practicing right now in the United States at least. I’m

Zach Zarnow:

Sorry for you, but yeah, justice.org, easy place to go to find us. I personally would be happy to chat with people. And then in terms of what you can do, there’s board service, there’s donating, there’s joining pro bono efforts, there’s joining a commission or a working group or a committee or things like that, courts and bar associations and legal aid groups, they all have those. And so for private attorneys that are kind of wondering, you can still get involved in all this stuff in a meaningful way, donating your time, of course, from pro bono and things like that. Reform proposals are floating around all the time about how the legal system should or shouldn’t be structured. Be a thought partner in that, weigh in on that, advocate for what you believe in. I mean, there are lots of ways that the bar can get involved in the work we’re doing, but if you’d like to work with us, go to scaleJustice.org.

Zack Glaser:

Love it. Well, Zach, thank you a lot for being here and for talking to me about this. So I appreciate your time and I appreciate the work that y’all are doing over at Scale Justice.

Zach Zarnow:

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you for the invitation. I’m right back at you.

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