Self-Help Legal Kiosks Create Adaptable Access

Episode Notes

Transcript

Ariel Clemmer:

We anticipated initially that people would use the kiosk to attend hearings remotely. We rapidly found out that that was simply not true, that almost nobody was using it for that purpose, and instead they were really using it for self-help resource triage. And so we were able to shift the website interface that we were using and make other changes so that we really were addressing that need.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the General Public Talk. Justice is sponsored by the Leaders’ Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Lee Rawles:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Lee Rawles, assistant managing editor at the ABA Journal and your host for this episode. Today we’re talking about legal kiosks and self-help tools. Legal aid addresses the unmet needs of low-income people with civil legal problems. However, under resourcing makes it impossible to provide meaningful legal help to every person who needs it. Many legal aid organizations build and share educational materials and self-help resources online, but those without access to a personal computer or smartphone can’t make use of these enter self-help legal kiosks. To learn more about this, we have three guests with us today. Ariel Clemmer, executive director of 603 Legal Aid in New Hampshire. Ariel, thank you so much for joining us.

Ariel Clemmer:

Thank you for having me.

Lee Rawles:

Mauricio Duarte, chief operating Officer at A2J Tech.

Mauricio Duarte:

Thank you for having me today.

Lee Rawles:

And Susan Myers, director of litigation and project manager for the Nevada Legal Kiosk Project at Nevada Legal Services. Good morning. Good morning. I’m going to start off with you. Nevada Legal Services has created, I guess 28 legal kiosks in libraries. Can you tell us what these kiosks are like and what sorts of challenges they help people overcome?

Susan Myers, Esq.:

Surely first, what the kiosks are like is they’re dedicated computers with a printer attached. Most of them, we provide a height adjustable table with privacy panels, so we provide it to the library as a complete package, and Nevada does not have a law help site, so there was no central repository for legal aid information. We have five legal aid organizations across the state. So through the kiosk project, I created a clearinghouse for all of this information so that people aren’t just randomly Googling around trying to find it.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Susan, what makes libraries a good fit for legal kiosks? Are there other public spaces you think could also work?

Susan Myers, Esq.:

Yes, and one of, well, let me talk about libraries first. One of the advantages of placing the kiosks in libraries is that they are already a trusted source in the community for information. And we were inspired by the Legal Services Corporation, public Library Initiative designed to assist librarians in providing legal information because they get the questions anyway. And the other thing about having the physical kiosks is that even if there is information online, a lot of people don’t have access to adequate technology. I don’t know about you, but I’m not so great about doing anything extensive on my smartphone if you need to fill out a form or anything like that. So it provides that resource as well as a place where librarians can point their patrons to. So we’ve found that that partnership works really well. One of the things that we did that I don’t know that it would’ve been as effective with non librarians, is that our state of Nevada Supreme Court law librarian and I designed a training program for library staff on how to use the kiosks to provide legal information.

Susan Myers, Esq.:

So they have those advantages built in. Now, that’s not to say there aren’t other locations that could host a kiosk. We’ve gotten questions about putting them in courthouses, but we’ve been finding that the judges, especially in our rural areas, are very good about referring people to the library. In a small town, you don’t have to go that far from the courthouse to the library. So the courts have been happy to refer people, but as we thought about courthouses, one of the issues is that not everybody feels comfortable going into one. They can be kind of intimidating. You have to go through security. Maybe you didn’t have a great experience in your last hearing, something like that. So the other part about the library is that there’s somebody there monitoring the kiosk. There’s somebody available to answer questions. If something goes ka fluey, the printer breaks or something, somebody calls us, well, there’s a system for that, an email system. But so there’s a lot of advantages. So if you’re going to put it in a courthouse or something, a self-help center might be a great option where there’s somebody there who can actually help guide people or point them in the right direction. Other places I’ve heard of are community centers. We’ve thought about homeless shelters, places like that. As long as you have a staff that works there that buys into the kiosk, I think that’s the important thing. You don’t want to just stick it someplace and have it ignored.

Lee Rawles:

Yeah, I live in Wisconsin and I was able to renew my driver’s license through a kiosk in a grocery store, and that’s the first thing that I thought of when I was hearing about these self-help legal kiosks. But you make a good point about staffing and how important that can be. Ariel, do you have any thoughts here about legal kiosks? You’ve launched your own project, this was your previous role at the Center for Social Justice at Western New England School of Law in Massachusetts. I’d love to hear about that project.

Ariel Clemmer:

Yes, thanks. So similar to the way that Susan described them, we also designed a kiosk project actually in the wave of the pandemic. So I was a very new incoming director of this Center for Social Justice in March of 2020. And I say that date because that was the date when everything shut down and our clients immediately were physically locked out of the courthouse. So originally the concept was simply to design computerized access stations for people so that they could have broadband and wifi access and computerized technology like the printers that Susan mentioned. And then the project really expanded in scope with a specific focus on self-help legal resources. And in Massachusetts, we do have the benefit of a number of statewide sources already. And so what we did was link through to those sources, primarily one database that was able to triage anyone coming in with any kind of civil legal issue.

Ariel Clemmer:

And so from there, people were directed to the best legal resource provider for them across the continuum of auctions in the state of Massachusetts at the time, Western Massachusetts, like all places and most legal aids facing it across the country, we’re dealing with this critical issue of a digital divide. And what I mean by that is the disparity statistics wise in the impact that things like the pandemic or being shut out physically from a place of need has on low income people and people of color. And so that was a key focus of ours was how to remedy that for our area. We ended up fundraising for this project and raising some funds that allowed us to actually partner with A2J Tech who’s also here today, and we launched 13 kiosks across Massachusetts in October of 2022. Like Susan said, we too situated a lot of these in libraries for the same reasons, and we also did a comparative experiment and placed sort of half of them in social service providers. So we really wanted to test out and see whether there was a difference in usage of those two types of locations. What we found is that there wasn’t, and that the biggest driver of success was actually the investment of the location itself, having somebody, anybody at the location who was committed to telling people about the kiosk, making use of it when appropriate. And in recent times, the kiosk project in Western Mass has focused on actually shifting towards areas where legal services are already being provided or it’s legal services adjacent.

Lee Rawles:

Mauricio, Ariel brought up that she partnered with A2J Tech in this. Could you explain a little bit about what A2J Tech is and how you work with organizations like hers to create legal kiosks?

Mauricio Duarte:

Yeah, no, and thank you for the shadow, Ariel. A2J Tech is basically a digital agency, and we worked on projects, technology projects that our aim to increase access to justice. When people ask us, do you do work in the medical field or other fields, we tell them, no. Our main focus is the legal vertical. So as long as you are a player in the legal industry, it doesn’t matter if you’re a bar association, if you’re a court, if you’re a nonprofit, specifically, nonprofits and courts are the players that we work with constantly in technology projects. We are here to help on any type of technology project, big, small, and sometimes even pro bono initiatives. We try to assist because we have a team of members that have different backgrounds, different experiences, so they can give their input. Not everyone at A two J Tech is a lawyer, not everyone is a developer.

Mauricio Duarte:

We have a combination of professionals and I think that gives the best results possible because again, to my detriment, lawyers do not know anything, everything, so we need to collaborate with others. So as a lawyer, I need to work with developer designers to create better experiences for our clients, so how we help legal aid programs. But even recently, courts to set up legal kiosk is a two J tax serves as that jumpstart to start your own legal kiosk program in your area. It could be your state, it could be your county, it could be your city, but we are there to assist and jumpstart that program. What does that mean is that we help from a operational perspective to make sure that everything gets set up, your kiosk gets installed, your kiosk gets shipped, that the interface to create a guided experience for users within the kiosk gets created.

Mauricio Duarte:

What we usually do, and Ariel and Susan have mentioned this, is that it’s not a Google site that you just go in and okay, randomly search for something. A legal kiosk is set up as a secure environment in which you guide them through the experience. You create a specific interface or a website interface in which you show them the different tiles resources. In some instances, we have had programs that want to create documented automation within their kiosk experience for self-represented litigants. Other programs want to refer to the statewide legal help site that they have because they already have valuable resources, but they want to triage some of those resources within the legal kiosk experience. So we help building that interface setting of the kiosk. And at the end of the day, we also try to help with the programs with marketing and some other components like data and reporting for the usage of the kiosks.

Mauricio Duarte:

So I’m sure that Ariel and some of the other programs that we have worked with have had access to the dashboards in which they can see the access, the usage of the kiosk, and they can make decisions of the usage of the kiosk. So that’s a bit about A2J Tech and a bit about how we help programs with legal kiosk. Now with that being said, we always tell programs the legal kiosk is your project. It is not an A2J Tech project, and we always should focus on the scalability and sustainability of a project in the medium and long term. And I think that’s important for any technology project specifically for legal aids and courts is always think of a technology project on how is it going to be sustained over time, and we just try to give resources and ideas for you to develop your own ability to also sustain the project. So that’s a bit about how we help with certain legal aids and courts with their kiosk project.

Susan Myers, Esq.:

And Lee, I’d like to add that Nevada also worked with A2J Tech on our kiosk.

Lee Rawles:

Well, one thing I really like that I’m hearing is how you can truly tailor the kiosk to what the needs of the local population are. Do you think that’s one of the things that makes these self-serve kiosks such an appealing project for the legal organizations who are approaching you?

Mauricio Duarte:

Yeah, I think one of the values or why there’s interest in legal kiosk is at the end of the day, each program knows their audience. They know their demographics, they know what type of content should be out there. They know what type of experience you should put out there. Legal kiosk project in Minnesota is not going to be the same as a legal kiosk. Project in Texas is certainly not going to be the same as in Western New England. Every single region has different set of demographics and different set of needs from a rural perspective. So I think that is one of the most appealing points of being able to customize the experience to your demographic. Again, we don’t come from A2J tech with a perspective of we know better. We think that the programs themselves already have worked in the area for multiple years, so they know better about their demographics and their users.

Mauricio Duarte:

Now with that in mind, we also try to use user research and user feedback in order to improve the experiences that are developed. That means that we try to test in real time, let’s say the interface that we’re building, try to get surveys and usage surveys in order to understand, okay, what is the perception? What is their reaction? What is the feedback from actual users of the kiosk? And that gives a very important data metric from a subjective standpoint of view that we are able to keep making adjustments, keep making improvements or optimizations based on that user feedback. So I think those two components, the ability to customize the experience and the ability to keep improving based on user research and user feedback are two appealing components. And the third final appealing component is that at the end of the day, kiosks can be relocated to other areas.

Mauricio Duarte:

Once you set up a kiosk, that does not mean it should be in that community center or that court forever. You can always move it based on usage. Again, it just requires a bit of logistical work, but you can move it around. So there are other programs I know that have even justice buses or legal kiosk within buses that can move around. So those are type of more creative ambitious projects, but certainly legal kiosk having the ability to move around is also an appealing point for many of the programs that we have worked with in the past.

Lee Rawles:

Well, I want to go back to the user feedback aspect. I love that there’s a database that lets you find out how people are actually interacting and using these machines, and I want to find out have there been any surprises what people have learned? Susan, would you like to start?

Susan Myers, Esq.:

Sure. There is a feedback option on the kiosk where people can leave comments, but honestly, we don’t get a whole lot. Initially when the kiosk project first launched, there were some comments mostly where we’re getting, oh, and let me back up a little. We can also see which locations, we can see the usage per location, we can see the time of day that they’re being used, things like that. But in terms of people commenting about, I wish it had this or I’d like to see this or this didn’t work, we don’t get a lot of that from users. Where we’re getting it is from the librarians themselves who work with the users and they will tell us that family law is the most popular topic in our area, or we have a particularly urban location that says it’s family and landlord. Tenant is used a lot. So that’s how we’re getting a lot of our feedback from the staff that is helping with the people using the kiosks.

Lee Rawles:

Ariel, what was your experience? I was curious whether maybe some topics were more popular than the people who were installing them thought they would be or less popular, just if there were any kind of surprises as to what kinds of questions were being asked at the legal kiosks.

Ariel Clemmer:

Yes. I think the biggest point there was that we anticipated initially that people would use the kiosk to attend hearings remotely. At the time, all hearings in Massachusetts went remote and we thought that the highest need was going to be for somewhat secure confidential locations with headphones where people could call into court. And in fact, what we found and what makes the points that Mauricio made about the flexibility and iterative process that they go through with their partners so successful is that we rapidly found out that that was simply not true, that almost nobody was using it for that purpose and instead they were really using it for self-help resource triage. And so we were able to shift the website interface that we were using and make other changes so that we really were addressing that need. The other thing is that Mauricio had mentioned different options and different models of kiosk, and we jumped on that at the Center for Social Justice and in fact did put at least a few of these kiosks as what we called kiosk light or kiosk 2.0 models that were mobile and that went in a justice bus that were handed out to either volunteers or staff of the center who would then be able to address Lee those pinpointed legal topics or specific needs for those individuals onsite and in the communities where people most needed to access ’em.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Ariel, you recently changed jobs. You’re now heading up 603 Legal Aid. Are kiosks something you might pursue in the future for New Hampshire, the folks that you’re serving now?

Ariel Clemmer:

Yes, that is in the long-term plan here in New Hampshire. Having had such a great experience with them previously, New Hampshire is set up a little bit differently from Massachusetts, and so we’ve decided to start with actually the infrastructure of building a really strong statewide self-help platform first. We are going through that process right now. We actually were just a recipient of a TIG grant to enable us to build this more robust self-help website in our state. And the idea is that once we have that infrastructure already knitted together, that we’ll be in a much stronger place to then launch kiosk or kiosk like project in our state.

Lee Rawles:

Well, to switch gears a bit, a conversation about legal tech almost always makes its way around to AI these days. So I’m wondering, as we talk about self-help legal services, do you think AI has a place in this space and what upsides or ethical pitfalls could you foresee? Have you start us off?

Mauricio Duarte:

Yeah, I think let’s say AI has a place and will have a place. I think as usual within the legal industry, we always have a lot of concerns, but the reality is that the technology is going to keep moving, accelerating and progressing and getting better. When I try to read some of the concerns from lawyers and practitioners of why they don’t want to use ai, going to the notion of legal advice and the a implications from an ethical standpoint, I understand the concern, but at the same time is there are alternative models in which you can deploy AI. AI does not have to be used only for legal advice, and I think sometimes we’re jumping the gun too far and too quick of thinking of the post apocalyptic chaotics in areas of AI.

Lee Rawles:

I mean, that’s where my mind goes. I’ll be honest.

Mauricio Duarte:

No, and I think the real approach should be from a strategic perspective of return of investment where AI can be deployed for self source services right now is to guide users to the most precise and accurate legal set of resources and legal information that they need. I still think that we are still probably a few, maybe months or a couple of years into which maybe AI will be more robust, more precise, that we might have a different discussion about legal advice. But I don’t want to necessarily cross that mind because I don’t want to necessarily create a controversial discussion. I think that’s more of an issue for a debate and maybe working groups for ethical discussions. But I do think right now, let’s say the immediate value that AI is providing is to assist self-represented litigants or individuals that are seeking legal assistance with legal information and legal resources, meaning that you can deploy AI to guide them through the relevant resources instead of giving them a list of 20 different links that they can check.

Mauricio Duarte:

You can go into areas when you can triage now just using AI in a more conversational manner to the relevant resources that they might need. To some extent, we have also seen that some legal aid programs are starting to use AI that gives out legal information based on certain fact pattern, but it’s not necessarily crossing the line of legal advice, just saying, Hey, based on your circumstances, you might want to check this website or you might want to check this additional resource that is provided by X, Y, and C. So even to provide referrals to other programs, to other community partners, I think AI is going to be relevant for that right now in the immediate term. Now in the long term, I do think that AI will help just from the simple perspective that legal aids have limited staffing and limited resources, and people with legal needs will keep increasing.

Mauricio Duarte:

Again, that’s why when we see the metrics from LLC on access to justice issues, the gap seems to be growing because legal needs keep growing and staffing does not grow accordingly in many programs, funding does not grow to the same quickness to the same speed as legal problems. So AI will become a complimentary tool for many legal aids in order to guide many of the users for empowering, I think self-represented litigants. I think that is one of the things that we have lose sight of. If we empower even more self-represented litigants with AI and some other tools, we can at least help alleviate some of the concerns with access to justice. AI will not solve by itself the access to justice issues similar like legal kiosk. Legal kiosk by themselves alone are not going to solve access to justice. You have to have a series of coordinated efforts in order to alleviate some of the needs in your area.

Mauricio Duarte:

So again, there’s always going to be concerns. There’s always going to be pushback about using a new technology, but if you ask me right now, my position is that AI is prime to help with legal information, legal resources, there might be a moment in time that I don’t think we’re there yet in which we might be able to have discussions about legal advice that will require, again, set of changes with ethical rules and the interpretation of those rules that I don’t think is the purpose of today’s call, but from a different purview. I also think that legal aids and courts should start looking at AI not only from a self-represented legal perspective or someone seeking legal help, but they should also consider AI into the operational and internal uses of ai. Two examples. One of the biggest pain points that we see with legal aid is intake.

Mauricio Duarte:

We have thousands of calls on a given day and we just have three intake screeners or intake staffers that are able to answer the phones. We are at a stage right now that even AI agents can talk with someone on the phone can collect the basic data, and then you can process the intake at a later time, but you are trying to mitigate the volume of calls. Again, there’s nothing right now that will solve the problem of getting thousands of calls into an intake line. That’s the reality. But if you start leveraging AI in a more internal operational way, you can alleviate some of that volume. And the second perspective that we have shared with legal courts, they can start thinking about from a medium to long-term strategy of AI, is how you can use it in order to generate or automate documents for litigants or also help them to avoid the back and forth of information and help AI in a sense draft documents.

Mauricio Duarte:

In many instances, the legal service that legal aids provide is very reliant on documents, and right now we’re a stage that using document automation and that’s not even mentioned ai, you can become more efficient at generating documents, motions, pleadings for some of the more impact litigation cases or family law cases. For instance, we have worked with legal aid programs in family law specifically that want to quickly generate motions and pleadings for the divorce cases, and now they’re starting to leverage some technologies in order to accelerate that process. So just to a dual view of how AI should be considered, not only for self-represented litigants or people seeking legal help, but I also think legal arts and courts should consider AI from an internal operational tool as well.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Mauricio, thank you for talking me down, Susan. Ariel, do either of you have any thoughts about this?

Susan Myers, Esq.:

I think I’m with you, Lee. Certain things make me a little nervous. I mean, I went to law school when we still did the research in the books in the library, but what I would say is as it relates to the kiosks, the one if you will, negative comment or constructive criticism, we did get in the feedback was if there were a search function, because like Maurizio described, the kiosk interface is basically tiles with topics, and then you can click on that family problems and you’ll get to everything about family law, et cetera. So I think that from my limited perspective, I am not going to speak as to legal aid in general. Some of these ideas are very exciting and interesting a little bit above my head, but I think we can incorporate it into the kiosks as it develops, especially for search functions and helping to point people in the right direction where to find the information within the kiosk.

Lee Rawles:

Yeah, a more conversational style might really help people who are using these kiosks. Ariel,

Ariel Clemmer:

I’ll go ahead and take on the opposite perspective here for equity. So I think that I agree, Susan with what you were just saying, but also Mauricio, this concept of AI for intake is fascinating and something that we see as the centralized intake hub for all of New Hampshire civil legal aid is something that’s really interesting. And I think as AI continues to develop, it does have these internal uses as Mauricio you said, and is very much in line with the growing movements across our country with respect to frontline justice and non-attorney advocacy opportunities and other ways that we can just use these tools to provide greater access to justice to more people.

Lee Rawles:

Well, I want to thank Ariel, Mauricio and Susan for joining me today, and thanks to the listeners for tuning in to this episode of Talk Justice. So the LSCs 25th Annual Innovations in Technology Conference is happening now as this episode airs. If you’re interested in more legal tech conversations like these, you can catch some sessions streaming for free on LSCs, YouTube and Facebook pages. The next episode of this show will feature a podcast recorded live at the ITC, so be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss it.

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