News: Tale of Two No-Cost Re-Engineering Projects that Launched Self-Help Centers (SRLN 2015)
Both the Bronx Family Court and the Pittsburgh Court were able to significantly increase quality, speed, and capacity by re-engineering procedures, re-arranging physical layout, some paint, and new benches. See Pittsburgh Court Doubles the Number of Self-Represented Litigants Served In the First Three Months With No-Cost Reengineering Initiative (SRLN News 2016) and attached presentation from EJC 2015 describing both.
Year published:
2015
Document Author:
SRLN
Comments: SRLN Comments to Proposed Court Rule Changes in Florida on Technology Integration (SRLN 2021)
On July 1, 2021, the Florida Supreme Court appointed Workgroup on the Continuity of Court Operations and Proceedings During and After COVID-19 filed a petition to amend the Florida Rules of Civil Procedure, Florida Rules of General Practice and Judicial Administration, Florida Rules of Criminal Procedure, Florida Probate Rules, Florida Rules of Traffic Court, Florida Small Claims Rules, and Florida Rules of Appellate Procedure.
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
SRLN
Report: Business Process Analysis in Legal Aid: How Florida Rural Legal Services Partnered with Toyota to Improve Its Client Intake and Customer Service (Legal Services Corporation 2021)
Many organizations have experience with business process analysis (BPA), a method to analyze a company’s processes and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations. In fact, there are multiple methodologies used to accomplish the goals of BPA. A notable one is the Toyota Production System (TPS). TPS was established based on several principles and concepts, including a customer-first culture, an acknowledgment that team members are the most important resource, continuous improvement, a go-and-see approach, jidoka, and just-in-time.
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
Legal Services Corporation
Article: Faster, Cheaper & As Satisfying: An Evaluation of Alaska’s Early Resolution Triage Program (Marz 2016)
The Alaska Court System, in partnership with the Alaska Pro Bono Program, created the Early Resolution Program (ERP) to address many issues with which courts across the country are grappling: how to efficiently and effectively manage divorce and custody cases involving self-represented litigants (SRLs), and how to triage cases to the appropriate resolution approach. This paper reported on an evaluation of the Anchorage ERP.
Year published:
2016
Document Author:
Stacey Marz
SRLN COVID-19 Brief: Alaska Courts and Attorneys Keep Probate Matters Moving (News 2020)
While many states have reported difficulties in processing probate cases during the Covid-19 pandemic, Alaska has been remarkably successful in moving these cases along, and even to some extent expediting them beyond what had been happening before the crisis.
Year published:
2020
Document Author:
Kenneth Kirk
SRLN Brief: Intro to Design Thinking (SRLN 2017)
In the Access to Justice space, design thinking practices from the technology space are increasingly embraced to improve the way people access legal services and to improve and simplify the processes themselves. Reviewing practices around the country, we see that sustainable innovation in the access to justice space happens when design thinking is adopted and implemented in our core practices, and when that happens we can effectively identify where technology can offer scalable, sustainable and accessible resources.
Year published:
2017
Document Author:
Katherine Alteneder, Eduardo Gonzalez
Video: Re-Imagining Family Law Procedures (Alaska 2016)
Video featuring the Honorable Vanessa White, Judge of the Superior Court at Palmer Alaska, and Stacey Marz, Director of the Alaska Court System's Self-Help Services.
Re-Imagining Family Law Procedures
See our related page for more information, News: Alaska Court Uses Triage and Targeted Pro Bono Unbundled Legal Advice to Settle 80% of Contested Domestic Cases (Alaska State Court System 2015).
Year published:
2016
Document Author:
Alaska Court System
News: Forms in Your Pocket: Mobile Solutions Are Nearly Ready to Scale (Pew Research Center 2016)
According to the Pew Research Center's Internet and Technology Mobile Fact Sheet (pewresearch.org), sixty-four percent of American adults own a smart phone (www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/mobile-technology-fact-sheet/), and legal aid organizations including Philadelphia Legal Assistance and Ayuda Legal Illinois report more than 30% of their online legal assistance users are on mobile devices when they do so.
Year published:
2016
Document Author:
Alex Smith Davis
Report: Supreme Court Task Force to Examine Limited Legal Licensing (Utah 2015)
From the Introduction:
Year published:
2015
Document Author:
State of Utah Supreme Court
Paper: Non-Lawyer Legal Assistance Roles (Clarke 2015)
The Utah Supreme Court has created a committee to study the possibility of creating a limited license legal technician - or something along those lines - in Utah. Their report is due out at the end of November. As part of the committee's work, Tom Clarke of NCSC (and co-author of the Roles Beyond Lawyers Preliminary Evaluation and Classification Frameworks (pdf)) was asked to write a white paper about non-lawyer assistance.
Year published:
2015
Document Author:
Thomas M. Clarke